cwmatz asks:
From what I understand, socialized medicine in Canada works and doesn’t have major issues. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) Couldn’t the US base a health care system on that instead of trying to make our own and messing it up horribly?
Yes, it does.1 Yes, you could.2 Maybe you should.3 But you won’t, and that’s probably the most important answer of the four.
- Of course it has issues – every health care system does – but the issues facing it are hardly unsolvable ones and not system-killers. Overall it’s mostly a stable healthcare system with some flaws, just like most healthcare systems. [↩]
- Universal enrolment in Medicare. It would cause transition pains in the short term, but it would work in the long run. [↩]
- Pure single-payer insurance, as Canada’s system is, isn’t the most efficient system available to choose from. In terms of absolute dollar expenditures per capita, a nationalized health system such as the UK’s is cheapest. In terms of value-for-dollar-spent, you’re probably looking at France’s public/private hybrid as being the best method available. In terms of easiest transition from the current American system, Germany’s managed care fund system would probably present the smoothest overhaul. Of course, they’re all superior to the American model and that’s what counts. [↩]
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From what I understand, socialized medicine in Canada works and doesn’t have major issues. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) Couldn’t the US base a health care system on that instead of trying to make our own and messing it up horribly?
If we did that, the US system wouldn’t have major issues, which would be upsetting to the people who make money off our health care system’s major issues. Or rather, the people who are our health care system’s major issues because they’ve decided that our health care system is actually a “let them gouge as much money out of the public as possible while providing as little health care as they can possibly get away with” system.
But there’s also the American tendency to lardassery to deal with: our generally counterproductive diet, lack of exercise, and warm loving embrace of the highway system.
ANY system of change is going to be an improvement, but none of them are going to magically fix American healthcare unless they start fixing how we eat, act, and think.
(Minus, of course, the actual quantifiable improvements seen from better access to vaccinations, prenatal care, etc, but those are gonna take probably a generation or so to start seeing real results)
“But there’s also the American tendency to lardassery to deal with: our generally counterproductive diet, lack of exercise, and warm loving embrace of the highway system.”
Canada’s the same.
“But there’s also the American tendency to lardassery to deal with: our generally counterproductive diet, lack of exercise, and warm loving embrace of the highway system.”
Compared to healthy Scotland where anything that can be battered and deep fried can and will be. Including pizzas and chocolate bars.
We don’t bend to little things like logic and evidence. USA! USA!
Putting aside the holy sacrament of the Timbit, for a moment, though…Canada might be the same, but we in the US are the same but more so; we’ve got more than twice the rate of obesity, at least according to 2005 data.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity
We are the nation that gave the world Jackass, Neuticles, the silicone breast implant, and gastric bypass surgery. Our national relationship to a healthy body image, let alone to good health, is pretty complicated.
That’s gonna have to change before I ever think that we’re going to see a system as efficient as the ones we’re comparing ourselves to. If our BASELINE level of health isn’t as good, all the regulated drug prices in the world aren’t gonna save us.
BringtheNoise: Are you really claiming that Scotland out-fries the US? You do know they’ve deep fried BUTTER, right?
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/32665106/ns/today-today_food_and_wine/
Don’t forget the deep fried Coke!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_Coke
Dude, the scottish invented haggis, a culinary freakshow which indicates that the scottish are not mere petit facil consumers of food like your occasionally 600 pound minnesotan who’s grow large off of – these are serious eaters, who consider eating serious business and the deep fried mars bars and pizzas are merely what they allow outsiders to know about.
In the mean back streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh, past the heroine joints and crack dens, there are little unmarked and exclusive frying shops. frying shops who are known as “home” to vast and frightening creatures that might be glimpsed waddling the streets of scotland’s cities by the unwary soul who’s out in the small hours of the morning. These creatures, now only identifiable as human by the mutualist bacteria in their intestines, reject the sad and limited food chain of the adiposally challenged society that they now shun, and strive, every hour of every day of every week of every year to create their holy grail: The New Food Chain, a concept that involves viewing frying as the merely the first step towards truly transcendental and religiously transformative acts of their culinary eucharist.
At these joints, far from judging eyes of the world a society exists, its code: to eat, it’s history: illustrious by its own warped standards. Within its sweaty, fleshy folds, food unknown of by the rest of the world, often containing objects that would be considered inherently inedible, if not poisonous, that are processed via arcane and secret methods by the Arch-Master Fryers into culinary holocausts who’s mere presence has been said to cause the digestive tracts of unwary and poorly trained neophytes to burst out from the copious flesh of their bellies, and proceed to thrash their previous owners to death for their foolishness.
Fred, your worldview intrigues me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Of course, deep-fried haggis is actually pretty traditional in Scotland, and is something sane people will order, as opposed to the stunt-eating of a deep-fried Mars Bar (which is more of a rite of passage.)
As far as Americans’ “Incredible Bulk” goes, I think the big difference in Canada is that we don’t have so much high-fructose corn syrup on our grocery shelves. (“Canadian Coke”, for instance, is made with cane sugar… which is about as Canadian as Habanos cigars.) Blame Big Corn, I think.
Otherwise we still incline to lardassedness and bolt down fully as much fat and sweet as citizens of the US. *cough* poutine and timbits *cough*
— Steve
The most important AND the most depressing… =(
You Americans fried butter – we battered chips (i.e. fries). We decided goddamn french fries weren’t unhealthy enough. We also have Scotch eggs (what a boiled egg really needs is low grade pork and breadcrumbs). We win.
Deep-fried foods are pretty big in the Southern US. They deep-fry everything – Twinkies, candy bars; if it can be breaded and dipped in a vat of hot oil, it’s fair game.
But we simply aren’t capable of having an honest debate on the issue of health care in the United States. Our Republicans are – hmmm – shameless sensationalists who get away with accusing our President of wanting to kill the elderly. Unfortunately, our citizenry is rather paranoid and skittish and susceptible to believing the most outrageous accusations. I don’t think most Americans believe our President wants to kill our grandparents, but enough do that it makes discussing the issue almost impossible.
The tactic now is just to scream “Socialism!” as loudly as they can, which they’ve really been doing for about two years. I recall learning something about “big lies” and telling them loudly and often…hrm. That’s odd because while we’re not a socialist country we do have a mixed economy and some very socialist programs – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip, public education, national highways, national parks, etc. Socialists were actually very popular in the mid-West and upper-Great Lakes states during the first half of the 20th century.
We’ve been having the discussion on universal health care for almost a century now. In fact, in two years it will be more or less 100 years as that will be the anniversary of Teddy Roosevelt’s run as a Bull Moose, which introduced many of the policies that would be incorporated as the New Deal under his cousin in the 30s and 40s. And yet our Republicans still charge that we are rushing the issue and that we need to slow down.
Given our history and the fact that it took another 100 years after our Civil War to address the issue of race, I guess it’s not that surprising. There are a lot of parallels, I believe, between today’s Republicans and Democrats of the Reconstruction Era, as well as the Civil Rights Era. The level of obstructionism is very similar.
Steve/Anton: Sorry to tell you that most of the sweetener in your average can of Canadian Coke is hfcs. The ingredient listing is “glucose-fructose,” which can cover a multitude of sins. I’ve had real cane sugar Coke in Mexico, and what we get here is not the same thing (though the easy availability of Coke in glass bottles there makes a difference as well.)
I want to read Fred’s blog now, because that was a damn entertaining chunk of prose.
This is what I get for leaving you all behind for the weekend (happy St. Valentine’s Day, by the way)
So, anyway: quit picking on the fatties, and upon the Michelangelos of the deep fryer (or should that be Vermeers?)
It’s the poor self-discipline and excellent self-destructiveness of the American people that I wanted to draw attention to, rather than to any specific manifestation.
That said, though…see, my guess has always been that since HFCS would stay liquid, you could cram MORE of it into anything. Cane sugar must precipitate out at some percentage, right?
@Fred Davis: Thank you SO much for that mental image right before bed. 😛
Do you have a blog? If you can write like that consistently, Our Host may have some competition.