Healthcare costs in Europe are cheaper than in the US because of the reality that younger people will have less check-ups, higher chance of preventative healthcare, and not use the service, yet still will have to pay the tax that comes with it. The vast majority of healthcare costs in the US come from the last three months of a patients' life. A pretty shitty ROI. We are too liberal in the US in terms of giving families and the elderly choices in the twilight of their lives, especially when it is all paid by medicare and medicaid.
Need a scooter? That's fine. The taxpayers will pay for it!
---------- Post added 2012-10-26 at 09:24 AM ----------
There's quite a difference between giving grandma her morphine so her death isn't as unpleasant, and giving grandpa a penis pump, all paid for by Medicare.
No colder than mandating preventative healthcare measures in your 30's and 40's as to decrease your chances of having a catastrophic ailment later on in life, which will in turn lower this final cost.
Everyone dies, and if they will use funds from the government to pay for them (the vast majority of Americans), I think there needs to be some kind of conversation.
Bzzzzt. Not quite. The FDA is considering making some medication OTC (like they did with some allergy medications) and the kiosks would dispense those. They are not (at least not according to what I read about it) going to have self diagnosis for prescriptions.
And Aspirin can kill you if you don't understand drug interactions, so let's not get too hysterical...
It's not just the wealthy. The middle class (depending on how you define it) can also afford healthcare quite well. The problem is the poor (again, depending a bit how you define poor). With a couple changes you could make healthcare even more affordable to everyone, but there will always be those who just can't afford it, and public healthcare should be aimed at them. But again, there has to be a limit. You can't just blow millions upon millions per patient just because there's a theoretical chance you might survive or it improves your health marginally. You need cost control when it comes to public healthcare.
The way I've understood the current medicare, it's not very good.
Last edited by mmoc43ae88f2b9; 2012-10-26 at 04:27 PM.
I've had to manage pharmacists, and while I don't have any real understanding of pharmacy.. I can tell you that 95% of the time the pharmacist does nothing but count pills like a cashier counts change.
So eliminating the need for that on some medications can only be a savings for people.
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.
No doubt, not saying let's eliminate pharmacists. Just that the bulk of their time is spent counting pills that no knowledge, training or education is really required for.
Much better to move stuff to an automated way and leave the pharmacists more time to do what they went to school for.
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.
Whether you think Obama has a record or not, I thought this was kind of funny:
MY X/Y POKEMON FRIEND CODE: 1418-7279-9541 In Game Name: Michael__
Except that one of them has four years of standing programs and policies to stand on, things that he doesn't just hypothesize about but things he has actually implemented, while the other is the contender and therefore has to actually bring forward what his plans are. Attempting to establish an equivalency between a lack of information (which even then is pretty far fetched, if you examine the two candidates' presentations on a critical level) just doesn't match in a situation where one of them is the presidential incumbent.