I remember when I was very young, 12 or 13 or so, asking why, if the Soviet Union had such a rotten, inhumane and inefficient system, did it seem to be on the verge of turning the whole world red.

Strange.. At a similar age I approached the same dichotomy from the other direction..

If democratic free market capitalism is so obviously great, then why are we having to struggle so hard against communism?

I don't think I ever got a satisfactory answer either.

And all you can ever do is make a quality of life improvement in what will always kill the patient, eventually.

Life is a terminal condition.

I have a lot of family in the UK, none of them have any serious complaints about the NHS and I have discussed the subject at length with a number of them both when I have visited there and they have visited here. Yes, there is considerable carping, but when I ask them point blank if they would like to trade places with me here in the US the answer is essentially "are you mad?".

Here in the US I'm basically uninsurable thanks to "preexisting conditions" and if I get seriously ill I fully expect to die untreated.

Both systems perform "triage", but the US system is based on how wealthy you are.

Of course, in the US, if you are wealthy it is prima facie evidence that you are good and worthy of life and if you are poor it is prima facie evidence that you are bad and not worthy of life.

All in all the moral clarity of the American system is greatly to be preferred, eh?

Norway:

Population:

Definition Field Listing Rank Order

4,627,926 (July 2007 est.)

GDP (purchasing power parity):

Definition Field Listing Rank Order

$257.4 billion (2007 est.)

USA:

Population:

Definition Field Listing

280,562,489 (July 2002 est.)

GDP:

Definition Field Listing

purchasing power parity - $10.082 trillion (2001 est.)

So actually, Norway's GDP is about 2.5% that of the USA while the population is only 1.6% that of the US.

Their productivity is *higher* than that of the USA..

And maybe if Henry Ford and GW Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, had not been dealing with the Nazis then the Third Reich would not have become so powerful so quickly.

Just what is it *exactly* that you find objectionable about Norway and Denmark?

The extremely high literacy rate?

The low violent crime rate?

The high per capita GDP?

The low inflation rate?

It is my understanding that malpractice insurance costs are more closely related to the state of the investment market than they are to actual malpractice claims.

IMO, there is a lot of disinformation being bandied about regarding malpractice and the claims associated with such malpractice.

http://www.slate.com/id/2145400/

The Republican answer to runaway health-care spending is to cap jury awards in medical malpractice suits. For the fifth time in four years, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tried and failed to cap awards at $250,000 during his self-proclaimed "Health Care Week" in May. But this time, the Democrats put a better idea on the table.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also want to save on health care. But rather than capping jury awards, they hope to cut the number of medical malpractice cases by reducing medical errors, as they explain in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. In other words, to the Republicans, suits and payouts are the ill. To the Democrats, the problem is a slew of medical injuries of which the suits are a symptom. The latest evidence shows the Democrats' diagnosis to be right.

The best attempt to synthesize the academic literature on medical malpractice is Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth, published last November. Baker, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who studies insurance, argues that the hype about medical malpractice suits is "urban legend mixed with the occasional true story, supported by selective references to academic studies." After all, including legal fees, insurance costs, and payouts, the cost of the suits comes to less than one-half of 1 percent of health-care spending. If anything, there are fewer lawsuits than would be expected, and far more injuries than we usually imagine.

I hadn't thought of it that way..

But then I don't find Andrew Dice Clay funny either.

Honestly, I find these message boards quite disturbing. I applaud them for providing opportunities to create bonding social capital, but many of the posts are quite negative and offensive, detracting from any social benefit they potentially create.

I have to ask if you have ever listened to right wing talk radio?

Or even better, have you ever visited a site such as Little Green Footballs, Red State or Free Republic?

Online discussions of damn near anything tend to get considerably more vituperative than equivalent face to face discussions.

But in my case at least, it is online discussions or nothing, there is no one I know in real life who is either interested in or willing to engage me in discussions on the subjects in which I'm interested, politics being just one of them.