What the hell happened to Texas?Follow

So you are for regulations, socialized health care, and socialized post-secondary education? Gotcha.

I dunno I enjoy not paying 7% on everything I buy, 5% is pretty freaking nice. But you are right he hasn't done much, then again working in a minority is hard to get anything accomplished, and it is surprising his first issue with a majority is the colossal waste of money in the Crime package.

Okay yeah, I agree that was a terrible move.

Thanks for the offer, but I'll pass.

I'm not sure what you're asking for then, and I suspect it's somewhat circular. If by "available", you mean something that is a service to the public, aren't you skewing your measuring methodology towards a system which focuses on providing free services to the public? That seems a bit unfair if we're comparing such a system to one which focuses more on R&D.

Um... But cutting edge treatment for AVMs wasn't "available" in the UK. During the time period in question, you could literally only get the treatments she received at Standford University where they were developing them. How does that not count in your assessment? If you wanted to get treatment beyond just medicines to manage the symptoms of an AVM, you had to come to the US. Period.


And if you want to take a "big picture" view of the issue, if every country in the world used the same medical system that the UK uses, would we develop new cures and medical techniques at all? Who would do this if we're all focused on providing the care we have to the people who need it? It's one of the inherent problems with socialized systems. They are great at providing todays products and services to the people. Quite efficient, in fact. But the cost is that "todays" products and services are also likely to be "tomorrows" and "next years", and "next decades" as well. Advancement slows down. An extreme example of this could be seen in the Soviet Union, were in the 1980s, their day to day life looked like the US from the 1930s. Retarded tech development is one of the costs of governments attempting to provide directly for the people. And the degree to which the government does this, directly affects the degree to which advancement is retarded.


The reason is that in the private market where you're allowed to retain the profits from your business, if you are the one who develops a new/better product, you profit for it, making the cost to develop that new/better thing worth spending in the first place. But for the government, developing new/better things, just costs money which could be spent providing the current thing to the people. And once the new thing is developed and working, you've got to spend even more money upgrading everyone's stuff. There's a pretty large disincentive in socialist systems to actually improve things. If you can make them cheaper, that's worth doing, but "better" is often left on the wayside.

They miss out on treatments unproven to be useful?

Of course, in the 1980s European medical researchers only figured out the viruses that cause HIV and HPV... but your little AVM story was cute too, I guess.


Edited, Nov 10th 2011 9:51pm by Jophiel

Pretty much.


Seems that he can't accept my point. Medically there is nothing, aside from experimental treatments which may or may not work, available to him that isn't available to me.

I really don't see how you brought up experimental drugs, though, gbaji. I mean, it's not like those are guaranteed to be available.

As Xsarus said, it's not like 100% of all medical research ever is done in the USA. Or even as a result of Capitalist means. Last I checked, Universities got their research money from the government.

I'm not denying a lot of medical research is done in the USA, but to say that it is solely due to you purchasing medical insurance is disingenuous. Medical care is free in the UK, prescription drugs are not. Pharmaceutical companies make profit here too.

It would be idiotic to deny that a lot of medical research is done in the US.

It would also be idiotic to deny that a lot of medical research is done in European and Asian countries that have nationalized health care systems.

No one is doing the former but one guy is doing the latter.

You are again restricting the scope of what a health care system does to "treatment". What you're doing is the equivalent of comparing two countries in terms of their respective automotive industries by looking only at the cars available to purchase (and their cost) at the dealerships. And when someone points out that more automotive design improvements are made in one country than another you dismiss that as "experimental car technologies which may or may not work".

I understand that *you* value the end treatment the most when assessing a health care system, but can you at least acknowledge that other people may put more weight on other things?



Huh? When did I do this? I believe the only time I mentioned drugs at all was when I said that the only thing the UK could do to treat an AVM was to treat the symptoms with drugs. The "experimental treatments" specifically involved in AVMs were advancements in embolization systems allowing fine enough control (and size) to actually enter into the brain and seal off small enough blood vessels to starve the AVM without affecting the function of the brain tissue surrounding it. In her case this involved her ability to associatively assign verbal sounds to mental images - so seeing a pen and being able to think of the word for a pen, it's more than just being able to physically speak. Other advancements involve radio surgery techniques and a cool sounding thing called a gamma-knife.

I'm not aware of any significant changes or improvements to any medications she's taken over this time period, and I'm confused as to why you assumed that I was talking about drugs.



I never said it was. Again, you are tossing the "all or nothing" strawman at me. What I said is that the US health care system focuses more effort and money on that research than other systems do. You're the one who keeps responding to my statements that it's a matter of how much one system does one thing versus another with the insistence that I name something that US does that the UK doesn't do at all. It's not about that. And surely, you don't make the same argument in reverse, right? The US does everything the UK does, just not as much of it, or as completely, right? I mean, we do pay for health care for people. Just not everyone for everything, and not in the same way the UK does.


You're demanding an unfair comparison. I'm trying to make a reasonable and fair one. The UK focuses more of its total health care dollars on direct end patient care. The US focuses more of its health care dollars on research and development. These are not absolutes and I never claimed they were.



Huh? Now you're just inventing new things to argue about. When did I *ever* make a distinction based on where the health care dollars came from? And again with the all or nothing argument. So if even one dollar of R&D money comes from public sources, it somehow disproves something I've said? How is that?

Edited, Nov 11th 2011 4:06pm by gbaji

If it was well done, you wouldn't have noticed.

Hogwash, we all know that if anyone cures cancer it will be some rich WASP.

Does Ubeki - beki - beki beki stan count? I don't think it's in Africa, but I'm guessing it's not WASPY.