Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "The Lincoln Project"
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@donnaharding9604 CT for head injury, MRI for his knee. If your healthcare experiences had included spending time in Finland in the summer, you would see that everybody goes on vacation, and since they have 5 weeks of annual paid vacation, staffing shortages are an unfortunate reality even in critical healthcare.
Regardless of my anecdotes, the large data sets show considerable wait times for MRI and other diagnostic procedures in all the Nordic “Utopias”, whereas in the extremely self-critical US, we beat them in diagnostics times and procedures handily. We invented and developed MRI, which is extremely expensive due to the liquid nitrogen coolant architecture for the magnets. Tiny nations with a few million people and huge taxation burdens run by idiots in parliament who spend money like it’s free don’t allocate and develop their infrastructure well, despite all that is parroted in US media.
Proximity to hospitals with those levels of diagnostics is also unipolar in most countries (national capitol, many other major cities without), whereas municipalities most Americans haven’t even heard of have full assortment of hospitals, clinics, trauma centers, and EMS infrastructure.
I was Nationally-Registered in EMS from 1999-2003, multiple family members in the radiology and nucmed fields as long-term careers. Grass is greener in the US in these areas.
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@donnaharding9604 Healthcare shouldn't be partisan, so it always interests me when people immediately turn it into an argument based on partisan bias.
We have paid for private care in Finland after that experience, which is much faster. At that time, private doctors charged 65€/15 minutes, had waiting rooms full, but efficiently cycled through them in a timely manner.
Contrast that with sitting in the lobby in a public hospital waiting for a Dr. to see my dad, while we breathed 2nd-hand smoke for over 6 hours.
NHS is a failed system. It doesn't work well at all. You've been lied to about it by people who never researched it, never lived under it, but instead of questioning their claims, you accepted them at face value based on partisan association.
The last thing I want is political bias related to Healthcare, any of my insurance policies, or any services really. Leave the partisan rhetoric out of those day-to-day necessities of life.
Which makes me ask, why even have partisanship in the first place? We didn't have it in the military.
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@oldytacct8095 The problems are even worse under universal healthcare systems, especially when it comes to available services and wait times.
I have lived under several of those systems in Europe, and have been researching this subject for the past 2 decades. When my son had a bad bike accident in Finland (population was 5.4million then), we waited 45 days for him to get an MRI.
In the US, we've had National reviews of diagnostic times for MRI where they complained that it took over 217 minutes, then got it down to a National average of 137 minutes, still working on reducing that to less than 60 minutes.
Same for Primary Care Provider appointments.
A lot of the studies you see will compare tiny little countries, but the US still has vastly-better services, diagnostics, EMS, level 1-3 trauma centers, life flights, clinics, dentists, orthodontists, and specialist clinics per capita.
They do some cherry-picking of data of some of the worst-performing cities in the US to make comparisons with countries like Switzerland, then talk about how great universal healthcare is.
What I've learned is that the mantra about universal healthcare is not supported by the data. Everything is worse, with no incentives to improve or innovate.
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@SNESpool Bad analogy of the zero sum premise. Healthcare isn't a zero sum marketplace. Everyone that wants coverage could get it. The ones that didn't have policies prior to ACA were mostly college students who were healthy, didn't want to pay for it, didn't see the need (free climbers with no experience, but just doing some bouldering down low, with a giant Medicare and Medicaid safety net to catch anyone without ropes at the bottom.)
Medicare and Medicaid are well over a combined annual $1 Trillion funded programs, so anyone that couldn't afford it was covered.
I used to investigate fraud, most of which was related to false medical claims, and my wife did medical billing for years.
None of the premises used to justify ACA were legitimate. It was all about the insurance and medical industry working with politicians in DC to screw over the Nation for short-term profits, while being sold as universal coverage.
It was really conceived back under "Hillary Care" in the early 1990s, when she worked behind the scenes with big pharmaceutical campaign donors and left out the senior Democrats in Congress who had been trying to get a European NHS-style monstrosity bill put together for many years.
She set up her own dictatorial task force, which really turned Congress against her because none of them were consulted or brought-in to work on it cooperatively.
The Democrats in Congress got shellacked in 1994 for that and the Biden "crime bill" with one of the biggest mid-term losses in US history.
When Obama came in with Biden and Hillary, they dusted off Hillarycare, put Obama's face on it, and bribed their way through RINO Congressmen to get it through.
Then Democrats and RINOs got shellacked even worse than 1994 with an even bigger mid-terms turnover, which saw Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul, Jason Chaffetz, and Trey Gowdy get into Congress.
The people never wanted this kind of corrupt, heavy-handed legislation that directly hurt so many of us.
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@816taylor I have family working in hospitals in Canada for decades. Big deal. I can also look at Canadian healthcare watchdog organizations to see what the wait times are for seeing GPs, getting critical treatments, and overall statistics of Canada. Canada is a lot like the US in many ways when you contrast it with other countries, since it effectively is integrated into US trade, technology sharing, and has the largest border with the US of any nation.
Canadian NHS is not managed very well, even compared with all the waste, fraud, abuse, and embezzlement in US hospitals, and members of Canadian Parliament have been seen repeatedly flying to the US for procedures so they don’t have to wait for them in Canada.
It is you who doesn’t know what you’re talking about even remotely, and flew off the wall unhinged in personal attacks because you have no argument based on reason or data.
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@keithcraig506 I had the same experiences in West Germany in the early 1980s. Not great, not terrible, but outdated compared to the US-but closer than most other nations. Again, those are anecdotes, which is why I look at large data sets.
I don’t like partisanship entering the discussion about medicine, defense, science, education, transportation, infrastructure, etc. Partisan slants should have no place in any of these discussions.
Yes, various politicians with an R next to their names have been proponents of NHS-style healthcare systems because they have seen incorrect data repeated in universities and media for decades.
I don’t accept any premises based on partisan-affiliation, since there isn’t anything logical or scientific about that approach. From all the data I have seen on NHSs, especially from internal audits and watchdog organizations within the specific countries, I am not a proponent of NHS, especially for the US and our 50 States.
That would be even worse than what we have now, and we’re essentially the cream of the crap when it comes to healthcare.
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@greghuff3316 None of that was the case. Finns take long vacations in the summer, so they are short-staffed around popular holiday seasons, including in hospitals.
The rankings aren’t scientifically-valid because they don’t account for the fact that most medical advancements have come from the US, which are sold to other developed and developing nations, including technologies like MRI. They also don’t take population, demographics, climate, water supply, daily habits, diet, etc. into account, and isolate the causal factor of outcomes into healthcare alone.
Name me any other developed nation with 330 million people, and you start to see how the national comparisons fail basic principles of statistical analysis, while also ignoring more influential factors like culture, climate, region, diet, and genetics.
For example, it makes zero scientific sense to compare the 5.5 million population Finland with the 330 million population of the US. Finns, until recently, have been relatively genetically-homogenous, live at extremely high latitude (really long winters, short, mild summers), take sauna baths regularly (excellent for health, stress-reduction, pressure-cleansing through thermogenesis, excellent for lung cleansing, etc.), and many people in Finland have kesämökit (summer cabins).
During the weekends, Finns will drive out to their cabins to drink, cook sausages, go swimming in the lakes, and just relax.
Conclusion: "Finnish NHS provides better health outcomes!"
See how that line of reasoning fails basic critical analysis? This is why I am very dismissive of OECD and other studies that ignore important multi-factorial variables.
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@Ms.Byrd68 We had a great PCP and a great, affordable Healthcare plan prior to ACA. It then skyrocketed in monthly premiums until we drained savings trying to pay for it.
I was finishing my degree at the time, while my wife worked part time. I complained about it with friends of mine, wondering if it was just us. My good friends in Colorado watched his and his wife's premium jump to $1200/mo, no kids even.
My other good friend in WA, who is a PA, saw his jump to over $2200/mo, empty nester.
This is why the Tea Party surged into prominence, and why the corrupt politicians in DC immediately labeled it racist, because they were simply mitigating the gargantuan backlash to their destructive policies.
The media (owned by pharma, insurance, etc.) was complicit in the slandering of Americans who were irate over losing their coverage, because those corporate interests were making a killing raising everyone's rates, drug prices, medical device prices, etc.
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@laurie6123 Congress controls their own salaries, so they will always vote to increase them. They also still practice insider trading with “independent investment brokers” who they aren't allowed to tip off. Yet they still claim they didn’t tip them off prior to the SARSCoV2 response in 2020, and accidentally made millions.
The only way to reign them in is at the State levels. States need to control their own primaries so that none of the candidates will be allowed to collect the Federal rated Congressional salaries, but will have most of that salary paid back to their respective States. A Congressman shouldn’t make more than the median income of their State.
Their spouses, children, and family members also must not be allowed to work in “no-show” corporate donor or front company jobs, like Hunter working at Burisma, collecting millions from Chicom’s along with James Biden, or Neil Bush on the Chinese payroll with his front companies. Things like the Clinton Global Initiative should not exist either, where Putin paid the Clintons millions so he could get access to US Uranium mines and revitalize Russia’s nuclear arsenal with the help of Hillary, VP Biden, and Obama.
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@Trond Knudsen Tea Party didn't oppose Healthcare. Tea Party opposes government-mandated Healthcare interference schemes (ACA) that decimated millions of people's existing Healthcare plans, including ours.
Our monthly premiums were $369/mo from 2008-2009, and my wife had a regular PCP MD. After ACA, premiums jumped to $829/mo, and she lost her PCP.
To cut costs, we pulled me off the policy and I reverted to using VA, even though I much prefer the private sector.
Those $829/mo premiums required us to dip into savings. My wife had several treatments that weren't covered, which cost a ridiculous amount of money (none of which are available in any other nation's NIHs-all private, if even an option at all).
My wife hasn't had a PCP for 10 years now. We finally found her an OBGYN, who we don't really like, but it took years.
My VA PCP isn't even a Doctor, but an RN acting as a PA, referred to as a Doctor. He's good, but what if we're missing things due to lack of training and experience?
This is all very common since ACA was implemented.
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@Trond Knudsen Those other systems under-perform even compared to the post-ACA environment in the US. I've lived in several of them, and have family in others (Canada, Sweden). My mom is from Finland, where I have lived at various times since 1979. We also lived in Germany and Japan. I've spent a lot of time all over Europe since the 1970s.
Finnish NHS doesn't even compare well with US VA system, and it's one of the better NHSs. You might wait 45 days to get an MRI. US is trying to get MRI delivery from order down to 45 minutes, complaining about 56-137min averages since 2019.
The lies about how great European NHSs are have been perpetuated by college professors and media idiots who have never bothered to study them. The grass is not greener in those NHSs, not even close.
I can break it down mathematically just showing wait times, hospitals and clinics per capita, dentists and orthodontists per capita, specialists, level 1-4 trauma centers per capita, fire, EMS, Life Flight, you name it.
You'll see a lot of cherry-picked figures that ignore the fact that the US has 330 million people, and tertiary results that aren't directly a result of access to Healthcare, but represented as such.
US is without peer when it comes to availability and quality, but ACA hasn't helped that. It helped a ton of insurance companies make temporary obscene profits though, as long as they and their pons in both political parties backed it. Some of them took huge bribes to change their votes in favor of ACA, acting as hold-outs until the last minute to extract maximum payments.
The whole thing was unconstitutional and hurt the US.
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@jhegre US Healthcare has more expenses associated with it because there are far more options, specialists, hospitals, clinics, research centers, universities, Dr./nurse/EMT/technician training programs, EMS layers, diagnostics, and long-term care options.
It's like comparing a shopping mall complex to a corner store.
I'm not just basing my research on 5 decades of anecdotes living across the US, Europe, Asia, and Central America. I've done market analyses looking at types of hospitals and clinics relative to population density, wait time comparisons, and treatment cycles from onset/incident to pre-hospital care, in-patient care, treatments available, and long-term outcomes.
What you'll find is that other countries are very poor in comparison to the US in this respect, so they invest in propaganda from the state declaring how great their NHSs are to affect mass compliance, because direct taxation rates are so high in those countries.
Their parliaments and trade negotiators rely on the US primarily to develop and manufacture many of their drugs, medical devices, and diagnostic equipment.
US research and development in medicine and biotech is instrumental in propping up Europe and other countries who signed onto Bretton Woods after WWII.
So this adds to the expenses US taxpayers and businesses bear in the domestic US market. None of these nations are operating inside of a bubble. Most of them can't develop or manufacture advanced systems like MRI, fund huge medicinal or treatment studies, or equipment because their economies are too small.
The US domestic politicization of the Healthcare argument talking about how better European NHSs are is void of a comprehensive analysis. The math doesn't add up.
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@andreah6379 ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, all owned by huge pharmaceuticals, insurance, personal/home products, auto mfg, using sensationalist headlines to pull you in with an endless stream of lies. Viewership of the legacy corporate media is in the tank, trust un media lower than any time on record.
I gather data from industry-specific sources, watchdog groups, and my own personal travels and experiences around the world.
I purposely don't click on corporate media.
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@Trond Knudsen I heard my whole life how much greener the grass is in European NHSs, but having lived in several European countries since childhood, the US hospitals always seemed more modern, with more money invested in them. I've also lived in 8 US States (CA, UTx4, ME, GA, VA/DC, WA, NC, CO), and have been Nationally-Registered in EMS, with several family members in the medical field to compare notes with (anecdotes of course).
Looking at empirical studies, I found that audits of the Finnish, UK, Swedish, and Canadian NHSs identified that patient care was very low priority in practice, while jobs and bureaucratic policies were of top concern.
Sweden adjusted their system by encouraging more private health options due to efficiency vs wastefulness of government, so they improved by using more free market solutions due to failures of their NHS.
One of the studies I have done is to look at hospitals and clinics per capita, and how they're located in these relatively small countries compared to the land mass of the US.
It really doesn't make a lot of sense to compare UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, etc. to the entire US, but to look more at States with similar latitude/climate/population/GDP to try to baseline the metrics.
Even then, the poorest, least-educated US States outperform the more wealthy European nations in most ways.
You see it in availability and proximity of Fire/EMS, Level 1-4 Trauma Centers, dentistry, orthodontics, and specialty clinics. Dentistry in Northern Europe is just not as accessible, so you see a lot of crooked, missing teeth, even among English Royalty (Prince Charles' mistresses).
A Minister of Parliament in London doesn't have the same access to Healthcare as an illegal immigrant family in the deep Southern US. Same for Canada, where MPs frequently fly to the US for quicker care (bypassing the atrocious wait times in Canada).
Europe as a whole has a very diverse range of quality of care, and differing standards. Your hospital/clinical experience in Norway, Sweden, or Finland will be different than in Italy, Greece, Slovenia, or Portugal.
The US has National standards of training in pre-hospital EMS care, MD, Radiology, nursing, L&D, etc., all speaking the same language.
Europe is extremely diverse culturally and linguistically, so it's difficult to even convene discussions on EMS and hospital care standards, just like with the army of translators needed for EU Parliament.
The truth about this matter can't be told in Europe, otherwise they would see significant exodus of their actual working class and professionals. They have to keep the propaganda about how much better their Healthcare is alive and well for that reason.
US media and politicians, who are ever-more clueless about most subjects, repeat the European NHS superiority mantra as gospel, when most of them can't point out on a map where Sweden, Switzerland, or Albania are, let alone capitols, languages, and populations.
OECD numbers look at life expectancy and infant mortality, lumping 330 million US population together, then itemizing separate European states who have tiny little populations like Finland (5.5m), Norway, etc., then saying how the US isn't at the top. It's as if whoever compiled the data never took a basic course in statistics (large data aggregate vs small data isn't valid).
In other words, a 330 million population of 50 States will never be at the top when compared with a 5.4 million population of homogenous people.
Life expectancy is largely a factor of diet, exercise, and accidents. US over-eats as a rule, which isn't within the purview of Healthcare systems, but more about individual and family choices in meal-planning.
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@StanSwan So you read the Constitution where Congress can raise or levy taxes for defense, debts, and general welfare of the Nation, but then didn’t study the history of why we never had indefinite Federal taxation until the 16th Amendment. During the Civil War, Lincoln and the Union, (as well as the Confederacy) raised taxes to support the war.
The United States took in revenue in the form of tariffs prior to that. The US was the fastest-growing market in the world, and everyone wanted to do business with the US if they could.
The Civil War era taxes were eliminated in 1872, as the government no longer had justification for a large standing Army or war effort, and had plenty of revenue from tariffs. The US Economy continued to grow rapidly during the Reconstruction Era.
Taxation was never meant to be an indefinite tool for revenue-generation by Congress, especially since tariffs filled the Treasuries’ coffers at obscene rates.
The question is, why did we all of a sudden switch from tariffs to penalizing US citizens, then using that money to pay interest to a foreign group of bankers to loan us their currency?
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