LOL Just wow. What amazes me is the number of members in here who want/love the idea of having a much bigger brother who rules your lives, and everything about your lives.
If your response is to turn everything into hyperbole, then I'll come back with: I can't believe some people here want to bend over and take it in the ass from every single corporation and want to give every single CEO billions more in profit.
"Love the idea"? No. "Much bigger brother"? No. "Rules my life?" No.
If you all think your opinions are a majority of the country's opinions in wanting MORE government, you are sadly mistaken. They aren't. Not. Close.
I don't. Most people don't want more government. They want a government that does the things it's supposed to do, and does those things well. It's pretty clear we have fundamental differences about what a government is supposed to do. In my mind, a democratic republic exists for a number of reasons, of course, but one of them is to make better the lives of all of its constituents. That's an ideal, granted, but then again, we already take for granted the ways that the ideal has been made to work. Public services are there for the public. This isn't Hobbes' "war of all against all" yet. Though we're getting there.
How long do you seriously wait to see your MD? Like a day or two?
I've never been able to get in to see my family doctor in less than a month. And what part of a three month wait time for a specialist did you not read in my earlier post? If you read the article I linked to earlier, you'll see that in Canada, because so much of its population is grounded to the south, the farther north you go, the more wait times increase. And it's not that much of a difference. Use the link cavman provided. I tried gastrointestinal disorders, since that's what I have. 4-6 weeks seems like the average. That's about what I encountered here.
I just have to foot the bill for everybody who chooses to save money by not buying health insurance and yet still shows up at the emergency room or files for medicaid.
And you know what, Doug? I'm sick of paying for people who are too stupid and too cheap to take care of themselves. So unfortunately, yes, we need government to tell them they have to buy health insurance. Yes, we need the government to tell them they can't take buy a home with an adjustable mortgage and no money down. I wish we didn't ... but people are cheap, stupid, only concerned with themselves, and the bastards are taking my money away.
So, I understand you're pissed that the government wants to take your money away, but unraveling the social safety net such that everybody has to pay their own way no matter what isn't going to happen. As long as that's the case, I have no interest in paying the bills for people who choose to cheat the system.
Why should I have to pay for your poor behavior? I don't want to pay for your heart surgery, high blood pressure/cholesterol medicine because you eat 5 burgers a week. I don't wanna pay for your lung cancer because you smoke like a chimney. I don't want to pay for your liver transplant because you drink and drink yourself to sleep.
Plus you can just win all the money you need for healthcare in a poker game. Since it's a game of skill...
Jon, though it sounds like you and I agree on what needs to be done, I take exception to this idea of all these people who "choose to save money by not buying health insurance and yet still shows up at the emergency room or files for medicaid". Or "people who are too stupid or too cheap to take care of themselves." There are many people like myself who work in fields where health insurance isn't provided. Those same fields often don't pay particularly well, and as you said, if something happens, then you're screwed. You either run up your credit, if you have credit--which only makes another national problem worse--or you rely on hospital charity, which can help but doesn't solve the problem because 1) as you said, the public is footing the bill, and 2) you're still paying a potentially hefty sum. If your bill is $1000 and they knock off half, or even 75%, it can be tough coming up with the $250. You can't squeeze water out of a rock.
The public myth of the shiftless, unemployed or barely-employed person who just bilks the system is blown out of proportion for political purposes, just like that thing about people on welfare driving Cadillacs in the 1980s. (If you buy a 20 yr-old used Cadillac with 160k miles on it for $500, are you living large?) Do those people exist? Yes. Are there upwards of 30 million of them? Not anywhere close.
I think some people just can't get their heads around the number of workers at part-time or on contract. It's a huge portion of our workforce. There are people working 35 hrs./week who are not considered full-time. Where I used to work, they continually hired "seasonal" help and kept them on all year long in order to avoid paying them at a part-timer's rate or giving them holidays, sick days, etc. In my current job as an adjunct professor, I teach a full load and am encouraged to take on more projects and duties, but I have no way to buy into the college's health plan. I know waiters, musicians, construction workers, administrative assistants with the same problems, and even full-time workers who were denied coverage. This is why the problem is so great, not because of a conspiracy of shiftless idiots who want to cheat the system.
