[sailaway21]

Cam responded to sck5's fallacies pretty well...I'll only add a few things...

All that vacation that the Europeans enjoy is also a reason that they live in an essentially no growth society. To be productive one does have to actually do the work at some point. Likewise, in Europe a six percent unemployment rate is nothing to get excited about. As we say, this is great work if you can get it. How long it can continue, and fund a health care and pension system, might not be a bet one would want to make.

The use of WHO numbers where we come out on par with Costa Rica betrays a common, but still erroneous, use of those numbers. There is no actual WHO study where the US and Costa Rica are comparable. There is a study with two breakdowns of it's numbers where, if you perform the type of legerdemain that would land an accountant in gaol, you can conflate things to make it look so but it's not the actual determination of the WHO that such is the case. One could look it up. ( In fact I think I did...over in the Health care thread on A-S, not too long ago.)

The problem with Medicare and every other health insurance plan is that they are not based upon a patient cure menu...everything is ala carte. Medicare and most insurance plans encourage increasing the number of tests and procedures done because they bill out on that basis. Thus you get an X-ray for a hangnail...just to "make sure" and you probably pay more for the X-ray than you did to have the hangnail trimmed. Hospitals and doctors are encouraged to "add-on" to each job what might be called options so as to run up the bill so that they can make a profit on the already under-market recompense made by Medicare.

No the co-pay shouldn't be $15-20. Whom has those numbers anymore anyway? You can't get Mario over to look at your lawn's mole problem for $15-20. The co-pay for a visit should be more in the $100 range or whatever number one might think will make the potential patient think twice about making a questionable doctor's visit. It's not the people going in for a lump on their breast that we're trying to discourage...it's the one's with a sore throat or a sore arm whom haven't bothered with taking some aspirin first before they utilize a highly trained professional with better, more important, things to do.

And, in case you missed it in Cam's post, Americans actually have the longest life expectancy if you factor out homicides and auto accidents. We have quite a few homicides and we do drive far more than any other peoples. You could look it up.