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Walter Reed-A Sneak Peek at How Socialized Medicine Would Work

Are the left's policies on government employees the primary problem at Walter Reed?

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aquapub

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A liberal on this site recently ridiculed a columnist for concluding that if Walter Reed wasn't run by the civil servants who liberals and their unions have passed so many laws making it impossible to fire, removed incentives for efficiency from, and constrained with mountains of pointless bureaucracy and red tape, the situation at Walter Reed would never have reached the state it is in.

This led me to wonder if it has occurred to anyone that the way Walter Reed is run-by unaccountable bureacracies of incompetents who can't be fired-is standard for government agencies.

Government-run health care is not much different from Walter Reed around the world.
 

No doubt. On the other hand, ask the vets if they would rather have the alternative of no health care, like tens of millions other Americans face.
 
Main problem is that we live in a country that is all too often ashamed of its veterans, and is too simpering and cowardly to face the consequences of its policies. We all "support the troops" and most of us have a-- well-deserved-- suspicion of people fighting against the wars our soldiers are currently fighting in, but we all start whining like a bunch of little girls when we see pictures of our soldiers-- our brothers and our sisters-- coming home looking like the low-budget version of the Six Million Dollar Man.

But we don't actually give a damn about them. We just want to stop feeling bad about seeing them, so we sweep them under the rug and toss them just enough money to keep them off of our street corners. And when you try to fight in two wars at once without raising taxes, corners have to be cut somewhere.

Government priorities are based on what the public demands. If our national healthcare service were as deficient as our military healthcare-- and white-collar professionals had to use it-- it would without a doubt operate far better than Walter Reed.

Only reason we don't have national healthcare is the medical professionals' lobby has managed to convince us that paying five times as much money per capita for healthcare as South Korea, for the same life expectancy and mortality rates, is somehow better than keeping the working poor healthy enough to keep working.
 

You have a point, although the pharmaceutical lobby is probably more influential and also heavily contributes to our insane prices.
 
Iriemon said:
No doubt. On the other hand, ask the vets if they would rather have the alternative of no health care, like tens of millions other Americans face.
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That would be pointless. It doesn't make sense to sink the boat for everyone just to try and rescue the vast minority, especially considering how many of the poor got themselves into their situations on their own.
 

Well, that and the fact that every country that has it has worthless health care, little advancement, and a crippled economy.

Ever see the numbers on how many Brits fly over here every year for health care?
 
rathi said:
You have a point, although the pharmaceutical lobby is probably more influential and also heavily contributes to our insane prices.
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I don't get why they don't just let generic producers begin making rip-off brands right when they come out and just attach a $1 or $2 "royalties" payment to the company that developed it for life.
 
aquapub said:
I don't get why they don't just let generic producers begin making rip-off brands right when they come out and just attach a $1 or $2 "royalties" payment to the company that developed it for life.
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I am no fan of the Big Pharmaceuticals
but their mark up is much more than a buck or two

and people dont seem to want to realize that not only do pharmaceutical cos spend billions on R&D for drugs in production
but they spend many billions more in R&D in drugs that never make it to production
 
I find the stories surrounding Walter REed appalling
and even being a staunch conservative, especially fiscally
I would actually support a tax hike if the revenues went directly to the care of soldiers who have laid their lives on the line for our country
it is the bare minimum we owe them
no deductibles
no co pays
just 1st class medical care without the red tape
 

The only way that's going to happen is if we get their medical care out of the hands of the government.
 
aquapub said:
Well, that and the fact that every country that has it has worthless health care, little advancement, and a crippled economy.

Ever see the numbers on how many Brits fly over here every year for health care?
Click to expand...


You would have had to live under everyone of those systems to really convince anyone of that. Some countries have better systems than other. I like the Spanish system. Those who do not have the economic means to have private insurance use the national plan. But the private insurance companies do not gouge the way the insurance companies here do.

Look at the economic status of the British who come here. You also have to look at why medically they are coming here. Some countries have fields of medicine that are better than others and that includes the US. Foreign doctors sure like to come here because of the money they can make. But comparing health systems is useless. I always go to Barcelona to the clinic there for my eyes. Why? I have family in Spain and I know even by US or German standards that that is the foremost eye clinic in the world.

We don't know how a national health care system would work in the US because we have never had one.
 
aquapub said:
Well, that and the fact that every country that has it has worthless health care, little advancement, and a crippled economy.
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Be a damned good point if it were even remotely true. Canada's healthcare is better than ours and their economy is healthy. Most of the industrialized world has better healthcare than we do, they pay less for it than we do, and the only ones with "crippled economies" are the ones with wildly irrational economic and labor policies-- like France, for instance, or some of the former Soviet states.

aquapub said:
Ever see the numbers on how many Brits fly over here every year for health care?
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No, I haven't. And I bet you haven't, either. How many British citizens fly to the United States for healthcare, and what procedures are they seeking?

Because I remember seeing similar claims about Canada-- which is much closer to us than Britain-- and then discovering that these claims were absolutely ridiculous. Less then a tenth of a percent of Canadian citizens have ever come to the United States for medicine, much less repeatedly.
 
I have a friend from Ottawa Ca. who works for multinational Nortel. He works all over the world and often in the US I remember twice he was working around here and had a medical problem. Nortel would have paid for the care here but he opted to take a couple of days off and fly back to Ottawa for treatment. Since then I have never believed what my fellow countrymen say about the Canadian health plan and most of the time they have never even been to Canada. If a Canadian of means goes back to Canada for treatment that says it all. And how about all those US citizens crossing the border to by their prescription drugs? Canada sucks...yeah right.:spin:
 

Well thank you again for proving how much you support our troops by trying to use them as tools in a political partisan argument.:roll:
My sister lives in Canada now and my one son was born there, I would rather use their system any day then use the military system. It is totally different then the military health care which is run by Tricare which operates exactly like any other insurance company. Tricare is simply awful and always has been.
 
Originally Posted by Iriemon
No doubt. On the other hand, ask the vets if they would rather have the alternative of no health care, like tens of millions other Americans face.
Click to expand...
aquapub said:
That would be pointless. It doesn't make sense to sink the boat for everyone just to try and rescue the vast minority, especially considering how many of the poor got themselves into their situations on their own.
Click to expand...

I agree with you it would be wrong to eliminate Govt health care, bad at it is, for those who need it. The other option is to try to improve it.
 

Does that explain why Americans are going abroad to seek health care?
 
Iriemon said:
Does that explain why Americans are going abroad to seek health care?
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Ya mean like this?

This year alone, upwards of 500,000 Americans are expected to travel overseas to get their bodies fixed, at prices 30 to 80 percent less than at home.

Source

or this?

Businesses and insurance companies are starting to eye the potential savings of outsourcing health care from the world's richest country to the developing world.

Source
 
Inuyasha said:
We don't know how a national health care system would work in the US because we have never had one.
Click to expand...

It's not an amazing coincidence that every country that tries this slows their economy to a dysfunctional crawl.

It's also not a coincidence that we are the technological envy of the world while also having the least Socialized system.

We also don't have to make the mistake before being able to comprehend that it is one.

Sure we need reforms, but this is not a solution. This is about ten steps back.
 

The growth rates of most (if not all) countries with Socialized medicine tell quite a different story.
 
aquapub said:
The growth rates of most (if not all) countries with Socialized medicine tell quite a different story.
Click to expand...

Please give me some sources for that one liner because I don't believe that happens across the board as you are inferring.
 

Just like old Eire, whom you held out as an example of a rapidly growing nation with a per capita income higher than the US, which has a socialized system including national health care that most liberals here wouldn't even dare to fanatasize about.
 
aquapub said:
Yes, improve it...by replacing it with a private system...the kind that ACTUALLY works.
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Sure, let's just tell the vets to go out and go get their own private insurance.

Hopefully they don't have pre-existing conditions, however, as getting private insurance with a pre-existing condition can be just about impossible.
 
Iriemon said:
Sure, let's just tell the vets to go out and go get their own private insurance.

Hopefully they don't have pre-existing conditions, however, as getting private insurance with a pre-existing condition can be just about impossible.
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are you sure about that?
I thought that was no longer allowed
they could refuse covering it for a year or two at the beginning of coverage
but I thought they could no longer block you like they used to

you have to admit that there would be rampant abuse of Ins if people got diagnosed for something, picked up Insurance, got treatment than dropped Ins, only to pick it up again once the need arises again
 
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