If everyone is covered its Universal Health Care, if you don't like how its implemented fine, but don't pretend that it doesn't cover everyone when it does.

I certainly prefer there to be a public option. Its a huge disappointment that the PPACA doesn't have it. Still, that doesn't mean the law plays into insurance companies' hands. Its true that in forcing people to get health insurance it adds customers but there are still two huge reasons insurance companies hate the PPACA:

1. Companies must accept people with preexisting conditions.

2. Companies can only take in so much per dollar per customer or they have to give something back. Its actually pretty hilarious that every casino has a board regulating it to ensure the customer doesn't get more gouged than they already are but insurance companies are in an uproar because now they can only charge 20% vig.

For the record, I think the government should stay out of healthcare entirely, all these regulations are driving up prices. Heck back in the 1920's you could head down to your local "Eclectic Medical School" spend a year there and then be out transplanting goat testicles into people to cure infertilility for 8k (inflation adjusted) and soon enough be a millionaire. And then you can start training other diplomma mill docs the same procedure and build a whole network of clinics. While your at it you could open up a pharmacy selling poison that you tell callers to your radio-show is the only thing that could cure them

But don't worry, public knowledge was able to stop him by the time over 16,000 of these procedures had been performed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R....y#Diploma_mill

Yeah but malpractice isn't just for anytime something went wrong, it is for when something went wrong because the doctor/nurse/whoever was negligent.

In your example, if you die under anesthesia because the anesthesiologist didn't read your file thoroughly enough and gave you the wrong drug, then they have committed malpractice.

^^^^^ thats right ben but lots of ppl think anytime. they also think operations are no more difficult than changing the starter on a car.

local story, guy died during a knee operation. family wanted to file suit. the family didnt think about the fact that the guy weighed 350lbs was late 40's and several other factors.

Hah, I love how leoslayer doesn't understand how taxes work. That's a recurring meme when talking with conservatives about the evil government. Who was the financial adviser who doesn't know how taxes work again?

how do i not know how taxes work? because i didnt know that they use marginal rates in france?

Heh, great excuse. It makes total sense having your total effective tax rate double if you earn an extra euro. Your excuse is almost as good as the other dude's excuse, he said he didn't know how taxes worked because he uses spreadsheets or something like that. Great wealth adviser he is.

well it seems to make sense to me. why would i pay attention to how they do anything in europe?

Yeah, why would you?

I'm sure your other contributions to this topic are equally insightful.

It's my understanding there are other countries that have something very similar to what we have with private insurance companies and mandates (Switzerland, Korea maybe, Germany even?).

Although I think most of them still have a public option. I believe we'll have a public option within 5-15 years. We just have to wait until the next conservative president screws the pooch as bad as GWB to usher in a bunch of dems.

Because they do medical care cheaper and better than we do?

Or you can just keep embodying the ignorant American stereotype.

bahbahmickey - got exposed for not having a clue what he was talking about - never even slowed him down. Can you imagine if you actually hired him as a wealth adviser? There's no way that's what he does. Maybe he works in the mail room or something.

Then the surgeon should have refused to operate or the anesthetists refused to provide anesthesia. If you can in one line explain why the patient was so high risk, then they shouldn't have done an elective procedure. In fact I think your hypothetical (based off of the two sentences) is more likely to get someone in trouble than if the patient was perfectly healthy with no risk factors and had a freak MI during surgery.

i dont hav all the details and it was several years ago. im not sure if he infarcd or not. i was just using an example tht nothing is 100 percent under ga

No it's not a rounding error, it's statistics. 5th grade statistics to be fair. And the higher the population, the higher the weight that statistic carries, even if you think it's a rounding error.

Probably because you were using it as an argument? Don't talk about stuff you know nothing about if you don't care how it works and don't even want to read about it.


So again you are using something you know nothing about as an argument? ****, might as well start making stuff up, would have the same effect. People can die under surgery, wow.

now this last one you are wrong on. just because it happened 8 or so years ago does not mean i dont know what im talkin bout. my ex wifes whole family is in medicine including her. of course they would talk about cases look at ultrasounds kinda like poker players go over hands. i like most ppl was surprised to hear the guy died till they explain how nothing is 100%.

kinda like ppl think that launching the space shuttle was no big deal till the accident.

Who gets to decide what constitutes negligent? Hope it is not a trial lawyer.

Isn't the whole libertarian idea that everything is settled by lawsuits instead of regulations?

You have too much confidence in countries ability to gather statistics. I have worked the U.S. Census. Many of those checked boxes are guess work. The dead aren't all sending e-mails to the social security offices notifying the office of their death. There are many dead persons still receiving their monthly social security checks.

I don't think so. Can you find Ron Paul's position on this issue?

So what is the libertarian solution if my crappy unlicensed doctor removes my spleen instead of gall bladder, or my kid gets eColi from tainted meat, or Dupont pollutes my drinking water? I'm 99.999% sure plenty of libertarians on here have said lawsuits are the answer. Or maybe ostracism.

Found an article on social security sending checks to the deceased.
It wasn't even always fraud.

Judge and Jury?

One again, how much money do you think life insurance companies would lose if they used Japanese mortality tables to price american life insurance policies?

It's not a rounding error, it's significant.

You're equivocating between the standard deviation of a population and the amount of error on the mean. E.g, you can have one population with average 60 and standard deviation 10, another with average 61 and standard deviation 10, and these populations are different. Now suppose that the only way you can get the average for each population is by sampling from them, and you take 10 million people from the first population and 10 million from the second. You would confidently be able to say that they have different mean values (and hence the two populations that you are sampling from are different) despite both having a large standard deviation.

So go take a ****ing stats course.