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Originally Posted by missworld
How do we fund the police or the military?
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Flawed logic. Security and defense of the nation (whether via military or civilian means) is guaranteed- military via the Constitution and civilian via states' rights. Health care is not guaranteed, thus there is no guarantee for funding.
But even if we, hypothetically, did fund health care in a similar way that we fund defense there would still be problems with it.
Doing it on a Federal level would be a nightmare, just as funding our military is a nightmare. I'm sure you've heard of stories from the initial invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq where some of our troops (granted, not a large number) didn't have adequate gear. What if a hospital didn't have adequate medial equipment? What if the gov't could only afford 2 million crash carts, but hospitals had a demand for 3.5 million? We've told our military "oh well- we can't do it" on several occasions; don't you think they'd tell that to patients too?
Or if it's funded on a state scale- that means everyone's taxes will increase whether it's via income or sales taxation. That means everyone's cost of living will rise because the state budget will rise. Even in places like NY where everything is heavily taxed, we can't afford gas for our police patrol cars right now. Smaller cities are
cutting back their police coverage because they can't get the gas contracts like NYC can and have to pay market prices.
Now what happens if the state falls into a budget crunch? Take the NY market again for example. We're facing a huge budget problem right now- we can't afford much. We're cutting back on absolutely everything- would we be okay cutting back on health care? We've decreased the number of cops in some areas, we've forced other areas to rely on purely volunteer fire fighters. Would we be as agreeable to all volunteer nurses and doctors? Then where is the incentive to spend time and money to become a nurse or a doctor? Iirc, Canada is facing a nursing shortage worse than we are. Would we be willing to close clinics to balance a budget? What happens when there is no alternative for heath care for the people who live there?
And this is only the tip of it. I assure you, our public servants are not treated as they should be; I don't want my health care providers to become public servants.
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This should not be politics, this is common humanity, we can find a way for health care for everyone to work, by working together,
The insurance companies are your best answer to health care???
Finance? Where is common humanity in this.
If you believe that, you underestimate the humanity of the America people. |
When it is funded by our budget, starting in the House and working its way up, how is it not political? Nobody wants to see someone else suffer, but there's also a very realistic side to this: it's never been tried on this large and diverse of a scale. We've got ~300M people (correct me if I'm wrong), China has 1B people. That's also the place where SARS originated and the Chinese have no primary care facilities- only places that we would consider hospitals. How well do you think that would go over in the US, especially in rural communities where the nearest hospital can be over an hour away? What if there's an epidemic like SARS that starts in the US, and we can't get them to a hospital in time? Plus, with the absurd number of flights that leave from the US, it would travel even faster. Could we contain it in time? The Chinese couldn't.
The logistics of this are mind-boggling, especially when you consider that California is already facing a budget problem as is NY and a multitude of other states. And there is so much more to this issue- really, I've found that most people haven't taken all of the sides of it into consideration. Emotional knee-jerk reactions are dangerous in politics, a realistic pragmatic approach is far more important. As much as health care is a problem that deserves to be addressed, now, unfortunately, is not the time to do it. And despite our politicans's promises to the contrary, I'll guarantee that this is not a high priority problem to our government right now. They're not treating it as such and I don't see that changing anytime within the next year.
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| Other countries manage a national health system are you saying that our country could not do as well or better than they do... Interesting.. |
Frankly, no. I think it'd be an epic fail.
There's too much of a difference in the populations of most countries serviced by UH and our population. We'd have problems that they wouldn't dream about and our gov't is far more cumbersome and bureaucratic than most of theirs. Our gov't is designed to be as slow as possible to allow for evaluation and debate, and we deliver that in fine fashion. But I'd much rather have the control over my health care that I do now than the control over my taxes that I do now (which, for the record, is zilch).
I know this is going to sound absurdly insensitive and rude, but the truth that nobody's saying is, do we want to sacrifice the decent health care that 84% of our country has so we can give 100% of our country crappy health care? I think we can come up with a better alternative for that without making the majority suffer.
