“I am in this fight every single day.”
Factoid of the day: The bill has the word “shall” 1,683 times, “must” 47 times and “require” 495 times. This won’t cause any problems with anything at all.
Here is the video Hanna mentioned this morning.
Want to see how much sense Government Healthcare makes. This chart about sums it up. Click this link and prepare for your head to explode.
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The Mike Slater Show
8 Comments
July 15, 2009 at 11:44 am
Mike Myers on government healthcare: “It’s underwritten by the government which means it is completely free….” What the heck? What PLANET is he living on? He can’t really be that stupid…..can he?? Does he think our government makes ANY money? Our government doesn’t MAKE money, it takes OUR money! What a moron. Great video, scary future if this thing gets passed.
July 15, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Slater,
Thanks so much for posting the video. Steven Crowder will be on Cavuto today to discuss it. He’s a star like our Slater!!! But yes, it is maddening. I loved the part where the nurse told him they could not do a simple blood test and it would take 2-3 years to get a family doctor, or he could go to a PRIVATE doctor to get a blood test, but that would cost him $900!!!!! 2-3 years for a doctor? I called today to make an appointment with mine, and I am seeing her THURSDAY!
July 15, 2009 at 6:32 pm
A video like this is about as useful as a Daily Show “man on the street” segment. The fact is all the polls show Canadians and people in every other developed country like their health care system more than we like ours. Our private health care system, our public transportation infrastructure, and our public school system are the biggest laughing stocks in their respective genres in the world. In the rest of the developed world, there is a stereotype of the “rich but poor” American who has to spend all his/her money on school, a car, and medicine. So, we’re screwed up on all sides.
I’m not saying all this to say “socialism” is the answer or that I even have any answers. But, I do know that saying that our health care system is the best or even good when 60% of U.S. bankruptcies involve health care costs and 50 million people are without coverage in the country with the world’s most powerful economy is just being intellectually dishonest.
If anybody out there is interested, the Emmy-nominated Worldfocus on PBS did an excellent series on the different (public and private) health care systems across the world and the advantages and disadvantages. I would recommend viewing it if you’re into actual, substantive thought and debate. They’re short 5-10 min segments, and you can search around the different countries starting on this link:
http://worldfocus.org/?s=health+care
In my opinion, in a nation of our wealth and power, health care is a human right the same as clean water. That, I feel, is the core of the debate. Sooner or later, guaranteed healthcare will happen here because it’s the right thing to do.
July 15, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Kyle,
The other industrialized nations of the world have rather generous welfare states because we practically subsidize their defense budgets. Twenty years after the Cold War, we’re still defending Japan and Western Europe to the tune of many trillions of dollars and the blood of our soldiers.
If they ever had to defend themselves from invasion, defend their own national interests, or put out fires in their own backyard, they would have to make some rather tough budgetary choices, and the real ugly side of their centrally planned rationing scheme would show quickly.
After all, a government can only raise so much money — at a point between 0% and 100% taxation, overall tax revenue will actually decrease, and they’re probably capped at it if not well past that point. Furthermore, their national debts and unfunded liabilities, on a per-person basis, are actually higher than ours.
July 15, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Addendum: TANSTAAFL
July 16, 2009 at 5:38 am
“The fact is all the polls show Canadians and people in every other developed country like their health care system more than we like ours.” What polls? Do you have links please?
Keep in mind while reading the following: Every other country mentioned here, INCLUDING CANADA enjoys the benefits of socialized “free” healthcare.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649 (scroll down to the bottom of the page in this link to find to all resource data mentioned in this article) I cut and pasted for r those not wanting to play follow the link.
This essay appeared on the website of the National Center for Policy Analysis on March 24, 2009. An earlier version was published in the Washington Times.
1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.
2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.
3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them.
4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:
•Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
•Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.
•More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).
•Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).
5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”
6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.
7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”
8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared with only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).
9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain. An overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identify computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade—even as economists and policy makers unfamiliar with actual medical practice decry these techniques as wasteful. The United States has thirty-four CT scanners per million Americans, compared to twelve in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has almost twenty-seven MRI machines per million people compared to about six per million in Canada and Britain.
10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. Since the mid- 1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to U.S. residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past thirty-four years did a scientist living in the United States not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.
Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and care for the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries whose healthcare is “free”.
July 16, 2009 at 9:50 am
Thanks for having Congressman Blackburn on your show. I just got off the phone with Sen. Corker’s and Sen. Alexander’s offices. I told them “Thank God” that we have Marsha Blackburn standing up for Tennessee in Washington, because everyone else seems to have lost their voices.
July 19, 2009 at 7:30 pm
I have a couple of friends who moved to the states from Canada. They liked the health care system there too, until they moved here. They didn’t know what good health care was because the norm there was not good health care, but that was all they were used to. They talked at length about how much better the health care in the states is compared to Canada and said that the people there just don’t know what they are missing. And these are two liberal friends that voted for Obama. Our health care system does need reform. But govt. reform and takeover of our healthcare will just do more damage. It has never worked. When will people WAKE UP?