then you must never have been to Canada or Europe.

Also, the people who do the healthcare stats aren't idiots; they don't include deaths from violence, accidents, etc. As for things like smoking or alcohol, the US actually scores pretty well in terms of clean living, compared to countries that have better life expectancies. It gets narrowed down to healthcare, period.

It becomes pretty obvious when you look at it stratified by age; the younger age you look at, the worse the US does, getting better as age rises, until at about age 70 and up we become the best in the world. Of course, when you average that sort of age distribution, it's going to result in the US having the lowest life expectancy and the hghest number of lost years of life.

And of course that explains the costs issue. The things that go into infant mortality are simple, cheap, banal items like prenatal vitamins and proper nutrition for mother and baby; and our medical system isn't happy doing simple cheap banal things, when there are expensive, high-tech, glamorous, fancy miraculous things to be done, like a heart transplant on a 70 year old which gives him another ten years of life, at a cost which would buy prenatal and infant vitamins for every low-income baby in a medium size city for years, gaining probably hundreds of years of life. But simple cheap banal things done for everybody in the population, rich or poor, are exactly what single-payer government health systems do real well. So we have infant mortality stats in the big cities that rival third world countries while dying Arab oil sheiks come here to spend a few hundred million squeezing a few more years in.

And if you want to argue that infant mortality due to a baby's being malnourished due to economic and social conditions is NOT a reflection of the healthcare system, then i'm not sure what you think a healthcare system is supposed to be.

(Digression: anybody about to parrot the rightwing thinktank meme here that "it's because we save babies in the US which would be stillborn in other countries so when some of them die they raise our infant mortality stats"; again, the people who do these stats aren't idiots, if you pool stillbirths/miscarriages and infant mortality, it really doesn't improve the US' position compared to other countries at all)

Of course, it's not an either-or situation; we can keep the expensive glamorous hightech stuff while adding the prenatal vitamins and barely notice any increase in costs; maybe even a net reduction when the healthy kids grow up to be healthy elderly. if we cared to. But I've come to believe the ugly truth is that the hatred and rage side of the American psyche needs somebody they can believe is being punished for their badness, through poverty and bad health. As I keep repeating the punchline, "if everybody could get healthcare, then I wouldn't want it".

"Conservatives" really do live in another century.

"In 2005, for example, Bumrungrad Hospital in Thailand served more than 50,000 American patients, a 30 percent increase from the previous year." http://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=2320839&page=1

http://www.medicalnomad.com/inthenewslist.do?view=procedure&startIndex=20&procedureID=null

"WellPoint Introduces International Medical Tourism Pilot Program

WellPoint announced a new international medical tourism pilot product that will allow members to access benefits for certain common elective procedures at designated facilities in India. Beginning in January 2009, WellPoint's affiliated health plan in Wisconsin will pilot the program with Serigraph, Inc., a Wisconsin-based global provider of printed decorating solutions. The pilot program includes coverage of certain common non emergency procedures such as major joint replacement, upper and lower back fusion, and other procedures that have significant cost differences between domestic and international providers."

Yeah, that's Canada alright. They shoot cripples on sight now.

If you are the type of person who is constantly, incessantly, unstoppably investigating your child every minute or so, you probably won't accidentally leave him/her in the car, but you probably aren't the best choice to have a kid. And if you're not that type of person, then there is a small but finite chance that you will someday forget the kid.

that they are secretly Marxists, who believe that the inevitable collapse of capitalism must be allowed, in order to result in the proletariat rising up to create the socialist paradise?

the two kids would certainly have made it, except that gay marriage has destroyed the institution of marriage.

"National Coordinator of Health Information Technology." All our health is belong to them!!!

That http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2549 was an ironic article, considering it focused on whether, if he became color commentator on ABC's Monday Night Football (which didn't happen), it would be possible that he'd rise above his history of racial bigotry and insensitivity; and what did actually happen when he ended up on ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown show a few years later.

No comment.

they'd accuse the captain of taking advantage of the crisis in order to push forward his agenda of plugging up the holes.

apparently he was instrumental in leveraging some republicans to back the stimulus bill after it stalled.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/13/lieberman-stepped-up-role_n_166905.html

it's the nature of politics.

"hey, aren't you going to pay back our loan? what did you spend it all on?"

"well, nuclear weapons for one thing"

"Ok then, well take as much time as you need"

the excited chatter on the financial pages about every megamerger, despite the pathetic track record of such grandiose schemes from the point of view of the stockholders, sells papers; much as the vast excitement before every release of windows sells papers, or the constant worry over Iraq's imminent WMD attack on the heartland.

"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." - William Randolph Hearst