NEWS: Family Values: Sick Kids? Tough Shit

The reason I wrote "regardless of wait times" is because, although I know people complain about how long they have to wait, I've never personally waited any longer than a couple hours to get looked at, and that is because I wasn't in a life-threatening situation, and our triage system makes sure the emergencies get in first. Also, I have quite a few people in my family with different forms of cancer, diabetes, etc., and none of them have had to wait for treatment. Although I know people complain about it (somewhere), it's never been an issue for me or anyone I know.

So I'm not sure what you've heard tell, but we have it pretty damn good, especially compared to a country where you actually can die if you don't have the $$ to pay for treatment.

i don't get why people think those in need have to "wait" to get their health care. who told you that?

people in finland, france, germany, switzerland, canada, denmark...wherever there is free public health care do NOT have to wait for care if needed. they go and get it. it's there. it's free. it's just as good as if they have private insurance. maybe they don't get the head doctor visiting them every day or a room by themselves with a window, but they get treated like if their life is worth something.

It's one of those unverifiable parade of horribles that people opposed to socialized health care trot out to scare people. "Oh, you'll have to wait in long lines!" they say. As if this were somehow different than people's experience with HMO's now. It's utter nonsense and a pure scare tactic.

There are wait times, however, they are mostly with regards to medical specialties, not really with general practitioners or core surgeons.

The reason why America doesn't have these wait times is that the specialties are much better rewarded, whereas in Canada it's only a bit of a pay bump (fostering a lot of gp's instead of orthopedics or whatever).

Edit: It looks like the Canadian government is plowing a lot of money into reducing wait times for cardio surgery, joint replacements, and radiology

My representative doesn't seem to be on this list...

I'm a bit confused by the logic behind Rep. Elton Gallegly's remarks.

If Rep. Elton Gallegly voted against the bill, how can he then criticise the Democrats for delaying an override attempt?

While trying to comprehend Rep. Elton Gallegly's comments, I came up with the following thought experiment.

1. Suppose that I am a politician.
2. Suppose that you are also a politician
3. Suppose I were to pass a law to withhold food from children.
4. Suppose you debate with yourself about whether, or not, to attempt override my decision to withhold food
5. Would I have the right to criticise you for not doing anything about my cold-hearted bastardishness?
6. Ok the children might have grounds for criticising your inaction but I hardly think that I would have grounds.
7. Were I to criticise you for failing to take action against my food withholding antics then by my words I would have implicitly condemned my own actions as a withholder of food
8. Having then publicly condemned my own evil food-withholding actions, as a politician and presumably therefore as a person of great moral integrity, I would feel obliged to apologise to the electorate (and the children) for the aforementioned food-withholding actions and having apologised I would then do the honourable thing and resign, choosing instead to make amends for my misguided political decisions by performing voluntary work in a soup kitchen.

Applying my thought experiment to the case of Rep. Elton Gallegly do you think it likely that, having implicitly condemned his own decision to withhold state medical insurance from children, he might now act with appropriate moral integrity and consider his position?

I think the point is that Americans have these wait times too. Especially for the kind of care that most people need most often (hint - it's not specialist). A typical urban hospital emergency room has longer delays than almost anywhere in the Canadian system.

And under the various managed care plans people are frequently denied outright access to these vaunted specialists. Because they cost so much more.

Exactly what I was trying to say, but much easier to read and understand. Thank you!