Agenda 21

[El]

More states should start doing it on their own too.

It's a bit late for that as an alternative. 

[Jack]

More states should start doing it on their own too.

It's a bit late for that as an alternative. 

Not really, considering nothing similar will come of the current path.

[El]

More states should start doing it on their own too.

It's a bit late for that as an alternative. 

Not really, considering nothing similar will come of the current path.

Yeah, but I think this is going to have to be rolled out and fail a whole bunch first, because it's so far into motion.

[odeon]

Obamamcare still seems like a very good idea in theory, which is being implemented shittily in practice.

Explain.

[odeon]

You should do *something* about your health care. As Michael Moore pointed out, Cuba has better health care than you, FFS.

[Jack]

Cuba is an anomaly in many statistical groupings, even within racial statistics inside the US. There's not much the average person can do.

[odeon]

Cuba is an anomaly in many statistical groupings, even within racial statistics inside the US. There's not much the average person can do.

it's an amusing anomaly, considering the last fifty years or so.

But the US is behind most Western countries when it comes to health care. Under your current system, around 50 million people are without any kind of health insurance but even those who have it are controlled by private firms who decide what kind of care you should get based not on medical reasons but on a simple profit/loss analysis.

[Jack]

How is it amusing. Cuba is full of physicians, but their taxi drivers earn more money. Even within the US they're the one minority with the best health statistics. No on can explain Cuba. A large percentage of people without insurance in the US can afford it but choose not to have it, because young healthy people pay less for annual basic health needs than the cost of premiums. Though it's true, there's a set of people in the middle who really can't afford it but don't qualify for existing government healthcare programs. That's what Obama was to address, but hasn't.

[odeon]

It is amusing because for years, the US pointed at Cuba as one of the bad guys and a communist state to boot.

Cuba is in no way the ideal state, and it's certainly not one I would like to live in, but why is it that a country like the United States cannot provide for proper health care for its citizens when Cuba can?

[Jack]

That's where people keep getting it wrong. Healthcare can't be refused for monetary reasons in the US, and this includes people who aren't even citizens. Anyone who can pay is charged more to make up for the people who can't. This makes healthcare so expensive, that people in the middle are lost in a system which only really functions well for the haves and havenots. What Obama actually proposed during his first campaign could work; that's why people voted for him.

[odeon]

I thought the current implementation was not fundamentally different from the one he proposed (and Hillary, for that matter). At least that was what someone said earlier.

But a lot of your citizens, even the ones who do have an insurance, are cared for based on monetary reasons, not medical ones. A buddy of mine who works at Eli Lily's confirms this, as do countless other reports I've read. Maybe they are all wrong, but if so, it's not what people are saying.

[Jack]

It makes me think of something butterflies once said to me. She had a mental image of ambulances speeding away from people with no insurance. I don't really know what Hillary proposed, but she did a good job with welfare reform, cutting the waste and opening the umbrella to include more people. People who have children can now get government care at a small cost when before they would have been stuck in that lower middle class hard spot. The same thing needs to be done for adults, and that's what oboma proposed, an affordable government health insurance option. No, there's currently nothing like that.

[odeon]

I doubt ambulances flee from the people without an insurance, no, I just think that they won't actually be getting much more than the first-aid kit. I don't think they'd get a pacemaker or AIDS meds. And I know for a fact that people have been refused meds not on an insurance company's list of approved meds. I don't think you have to look further than the board for examples.

Now, I'm not saying that people here are getting all the meds they need, but I do think people here have a better chance of survival, generally speaking, and I have the statistics to back that up with.

[Adam]

Over here we have Tory cunts selling off our NHS

Fucking Tories. They privatise everything except the fucking monarchy

[Adam]

"No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party... So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin."