You're assuming that your inefficient government systems are the best that can be achieved. I can assure you that they're not.
You're assuming that your inefficient government systems are the best that can be achieved. I can assure you that they're not.
"Dunter
Unless, of course, you're a net receiver of services; unless SOMEONE ELSE'S earnings are being confiscated in order to keep you in the manner to which you've become accustomed to thinking you're entitled.
You live in a country with a socialist point of view; the government should pay for "social" programs like hospitals.
I live in one that has a more capitalist POV; things like hospitals should be held by companies.
I've seen both types IN THIS COUNTRY.
The difference is VUMC is run like a business, the VA is run like a government.
And you assume your privately run hospitals are the best there are; I can assure you that they're not.
Question: why do Canadians come to the US for Medical treatment?
Answer: Our hospitals are better.
It's a different mind set. You say TOE MAH TOE, I say TOE MAY TOE.
BS.
The message you responded to was written by a UP apologist calling himself Jerry something. Please pull your head out of your fundamental orifice.
Go to
How about some new lines, don't just recycle old John Birch Society catch phrases.
Go to
"Brian Paul Ehni"
Whatever.
And you pay bloody high medical insurance payments. Far higher than our medicare fees.
-- Cheers Roger T.
Home of the Great Eastern Railway
Who says you have better doctors and facilities? Americans?
-- Cheers Roger T.
Home of the Great Eastern Railway
"Brian Paul Ehni>
Wrong paleface. It's because the wait times are less. On a per captia, less people use American hospitals because they can't afford to be sick. That's why.
If you guys a full medical coverage like we do, you'd have the delays as we have.
-- Cheers Roger T.
Home of the Great Eastern Railway
It does if R&D is allowed to come out of the bottom line, to a permissible percentage of income (perhaps? That would be just to prevent gouging and calling it "R&D").
Jay CNS&M North Shore Line - "First and fastest"
Let's examine that:
I made $68,750 (approx) in 2002. I brought home about $52,000. The rest was income tax, Social Security (7.65%), and insurance premiums (roughly $1900). I then had to pay about $4600 to the city for the privilege of living in my home (deductible from federal and state pre-tax income). My phone bill is taxed, seemingly 3-5 times through direct taxes, Federal "fees" (how is this different from a tax?), etc. My other utility bills are taxed. My gasoline is taxed at 49.6 cents per gallon, or roughly 2 cents per mile. Everything else I buy except food and prescription drugs is taxed at 5.6%. I haven't worked it all out, but I'm betting my final tax bite is in the 40%+ range, possibly over 50%. How does this differ from Europe?
On an aside, I once heard it said on an entertainment show that Abba moved to the US because under then-current Swedish law they could have been taxed at
103% of their income. Truth? Who knows?Jay CNS&M North Shore Line - "First and fastest"
I'll agree, as will most Canadians, your taxes are lower than ours. But, our taxes, in all provinces except Alberta and BC, include the cost of medicare. In BC and Alberta, we pay extra for medicare, or your emplyer s does if you have a benefits package.
You bought a house for how much???????
God, we haven't seen house prices liek that in BC since the mid to late
1970s.Median house price here in Victoria is around Can$240,000 for three bedrooms, 1 1 /2 baths and a two car garage and no basement.
Cheapest houses go for around Can$160,000.
-- Cheers Roger T.
Home of the Great Eastern Railway
RT>> > Do you suppose that the cost of your medical care IS actually RT>lower, or that RT>> > the cost is simply shifted elsewhere? Incidentally, not that RT>anyone cares, RT>> > but as a credentialed economist, I can authoritatively state that RT>> > the correct answer is the latter. RT>>
RT>> A Government run medical system isn't expected to make a profit. RT>> The public medical system is cost driven, not (frightened) customer RT>expectation RT>> driven. RT>> The public system should be at least 20% cheaper, more likely 50% RT>> cheaper.
RT>The over all cost of medical care is cheaper in Canada than in the RT>U.S.A.
RT>One reason that makes the States more expensive, is the private RT>medical system itself.
RT>The Vancouver General Hospital has a billing staff of two or three RT>clerks. A TV news program here in BC surveyed several American RT>hospitals of the same size. They, usually, had a billing department RT>of over 200 clerks, many for profit hospitals required a seperate RT>office building just to house them. A BC hospital fills out ONE type RT>of claim form. An American hospital has to fill out hundreds, if not RT>thousands, of different insurance company claim forms for hunders, if RT>not thousands, of different insurance companys. How inefficiant is RT>that?
RT>As to the American service levels and wait time Vs Canadian RT>hospitals, well, what do you expect when in the States if you've no RT>insurance, you don't get the same treatment as if you had insurance? RT>In Canada, NOBODY gets turned away from a hospital because they're RT>not insured and the Government Insurance scheme CANNOT turn you down RT>for existing medial problems. Unlike American insurance companies RT>will have a great list of exclusions.
RT>Medical care should never be a for profit industry! It's a social RT>service that should be available to everyone, regardless of their RT>financial state or existing medical problems.
RT>-- RT>Cheers RT>Roger T.
Spoken like a true socialist. However with no profit there is not motivation and no innovation. Let's here from someone more knowing on this topic:
Canada is offered up as proof that price controls would dramatically cut the cost of medicine. The proof has some holes. In Canada a three-month prescription for Merck's cholesterol reducer Zocor goes for $172. In the U.S., patients who pay retail fork over $328 for the same pills. The media are full of such shocking comparisons aimed at demonstrating that Canadians, thanks to price controls, pay far less for medicine than do Americans. Just one problem: It isn't so. While some high-profile brand name drugs are much cheaper in Canada, other lesser-known drugs and generics are not. In fact, 21 of 27 top- selling generics cost more in Canada than in the U.S., reports a study of lowest available prices by Palmer D'Angelo Consulting, an Ottawa firm that works for brand-ed drugmakers. For all 27 combined, the average Canadian premium is 37%. Why? Just two companies dominate the Canadian generics market, says study coauthor Neil Palmer.
That lack of competition is, ironically, partly a side effect of Canadian drug-price controls. Generic makers find countries with controls on patented drugs less attractive. So fewer jump in when a branded drug goes off patent. The end result: In the U.S., generic drugs cost an average of 74% less than equivalent brand name drugs; in Canada, generics average just 38% less.
Canada's rules can also discourage branded drugmakers from discounting older drugs to compete. John R. Graham of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver explains why: Canada's Patented Medicine Prices Review Board typically sets the maximum price for a new drug by comparing it with similar drugs already on the market. So if companies lowered prices on old drugs, that could cut into profits on new ones, too.
How did the myth of cheap Canadian drugs gain such wide acceptance? It began with a 1992 study by Congress' General Accounting Office and was reinforced by a 1998 report from the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Government Reform. Both studies were flawed. They compared only top-selling brand-name drugs, ignoring lower-priced generics that now make up half of U.S. prescriptions. Furthermore, prices in the studies weren't properly weighted to reflect market share or volume discounts, argues Wharton School health economist Patricia Danzon. Correcting for such flaws, Danzon and Li-Wei Chao, also of Wharton, found that if Americans had paid Canadian prices for the drugs they bought in 1992, they would have saved, at most, 13%.Yes, the Wharton economists have received research funding from the drug industry, and yes, the price break Canadians enjoy has likely widened since 1992. But it's doubtful that Canada's price controls on patented drugs, as opposed to economics, are the main cause of lower prices there.
The truth is, notes the Fraser Institute's Graham, all kinds of goods cost more in the U.S. than Canada. A turbo Chrysler PT Cruiser retails for $23,100 in the U.S. and the equivalent of $17,800 up north. Yet there's no Canadian Retro Car Prices Review Board. Even bigger price differences are common for goods with high fixed costs but lower variable costs, everything from music CDs to online service. Prices are lower in Canada because incomes there are a fifth smaller and the Canadian dollar is weaker. Producers logically try to recoup most of their high fixed costs from wealthier consumers and charge those who can't pay as much a price closer to marginal cost.
There's another reason for lower drug prices in Canada: lower liability costs. In Canada, judges--not juries--typically set damages, and awards for pain and suffering are capped at $185,000 U.S. Such differences account for a third to a half of the gap, a 1997 study in the Journal of Law and Economics concluded. Yet the politicians and do-gooders who complain most about U.S. drug prices are often the least likely to favor reining in legal costs.
======================================
The Freeloaders More From Steve Forbes
Europe, Japan, Canada and much of the rest of the world are mooching off the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. They refuse to pay fair prices for the medicines that were developed through our drug companies' research and development. These nations have imposed price controls on medicines; medical manufacturers thus can't recover fair compensation for their R&D costs. Result: Americans are medically subsidizing the rest of the world. It's one thing to help struggling countries, quite another to help rich, developed, high-standard-of-living states such as Germany, France and Japan. Make no mistake: These countries are engaged in a costly form of piracy. As Food & Drug Administration head Mark McClellan recently pointed out, "The economic consequences of overly strict price controls on drugs are no different than violating the patent directly through compulsory licensing to make copies of the drug."
The costs of bringing a new drug to market run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Globally, U.S companies now pay the lion's share of pharmaceutical R&D spending. When will foreign governments start to pay an appropriate share of the cost of developing these medical breakthroughs? Dr. McClellan recently asked that question in a major speech. While he offered no detailed answer, other than to suggest finding ways of pricing drugs overseas based on a nation's income, his question should be taken to heart by the Administration's trade policymakers.
McClellan's query isn't an academic one. Pressures are growing here at home to squeeze the pricing power of pharmaceutical companies. Treks by the elderly to Canada, on the hunt for bargain prescriptions, are a media staple. (Of course, stories about the flood of Canadians coming to the U.S. for advanced medications and treatments unavailable in medically socialized, short-on-care Canada are practically nonexistent.)
Few people realize that Americans are unwitting ATMs for foreign drug consumers. The net result will be fewer disease-curing or -preventing, pain-reducing, quality-of-life-enhancing medical breakthroughs.
Foreign nations naturally show no sign of voluntarily coughing up more money; the short-term political benefits of underpricing medicines are irresistible. Brazil, for example, recently demanded that U.S. drug companies sell it medicines at prices charged the poorest of poor nations around the globe. While Brazil is still a developing country, its economy is nonetheless the world's ninth largest. Why should it get the same bargain as disease-ridden, poverty-stricken Haiti, which has a per capita income barely one-sixth of Brazil's?
Should pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell to rich countries? Not before the American public--and foreign ones--are fully aware of how those nations are sponging off of us. We'd also better be prepared to fight hard if some of those nations rip off our companies' patents.
McClellan demolishes the charge that there are other factors at work catapulting the prices of medications in America. Consumer advertising? "On net such advertising benefits the public health. It gets more people into treatment for conditions that are undertreated in the population. [It] account[s] for less than 2% of U.S. pharmaceutical spending." Too much spending on "me-too" drugs? "Over the 1990s, only about 20% of pharmaceutical R&D spending was devoted to improving or modifying existing products," and many of these were perfectly justified medically.
So let's see if the pols and the media glom onto the real villains of our high-cost medicines--freeloading foreigners.
Point is, we both pay, just in different forms.
Keep on believing that.
BTW, wouldn't shorter wait times be a measuring standard for qualifying "better"?
Certainly true of many English and Irish entertainment stars. In fact, Ireland had to change their tax laws to benefit writers, actors, and musicians to stop the outflow of talent.
As for the rest, while I was stationed in Germany (admittedly in the 80's), gasoline was, on a unit-for-unit basis, twice as expensive as in the States. The difference was taxes. It's one reason we were allowed by treaty to buy gasoline thru ration tickets.
The US also does not have Value Added Taxes (VAT) like many other countries, just sales taxes. They raised the cost of spare tires and such to almost twice the price. Again, we had to fill out some forms to get out of paying that, too. And believe me, it was worth it.
Salvé skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
Illiteracy mkes it hard to read the weapon manuals :)
LOL Beowulf
Salvé "JCunington" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m20.aol.com...
Most of the countries with a national health service have very healthy r&d, I have a right to mdical aid , I've already paid for it and Idont mind, I prefer that system to having a massive bill or even be turned away froma hospital because I cant afford the treatment, this is not really a discussion of the merits of the two systems but an ideological clash. beowulf
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