Socialized Medicine - Who has it - What do you think?

What country?

 

Personally? New Zealand. I have family in Canada.

 

Ok. I respect your view on socialized medicine but what about western european countries, who all have socialized medicine, take up most of the top 10 ranks for best healthcare, while the usa is 37th?

 

Link me to the list of rankings please.

 

http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html

 

The WHO rankings are partially agenda-driven. For example, the "Financial Fairness" factor assumes that all households should spend the same percentage of their income on healthcare (the FF factor counts for 25% of a country's total grade, and it measures inequality in the distribution of those percentage numbers). This is a stupid Progressive ideal. Some people are more healthy than others; some people don't need health insurance; some people need it very badly; some people use charity hospitals... etc.

 

Source? Or is that just your opinion?

 

The website of the St. Louis Post Dispatch: http://www.stltoday.com/forums/view...rt=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&vote=viewresult

And a more full analysis of the ranking system by the Cato Institute (written by same guy as above article): http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9236

 

Ok thanks for the link. It's still no excuse for Cuba having a better life expectancy rate than Washington DC.

 

Life expectancy is not necessarily linked to your health care system. From the Cato Institute:

Cuba doesn't have enough doctors. Many people there are very poor. Cuba DOES NOT have a good health care system by ANY MEANS. Read this from a pro-democracy group: http://www.canf.org/Issues/medicalapartheid.htm

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8336

 

I didn't say it was linked, it was just a random statement lol.

 

The forest's were considered the "LORDS" hunting ground (ie. privatized) - get caught hunting in the forest and the penalty was death - how is that for a specific example.

 

You might try reading your history. The Great Depression, the booms and busts of the 19th century - the history of the United states has been stumbling from one boom to another bust. Read the biography of the Vanderbilt's, the stock market manipulation by Jim Fisk, the plays on the Railways and the mass bankruptcy's that followed. CONSISTENTLY must mean a totally different thing to you! If you are going to take a period of 200 years - I would argue Great Britain dominated the financial scene for 150 years of that - it wasn't until WWII that the USA took the lead. Even today the U.S. lacks the prosperity of some countries. The mass trailer parks, the unemployed homeless, etc is much greater in the U.S. than here in Australia.

You still have a view that the rest of the world is in poverty and hungering to come to the FANTASTIC utopia of the good ol' USA - actually the truth is the rest of the world is laughing at you - the trade deficits alone that you run mean in reality you are a bankrupt country. Your currency is becoming worthless and apart from your military hardware, you produce F all that the rest of the world wants - Asia is currently taking your money and shortly will take a huge dump on you. Wake up - the prosperity of the Clinton era has gone and you are living on Credit.

90% of your wealth is held by a few elites - that is not prosperity - prosperity is a numbers game - the higher the % of your population living well, not how who has the richest people - i.e. how well do you share the wealth.

 

Your THE USA IS SO FANTASTIC - is typical Hollywood propaganda - you know the type that says the U.S. won the second world war all by itself.

A few facts for you --- the two turning points of the second world war - the battles of Stalingrad and El Alamien were fought by the Russians and British empire - The American's were not involved (other than supplying material)

D-Day invasion - 3/5 of the force was British and Canadians - and they had more successful landings than the Americans at Utah and Omaha, who very nearly failed - and the British took on the tougher troops around the town of Caen, while they pinned them down - this then allowed the U.S. breakout from the Bocage.

How wonderful it must be to make up history as you go along. The USA is the best, the strongest, blah blah blah.

In truth the USA has been John come lately.

Some USA failures - Vietnam, Iran, probably Iraq, China (communist government took over), South Korea - stalemate, Afghanistan (yet to be determine)

Some USA successes - Victory in WWI & WWII as part of an ALLIANCE, victory over the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines (though in truth Spain was a power on the serious wane), victory over the Mexicans (although some might argue this given the number of Mexicans in the USA today), victory over the British (with serious French help)

I think this is probably a fair assessment of the USA.

Try a bit of reading rather than just watching Hollywood movies - you might be surprised that history is not centered around the USA.

 

Congratulations Einstein. That's an example of feudalism, but not an example of privatization, nor relevant in anyway to health care.

 

I don't know how long you have been reading P&R, but you are posting out of your arse now. People regularly call me an America hater, or anti-American.

I am far from a nationalist zealot.

So before you talk a bunch of junk, maybe you should come up with something to say. Something loosely based on facts and relevant to the person you are talking to.

The reality is, you can't justify socialism. No one can. Every experiment in socialism has eventually led to human misery. Either through dictatorial government, poverty or both.

So while many think that socialism is a short term fix, they truly are thinking short term, because consumption > production is a system doomed to fail.

Even in the great SICKO paradise of Canada, people are having to double subsidize their health care, because "free" is simply not sustainable.

 

Your parenthesis imply that supplying materials wasn't important. The second world war probably would not have been won by the allies had not the US's workforce been focused on creating supplies for the war effort. We could manufacture them without our factories getting blown to hell, and that was a huge factor in winning the war.
In the battles that Americans weren't involved in, how many American tanks and artillery shells were involved in those battles?

So was it a success, all in all? Who was the supreme commander again? And why were we even there in the first place? Because another European country decided they wanted the world to be theirs. After the British, the French, the Spanish, etc.

And how would Japan and Germany look today if the US wasn't around and didn't have a hand in WWII? Would Japan and Germany be thriving, stable democracies? Or would more of the world look like East Berlin and the former USSR?

 

What the hell are you talking about? Sweden, Finland and Norway have the best healthcare, education, crime rates, life expectancy and just about everything else you can think of IN THE WORLD. They are all socialist countres.

 

What country do you live in?

 

England. Don't get me wrong Guerilla, I agree with 99% of the things you say and you are a sound guy but your views on socialism I can't seem to get my head round.