Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1324 Editor's Choice: 20
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You're kidding, right?
[Read the article: "Sicko"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"America is a democratic country and the electorate makes its own decisions as to what it wants."
-- marko1965
Of course Amerika is a 'democratic country'. It says so, right here on the label. And if a carton of milk says 'orange juice' you believe it really is orange juice, don't you?
How 'democratic' can a country be when the government consistently does the opposite of what the majority wants? How 'democratic' can a country be when corporations spend billions every year to make sure voters are so disinformed that they vote against their own interests - but routinely vote the way corporations want?
That's not 'democracy'. That's corporatism posing as democracy. Amerika will not be a 'democracy' until corporations are forced out of politics. Amerika will not have a national health care system until the greedheads are no longer involved in the decision. That's because the current system serves the interests of greedheads: profit is everything, and whether they deliver any actual health care is quite beside the point. If they could profit without delivering any health care they would surely do so - and increasingly do so all the time.
"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson
Guess what? We lost that one.
Enjoy your 'orange juice'.
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Deja moo.
[Read the article: "Sicko"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]RealName:
In the UK if you are above a certain age and you are arbitrarily assigned a given health risk based on a wide array of factors you are excluded from procedures like kidney transplants and may even face a fight for access to dialysis, e.g. free or low cost access.
Got evidence? Didn't think so. And by the way, we won't take the Unflushed Rush's word on it.
Moreover there is a big cultural bleed over from national health care into areas like criminalizing certain diets, draconian laws on smoking and alcohol
We have that sort of think without a national health care system. Therefore your argument is specious.
Last but not least, Americans consume an awful lot of elective care that would not be covered in the nationalized system. Like almost all plastic surgery (even reconstructive work), allergists, and so on.
Different issue. We're talking about health care, not medical enhancement. Not the same thing. And allergy treatment and reconstructive surgery aren't "elective": you're just lumping them in with elective procedures to try to give your flimsy argument some sorely lacking credibility.
The fact is, that the hot button issues like how many more 10's of billions of dollars can we toss at breast cancer, are already covered outside of the private system we have now.
Whatever that means. If anything.
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More sicko.
[Read the article: "Sicko"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]curmudgeon2
That is the fallacy of socialized medicine.
What fallacy is that? You seem to fail to mention what it could be.
There are only a few ways to ration a scarce resource ... The socialized systems do it by queuing and by a standardized selection process.
A great improvement over limiting it to the rich and writing off 50 million Americans as disposable.
If the government is put in charge of critical resources it will inevitably bow to special interests and bureaucratic pressure and deny access to the resource to selected members of the population.
And yet, this is what health insurers do as a matter of common business practice. But somehow, you don't seem to mind when insurers make decisions based purely on profit, but do mind when the government makes decisions aimed at maximizing fairness for all.
Government bows to special interests when it has been corrupted, which is why wealthy and powerful corporatists in the health care industry have been so eager to continue the corruption of government 'regulation' of the health care industry.
Many of the people who bitch about the costs of medical care think nothing of spending $5 a day at the Java Hut, eating out a lot, and having other costly habits.
Which is a different issue and not germane to the elucidation of a just and economical health care policy. You have done little more here than invent an opportunity to blame the victim of a different kind of corporate rapacity.
"Medical savings accounts" do nothing to address the issue of corporate greed among insurers or drug makers: one catastrophic illness and you're as bankrupt as every other victim of the health care scam. Neither does your post address any of the issues raised by Moore's new film. Indeed, all you have managed to do is to saw off the branch of argument on which you sit, whining all the while about 'socialized medicine' but never stating any logically compelling objection.
Mostly because you don't actually have one.
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Spell Check Right-Wingers
[Read the article: "Sicko"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I hope someone on the left with a reputation for honesty fact checks the new MM offering. He doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the word "documentry."
At least he can spell it.