Socialized Inhumanity

Socialism is socialism. The Nazis euthanized "undesirables," too.

Brian;
Problem is, there are only some many doctors and only so many hours in the day. Canada came up with a solution when the exodus of doctors to the States started causing problems there once they started letting in floods of “refugees.” They simply threw open the doors of Canada to every foreign doctor who could come up with something that looked like credentials. As you might imagine, doctors who were good were already going to the States where they could work with good equipment and support, and, not at all incidentally, make decent money. The marginal types went to places like France, the UK, and Canada. This is part of the reason for the high death rates and poor care in socialized medicine.
I mean, where do people think all those doctors that get trained in places like Grenada go to work? They sure as hell aren’t at Johns Hopkins.

The bright shining promises of the socialized medicine fanatics here have no effect on me, since I grew up in Canada and have spent plenty of time in Japan. I know what the reality of socialized medicine is. The problem with people here is that the media does not give them the information they need to make an informed decision–quite the opposite, in fact. To a man, the people I’ve talked to here who support socialized medicine believe it will be “business as usual..for free.” They are tragically wrong.
I might add here that if anyone thinks Jim and I are simply trashing the idea because we have gold-plated health care policies, let it be known we are both self-employed, without health insurance, and paying for everything out of pocket. So it’s not just an academic exercise for us.

Ah, I forgot about your VA. But as you say, you have no illusions about socialized medicine–or maybe more accurately, rationed medicine.
I do have catastrophic cost health care. It has a $20,000 deductible ($1000 if I’m brought in by ambulance), so if I need a liver transplant or get t-boned by an illegal alien I won’t be bankrupted, but I have to shell out for ordinary things. And let me tell you, having to pay your own health care bills makes you aware of costs. For example, my doctor tends to use the blood diagnostics service in the hospital he’s associated with. They’re just downstairs and convenient for his patients. But they charge, literally, 15 times as much (!!) as Quest Diagnostics. So I stop off at a Quest office on my way home and save over $200. When I needed a back x-ray a while ago, his receptionist called around and found a place that did it for 1/3 of the hospital’s cost.
If more people did that sort of thing, health care costs would be rather less than they are.
The insurance companies are not innocent, for sure. I have sleep apnea and need a CPAP machine. If I bought the supplies via my old Blue Shield plan, I had to go through their designated DME. I can buy the supplies via the internet for so much less than the DME charges that, given my deductible, it was cheaper for me to do that than get them from the DME. But Blue Shield would not let me buy over the net and submit a bill, even though that would have saved *both* of us money. Bizarre.