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Originally Posted by goober
if you measure health care by outcomes, you'll notice the 40 countries that have better health care than the US all have socialized health care.
The US however is number one in the important category of cost per capita.
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If you are referring preventive maintenance there may be truth to that, but if you are talking about coping with a serious illness or surgery, you are fucked if you live in a country with socialized health care. The waiting lists for simple things like getting an MRI done are obscene. I can walk into my doctor's office today and have an MRI done tomorrow if I need it. In Canada, I'll wait six weeks. I posted this in another thread about a week ago about Britain's system:
What these politicians and many other Americans fail to understand is that there's a big difference between universal coverage and actual access to medical care.
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Simply saying that people have health insurance is meaningless. Many countries provide universal insurance but deny critical procedures to patients who need them. Britain's Department of Health reported in 2006 that at any given time, nearly 900,000 Britons are waiting for admission to National Health Service hospitals, and shortages force the cancellation of more than 50,000 operations each year. In Sweden, the wait for heart surgery can be as long as 25 weeks, and the average wait for hip replacement surgery is more than a year. Many of these individuals suffer chronic pain, and judging by the numbers, some will probably die awaiting treatment. In a 2005 ruling of the Canadian Supreme Court, Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin wrote that "access to a waiting list is not access to healthcare."
LA Times
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Is that what you want, Goober? You want people getting denied the surgeries they need and suffering with chronic pain?
As has been pointed out ad nauseum, there is a reason why thousands of foreigners come to the U.S. every year for their medical needs and not to the countries with socialized medicine. If the socialist medical care is so much better, then why are they coming here?