To ration or not

[MaggieMae]

Canucks come to America for health care
Filed under: Canucks, economic ignorance, socialism — crushliberalism @ 10:20 am

Just how good is that Canadian “universal health care”? It’s so good that…Canadians are coming here for private health care. From Buffalo News:
Canucks come to America for health care « Crush Liberalism

What a wingnut source that is. This is a paragraph from the article:

Let that sink in, folks. It is a crime for people in Canada for people to spend their own money (a) in any manner they see fit and (b) on their own health! And Edwards, Obama, Shrillary, et al on the left want that to come here? I don’t think so! Continuing:

Does seem like a strange source.

But are you saying that politicians wouldn't want this kind of care?

You don't think that the elites would be exposed to the same kind of nationalized care as the rest of us, do you?

From 'Animal Farm,' some animals are more equal than others.

Hmmm, maybe you're starting to *get it* after all. Of course people who can afford luxury treatment paid by all-inclusive insurance policies would turn their noses up at anything less for themselves. They also realize, however, that a few crumbs of coverage should be thrown to the serfs too.

I wonder how much over the years it has cost the taxpayers to provide all members of Congress with excellent health coverage factoring in the average number who have never had a reasonably large claim but WE paid for it nonetheless?

 

[MaggieMae]

William Falk, not William Faulkner. And way to miss the point of the article.

Oh crap, I used the wrong name, therefore everything else must have been missed.
Whatever.

Nice strawman argument there.

You missed the point because it wasn't about government bureaucracies v. living wills. It was about how we have to ration, otherwise every death costs millions of dollars trying to keep people alive for those extra precious seconds.

Not because you couldn't read the name.

 

[MaggieMae]

Shared here is William Falk's experience with his aging father. Falk is Editor-in-Chief of THE WEEK magazine:

When my father went back to the hospital a year ago, he was clearly close to the end: His lungs and liver were barely functioning, his abdomen was filling with fluid, and he could no longer lift himself out of bed.

The hospital's doctors nonetheless treated him aggressively, punching a hole in his chest to insert a drainage tube, which quickly led to uncontrolled bleeding, an infection, and a plunge in blood pressure.

Within 12 hours, my father was in a coma, with no chance of recovery, sustained only by a ventilator and a tangle of multiple IV drips. He spent four days in the ICU, until I overcame the resistance of two doctors and had the machines turned off, as per my dad's living will.

Medicare paid upward of $20,000 for these last days of my father's life, during which he received little comfort, moments of agonizing pain and fear, and all the medical care in the world, and then some.

In the historic debate over health care reform now beginning in this country, we will hear much talk of "rationing." If health care is rationed, we'll be told, we may be denied drugs or surgeries or treatments based on cost, effectiveness, or the patient's condition of age. It sounds cold and heartless, except when you consider that the only real alternative to rationing is unlimited medical treatment--including a refusal to "lose" the battle with death even when death is near. Unlimited care, of course, requires unlimited spending, which is not viable.

Rationing in some form is inevitable; the only question is when we'll finally be able to admit to ourselves that even in America, there are limits to everything.

What a bunch of crap. No, rationing is not inevitable, and it is not all or nothing....

We have the world's best system now, where those who want to go to extreme measures to maintain the spark of life are free to do so, and those who don't want to are free to refuse treatment.

The whole article is nothing but justification for allowing old people and other vulnerable citizens to die without basic, normal treatment...and remove for them the option of deciding they would like to try something to prolong their lives.

And dying is dying. Boo hoo, his dad had a drainage tube. This is not an "extreme" or un-called for treatment. It's a common treatment that often saves people's lives. It didn't save this guy's life, that's the way the cookie crumbles. It was painful, sure, but so is getting hit by a car, or drowning to death in your own bodily fluids over a period of a week or so.

Indeed, the story is not credible. If there was a living will, the doctors and hospital were legally bound to respect it, and it shouldn't have taken more than a call from a lawyer make them comply.

The fact is proponents of Obama's health care plans, most notably, Daschle, have already told us there will be rationing of services that does not exist now under our present plans. There are two proposed entities to implement the rationing, both within HHS. First there will be a group charged with rating the effectiveness of tests and procedures independent of medical organizations that now define "acceptable" protocols, and second, most alarming, there will be a group to decide if a test or procedure is cost effective, that is, even if it is better than anything else around, is your life or quality of life worth the price in the opinion of some HHS bureaucrats?

On Charlie Rose yesterday Daschle explained that while we now cover the cost of providing the world's best high end treatments for the desperately ill by not providing health insurance to everyone, under Obama's proposals, we will cover the cost of more universal coverage by providing fewer expensive high end treatments to the desperately ill. A good deal for healthy people, not so good, perhaps a death sentence, if you become very ill.

Dashle's plan is but one of FIVE on the table. If he said it, he is incorrect by using the words "there will be" because thus far, nothing has been decided upon.

 

[MaggieMae]

Thanks for these examples of how America has failed its citizens.

How about putting your dinaro where you put your dinner, and tell me which country you'll be moving to.

Read and repent:


1. “…while the numbers clearly show that people are happier with their own health care than with the system as a whole, there is no dimension with which their happier than the quality of care they personally receive…a mere 15 percent complain about the quality of care they receive.”.(New England Journal of Medicine)
Health Beat: The Quality Question

2. “…when one digs deep enough, one finds that only 8 million folks can be classified as "chronically uninsured;" that's still a problem, of course, but a much more manageable one, and puts the lie to the canard that our system is irretrievably broken.”
InsureBlog: Vindicated!

“Once you whittle it down, you start to realize that the number of hard-core uninsured who are citizens is in fact fairly small — perhaps half the reported 47 million or less. (about 7.6%)”
IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- The '47 Million Uninsured' Myth

3. “The biggest fallacy of the Obama healthcare plan is that it would cover every America. It wouldn’t. It would provide the option of health care, but it would still cost money and I suspect that lots of those uninsured adults between 18-34 would still rather spend the money on something else. It wouldn’t do any more to insure children than is already being done independently of his plan.”
The Myth of the Uninsured American : Conservative Blog: Urban Conservative 2.0 - Conservative News & Politics


4. "If I lived in New Zealand, I would be dead.
The American health-care system may be a crazy mess, but it is the prime mover in the global ecology of medical treatment, creating the world’s biggest market for new drugs and devices. Even as we argue about whether or how our health-care system should change, most Americans take for granted our access to the best available cancer treatments—including the one that arguably saved my life. "
My Drug Problem - The Atlantic (March 2009)

5. "However, 89 percent were satisfied with their own health care quality and 57 percent with their personal costs. Losing insurance is a concern for 56 percent of respondents with private care, and 60 percent of those with any form of health coverage worried about their ability to afford insurance over the next few years.
Support for universal government-provided coverage fell further when the survey suggested the possibility of higher costs or taxes (35 percent), waiting lists (33 percent), limited choice of doctors (28 percent), or loss of coverage for some treatments (18 percent). ABC News' coverage did not call any of these a "significant hurdle" for supporters of universal coverage to overcome.
News Media Misreport Health Survey - by Joseph Coletti - Health Care News


6. For instance, while 88 percent say their coverage overall is excellent or good, that includes just 33 percent who call it "excellent." While 57 percent are satisfied with their own costs, just 23 percent are very satisfied. And even on overall quality of care, while 89 percent are satisfied, fewer are very satisfied, 52 percent.
As Health Care Costs Take a Toll, Some Changes Win Broad Backing - ABC News

The problem of the uninsured is only the beginning. The bigger problem is the fact that we are now spending $7900 per person in the US for healthcare, and that rate will double in real dollars within the next 25 years. It is unsustainable, and every employer out there knows it.

Everyone who is happy with their health insurance is so because they don't directly pay the entire bill; their employers pay a huge percentage, and it is the employers who are coming to the conclusion that they can no longer afford this. What we have already begun to see, and what we will see much more of, is companies closing their doors because they cannot afford to stay in business due to health insurance costs. And what we will see much more of is these companies moving overseas so that they can operate from a country where they are not directly responsible for those costs.

But but but I though companies moved overseas because they're taxed too much here!! So say the righties. (Although through loopholes and writeoffs, corporations only coughed up 15% of the tax revenues in 2007.)

 

[Emma]

i sure hope all of you with a living will etc realize that it dont mean shit.....first you aint gonna sue...live or die....when you are so close that the living will comes out...you are near the end...you can do all the dnr orders you want....next of kin will be the ones deciding...if the next of kin objects to unplugging you will stay plugged

That is so not true. Anyone serious about a living will makes sure that his/her doctor is aware of its contents by a copy to him, not just the designated overseers. And it's very easy to verify whether a copy is included as part of your medical records before any other doc/nurse touches you.

Yeah, it is true. Especially if the 'designated overseer' is the DPA.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Shared here is William Falk's experience with his aging father. Falk is Editor-in-Chief of THE WEEK magazine:

When my father went back to the hospital a year ago, he was clearly close to the end: His lungs and liver were barely functioning, his abdomen was filling with fluid, and he could no longer lift himself out of bed.

The hospital's doctors nonetheless treated him aggressively, punching a hole in his chest to insert a drainage tube, which quickly led to uncontrolled bleeding, an infection, and a plunge in blood pressure.

Within 12 hours, my father was in a coma, with no chance of recovery, sustained only by a ventilator and a tangle of multiple IV drips. He spent four days in the ICU, until I overcame the resistance of two doctors and had the machines turned off, as per my dad's living will.

Medicare paid upward of $20,000 for these last days of my father's life, during which he received little comfort, moments of agonizing pain and fear, and all the medical care in the world, and then some.

In the historic debate over health care reform now beginning in this country, we will hear much talk of "rationing." If health care is rationed, we'll be told, we may be denied drugs or surgeries or treatments based on cost, effectiveness, or the patient's condition of age. It sounds cold and heartless, except when you consider that the only real alternative to rationing is unlimited medical treatment--including a refusal to "lose" the battle with death even when death is near. Unlimited care, of course, requires unlimited spending, which is not viable.

Rationing in some form is inevitable; the only question is when we'll finally be able to admit to ourselves that even in America, there are limits to everything.

No, unlimited nonsense like that is NOT the only alternative to rationing. The alternative, and the one that's supposed to be in place now, is letting the PATIENT make the medical decisions. Gee, you think maybe the fact that Medicare was the real customer here, not Falk's father, might have had something to do with the doctors resisting the dictates of the living will? As long as they kept treating him, they got to keep billing Medicare, didn't they? I'll bet if the control of the money had been in the hands of the patient and his family, and they refused to pay for this bullshit, the doctors' resistance would have vanished.

 

[Cecilie1200]

i sure hope all of you with a living will etc realize that it dont mean shit.....first you aint gonna sue...live or die....when you are so close that the living will comes out...you are near the end...you can do all the dnr orders you want....next of kin will be the ones deciding...if the next of kin objects to unplugging you will stay plugged

Well, part of the "taking charge" that goes with having a living will is finding someone to be in charge when you're in extremis who will respect your wishes.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Once one is able to state the problem, it becomes so easy to prove the thesis.

This is not the kind of example of rationing that most are opposed to.
This is:
In the Province of Quebec, patients suffering from serious incontinence - ie, they have to aller aux toilettes jusqu’� 12 fois par nuit (that’s 12 times a night) - have to wait three years for a half-hour operation. That’s 3 years times 365 nights times 12 trips to the bathroom.
The central point about socialized medicine is that restricting access is the only means of controlling costs.
In Canada, Citizens Wait 3 Years For A Half Hour Surgery To Fix Incontinence | KXNet.com North Dakota News

Or this:
A woman of 61 was refused a routine heart operation by a hard-up NHS trust for being too old.
Dorothy Simpson suffers from an irregular heartbeat and is at increased risk of a stroke. But health chiefs refused to allow the procedure which was recommended by her specialist.
The school secretary was stunned by the ruling.
"I can't believe that at 61 I'm too old for this operation
NHS chiefs tell grandmother, 61, she's 'too old' for £5,000 life-saving heart surgery | Mail Online

Or this:
"Nice refuses, on grounds of cost, to recommend some drugs for patients with advanced kidney cancer. The consultants, who include the directors of oncology at Britain’s two biggest cancer hospitals, the Royal Marsden in London and Christie hospital in Manchester, claim there is enough money in the NHS to pay for the drugs. "
Top doctors slam NHS drug rationing

You have no problem with private insurance companies in the US denying treatments because of pre-existing conditions, or other technicalities?
Ask most Canadians if they'd give up their public healthcare .... you'd get a resounding "NO". Why doesn't the conservative government in Canada do away with public healthcare?
Insurance and pharmaceutical companies in the US have done quite a job with their propaganda.

Thats one of the more interesting facts about this. For all the condemnations of NHS that rightwingers like to point out, nobody is talking about getting rid of the NHS in Britain, Canada, or any other first world country that has nationalized healthcare. Even the rightwingers in those countries support it. This is why Republicans are so dead set against it, because theyknow that once people get a taste of it, Republicans will never be able to sell them on the failed idea of private healthcare again.

Incorrect on a couple of points. NHS's handling of British health care became such an open scandal a while back that, while they're not talking about abolishing it, they DID start incorporating market-based practices in it to improve it. In other words, they started moving AWAY from the bullshit you people are now recommending for us.

Second, I'm not impressed that people who've been thoroughly indoctrinated in and acclimatized to a system aren't looking for a massive overhaul. You can get used to anything. And the majority of Americans aren't clamoring for a complete and total change of OUR system either, the media's false advertising notwithstanding.

 

[Cecilie1200]

You have no problem with private insurance companies in the US denying treatments because of pre-existing conditions, or other technicalities?
Ask most Canadians if they'd give up their public healthcare .... you'd get a resounding "NO". Why doesn't the conservative government in Canada do away with public healthcare?
Insurance and pharmaceutical companies in the US have done quite a job with their propaganda.

National Healthcare in the United States? Why don't you have a little consideration for all the Canadians who come here for there healthcare?

Where will they go if we socialize healthcare?

And think about all those American seniors who won't go to Canada because they can't afford American prescriptions. Won't someone think of the business Canada will lose?

I'm a lot more interested in the fact that if the US tries to imitate the way that Canada and other countries get cheap pharmaceuticals, the entire world will stop getting new drugs developed to treat illnesses.

 

[Cecilie1200]

You do know that Congress currently has a government run health plan, right?

Are you suggesting that we citizens will get the same level of health plan?

I have no idea. But I thought that government run health care was so evil, blah, blah blah.

And yet...its Congress who gets the government run plan, and the rest of us have to deal with the shitty private plans?

I find it fascinating that the only argument you can come up with for "Government-run healthcare is GREAT!" bypasses the two programs that might actually be analogous to the situation - Medicare and Medicaid - and goes to what is provided for a handful of politicians on the basis of them being government EMPLOYEES, as opposed to simply citizens.

The rest of us don't "have to deal with shitty private plans". Most people who have private plans are reasonably satisfied with them. And many people have those shitty government plans that you so conveniently ignored. So unless you're going to argue that government-run health care for all Americans is going to treat the 300 million-plus residents of this country like high-level government employees, you can shut up about this "argument".

 

[Political Junky]

National Healthcare in the United States? Why don't you have a little consideration for all the Canadians who come here for there healthcare?

Where will they go if we socialize healthcare?

And think about all those American seniors who won't go to Canada because they can't afford American prescriptions. Won't someone think of the business Canada will lose?

I'm a lot more interested in the fact that if the US tries to imitate the way that Canada and other countries get cheap pharmaceuticals, the entire world will stop getting new drugs developed to treat illnesses.

Many drugs come to us from Europe.

 

[AllieBaba]

Shared here is William Falk's experience with his aging father. Falk is Editor-in-Chief of THE WEEK magazine:

When my father went back to the hospital a year ago, he was clearly close to the end: His lungs and liver were barely functioning, his abdomen was filling with fluid, and he could no longer lift himself out of bed.

The hospital's doctors nonetheless treated him aggressively, punching a hole in his chest to insert a drainage tube, which quickly led to uncontrolled bleeding, an infection, and a plunge in blood pressure.

Within 12 hours, my father was in a coma, with no chance of recovery, sustained only by a ventilator and a tangle of multiple IV drips. He spent four days in the ICU, until I overcame the resistance of two doctors and had the machines turned off, as per my dad's living will.

Medicare paid upward of $20,000 for these last days of my father's life, during which he received little comfort, moments of agonizing pain and fear, and all the medical care in the world, and then some.

In the historic debate over health care reform now beginning in this country, we will hear much talk of "rationing." If health care is rationed, we'll be told, we may be denied drugs or surgeries or treatments based on cost, effectiveness, or the patient's condition of age. It sounds cold and heartless, except when you consider that the only real alternative to rationing is unlimited medical treatment--including a refusal to "lose" the battle with death even when death is near. Unlimited care, of course, requires unlimited spending, which is not viable.

Rationing in some form is inevitable; the only question is when we'll finally be able to admit to ourselves that even in America, there are limits to everything.

What a bunch of crap. No, rationing is not inevitable, and it is not all or nothing....

We have the world's best system now, where those who want to go to extreme measures to maintain the spark of life are free to do so, and those who don't want to are free to refuse treatment.

The whole article is nothing but justification for allowing old people and other vulnerable citizens to die without basic, normal treatment...and remove for them the option of deciding they would like to try something to prolong their lives.

And dying is dying. Boo hoo, his dad had a drainage tube. This is not an "extreme" or un-called for treatment. It's a common treatment that often saves people's lives. It didn't save this guy's life, that's the way the cookie crumbles. It was painful, sure, but so is getting hit by a car, or drowning to death in your own bodily fluids over a period of a week or so.

This is simply not true. You must have the resources to do so, and many many people don't.

Which is the way it always has been. The government is not responsible to make sure you get all the perks of people who have more money than you do.

And just because some people can't afford it doesn't mean we need to stop providing decent care for those who can.

 

[Political Junky]

What a bunch of crap. No, rationing is not inevitable, and it is not all or nothing....

We have the world's best system now, where those who want to go to extreme measures to maintain the spark of life are free to do so, and those who don't want to are free to refuse treatment.

The whole article is nothing but justification for allowing old people and other vulnerable citizens to die without basic, normal treatment...and remove for them the option of deciding they would like to try something to prolong their lives.

And dying is dying. Boo hoo, his dad had a drainage tube. This is not an "extreme" or un-called for treatment. It's a common treatment that often saves people's lives. It didn't save this guy's life, that's the way the cookie crumbles. It was painful, sure, but so is getting hit by a car, or drowning to death in your own bodily fluids over a period of a week or so.

This is simply not true. You must have the resources to do so, and many many people don't.

Which is the way it always has been. The government is not responsible to make sure you get all the perks of people who have more money than you do.

And just because some people can't afford it doesn't mean we need to stop providing decent care for those who can.

Yes, just let the poor ones die. How compassionate and Christian of you.

 

[AllieBaba]

Thank goodness for religious charities who provide them with health care.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Don't worry folks. If we want a European health care model, there will be rationing.

Of NICE and Men - WSJ.com

Speaking to the American Medical Association last month, President Obama waxed enthusiastic about countries that "spend less" than the U.S. on health care. He's right that many countries do, but what he doesn't want to explain is how they ration care to do it.

Take the United Kingdom, which is often praised for spending as little as half as much per capita on health care as the U.S. Credit for this cost containment goes in large part to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE. Americans should understand how NICE works because under ObamaCare it will eventually be coming to a hospital near you.

The British officials who established NICE in the late 1990s pitched it as a body that would ensure that the government-run National Health System used "best practices" in medicine. As the Guardian reported in 1998: "Health ministers are setting up [NICE], designed to ensure that every treatment, operation, or medicine used is the proven best. It will root out under-performing doctors and useless treatments, spreading best practices everywhere."

What NICE has become in practice is a rationing board. As health costs have exploded in Britain as in most developed countries, NICE has become the heavy that reduces spending by limiting the treatments that 61 million citizens are allowed to receive through the NHS. For example:

In March, NICE ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer. This followed on a 2008 ruling against drugs -- including Sutent, which costs about $50,000 -- that would help terminally ill kidney-cancer patients. After last year's ruling, Peter Littlejohns, NICE's clinical and public health director, noted that "there is a limited pot of money," that the drugs were of "marginal benefit at quite often an extreme cost," and the money might be better spent elsewhere.

In 2007, the board restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, a cause of blindness. The drug Macugen was blocked outright. The other, Lucentis, was limited to a particular category of individuals with the disease, restricting it to about one in five sufferers. Even then, the drug was only approved for use in one eye, meaning those lucky enough to get it would still go blind in the other. As Andrew Dillon, the chief executive of NICE, explained at the time: "When treatments are very expensive, we have to use them where they give the most benefit to patients."

NICE has limited the use of Alzheimer's drugs, including Aricept, for patients in the early stages of the disease. Doctors in the U.K. argued vociferously that the most effective way to slow the progress of the disease is to give drugs at the first sign of dementia. NICE ruled the drugs were not "cost effective" in early stages.

Other NICE rulings include the rejection of Kineret, a drug for rheumatoid arthritis; Avonex, which reduces the relapse rate in patients with multiple sclerosis; and lenalidomide, which fights multiple myelom. Private U.S. insurers often cover all, or at least portions, of the cost of many of these NICE-denied drugs.

NICE has also produced guidance that restrains certain surgical operations and treatments. NICE has restrictions on fertility treatments, as well as on procedures for back pain, including surgeries and steroid injections. The U.K. has recently been absorbed by the cases of several young women who developed cervical cancer after being denied pap smears by a related health authority, the Cervical Screening Programme, which in order to reduce government health-care spending has refused the screens to women under age 25.

We could go on. NICE is the target of frequent protests and lawsuits, and at times under political pressure has reversed or watered-down its rulings. But it has by now established the principle that the only way to control health-care costs is for this panel of medical high priests to dictate limits on certain kinds of care to certain classes of patients.

The NICE board even has a mathematical formula for doing so, based on a "quality adjusted life year." While the guidelines are complex, NICE currently holds that, except in unusual cases, Britain cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months. Why $22,000? It seems to be arbitrary, calculated mainly based on how much the government wants to spend on health care. That figure has remained fairly constant since NICE was established and doesn't adjust for either overall or medical inflation.

Proponents argue that such cost-benefit analysis has to figure into health-care decisions, and that any medical system rations care in some way. And it is true that U.S. private insurers also deny reimbursement for some kinds of care. The core issue is whether those decisions are going to be dictated by the brute force of politics (NICE) or by prices (a private insurance system).

The last six months of life are a particularly difficult moral issue because that is when most health-care spending occurs. But who would you rather have making decisions about whether a treatment is worth the price -- the combination of you, your doctor and a private insurer, or a government board that cuts everyone off at $22,000?

One virtue of a private system is that competition allows choice and experimentation. To take an example from one of our recent editorials, Medicare today refuses to reimburse for the new, less invasive preventive treatment known as a virtual colonoscopy, but such private insurers as Cigna and United Healthcare do. As clinical evidence accumulates on the virtual colonoscopy, doctors and insurers will be able to adjust their practices accordingly. NICE merely issues orders, and patients have little recourse.

This has medical consequences. The Concord study published in 2008 showed that cancer survival rates in Britain are among the worst in Europe. Five-year survival rates among U.S. cancer patients are also significantly higher than in Europe: 84% vs. 73% for breast cancer, 92% vs. 57% for prostate cancer. While there is more than one reason for this difference, surely one is medical innovation and the greater U.S. willingness to reimburse for it.
* * *

The NICE precedent also undercuts the Obama Administration's argument that vast health savings can be gleaned simply by automating health records or squeezing out "waste." Britain has tried all of that but ultimately has concluded that it can only rein in costs by limiting care. The logic of a health-care system dominated by government is that it always ends up with some version of a NICE board that makes these life-or-death treatment decisions. The Administration's new Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research currently lacks the authority of NICE. But over time, if the Obama plan passes and taxpayer costs inevitably soar, it could quickly gain it.

Mr. Obama and Democrats claim they can expand subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, while saving money and improving the quality of care. It can't possibly be done. The inevitable result of their plan will be some version of a NICE board that will tell millions of Americans that they are too young, or too old, or too sick to be worth paying to care for.

 

[MaggieMae]

i sure hope all of you with a living will etc realize that it dont mean shit.....first you aint gonna sue...live or die....when you are so close that the living will comes out...you are near the end...you can do all the dnr orders you want....next of kin will be the ones deciding...if the next of kin objects to unplugging you will stay plugged

Well, part of the "taking charge" that goes with having a living will is finding someone to be in charge when you're in extremis who will respect your wishes.

Many people with Living Wills are concerned about that very situation. There are "Do Not Resusitate" bracelets that can be purchased from hospital supply companies and online. I haven't bought one yet, but I have medical emergency information posted on my refrigerator, as well as DNR information kept in my wallet and glove compartment. If I'm out cold in an ambulance, I figure it won't matter anyway by the time I get to the hospital, they'll know what to do.

 

[MaggieMae]

National Healthcare in the United States? Why don't you have a little consideration for all the Canadians who come here for there healthcare?

Where will they go if we socialize healthcare?

And think about all those American seniors who won't go to Canada because they can't afford American prescriptions. Won't someone think of the business Canada will lose?

I'm a lot more interested in the fact that if the US tries to imitate the way that Canada and other countries get cheap pharmaceuticals, the entire world will stop getting new drugs developed to treat illnesses.

Huh? A few years ago, the winter flu outbreak that occurred in the U.S. was a strain that all of our own flu drugs didn't affect, so we had to import the effective drug from Great Britain. Many "new" drugs are first tested, approved, and marketed in Europe before our slow-moving FDA begins similar regimens here. The bird flu vaccine also came from overseas. Seems to me they are much more open to drug experimentation across the pond than in the United States, and they do it more effectively and cheaper. Why would that change?

 

[MaggieMae]

Thank goodness for religious charities who provide them with health care.

Oh sure. The truth is if religious charities were responsible for "health care" for the needy, they would do nothing else. Are you kidding?

 

[AllieBaba]

Let's try to use speech patterns of adults. That post makes no sense.

 

[MaggieMae]

Let's try to use speech patterns of adults. That post makes no sense.

Which part was too tough for you?