To Europeans, U.S. Universal Health Care Is Long Overdue
- Thread starter Hot Mega
- Start date
Misery loves company.
Supafly
Retired Mod
I'd rather say:
The old way had the scent of genocide against the poor people in the USA.
Poor AND sick? Hey, get a shovel and dig yourself a hole, we don't care.
Now the USA finally made that upgrade, so now step up and fix your fucked-up agencies spying on ANY communication you guys have.
You are back in the days of the spanish inquisition there.
Still so much work to do
:2 cents:
The old way had the scent of genocide against the poor people in the USA.
Poor AND sick? Hey, get a shovel and dig yourself a hole, we don't care.
Now the USA finally made that upgrade, so now step up and fix your fucked-up agencies spying on ANY communication you guys have.
You are back in the days of the spanish inquisition there.
Still so much work to do
:2 cents:
:rofl:
Philbert
Banned
...and loves to share!
An interesting article. Obviously the Europeans do not have everything figured out, but there is movement here toward an European model (especially on the pre-existing condition issue).
I don't believe there is a universal model. What works in the Netherlands really well will not, for example, work in the USA. People there exercise differently, eat differently, are exposed to different pollution and toxins, and blah blah blah.
Frankly, I don't think the Europeans are exactly right to thumb their noses. Things are not exactly exceptional everywhere in Europe, either. Health care is brutally difficult. No government has it figured out entirely. No insurance company does either. No blending of the two seems possible. I'm glad I don't have to make decisions on this scale. I prefer to simply bitch about them.
Funny.
Ace Bandage
The one and only.
Remember that time when America joined the war late, and then contributed in a much smaller way than is generally reported? Remember when they spent the last six decades talking about how they saved the world from tyranny while not taking into account the European resistance and war effort, not to mention the contribution of the rest of the world (virtually all of whom entered the war YEARS before the States did)? Remember the plight of the factory workers in America during the war era? The ones who suffered terrible injuries and toxin exposures? The ones who didn't have universal health care and who had an extremely low life expectancy?
Yes. I remember that too.
Ace Bandage
The one and only.
Yeah, and I'm sure that the fact that we contributed roughly 50 billion (about 750 billion today) dollars in armaments via the Lend-Lease agreement before entering the war had no effect on the resistance at all, right? I'm sure they would have been fine on their own. And the tide of the war probably would have shifted on its own as well. The fact that we outproduced every other country in the war combined was probably irrelevant. Europeans appeared to have everything in order when we joined in. We just needed to improve our stance at the bargaining table. Good call.
I'm not fighting with you on this.
The last I'll say about this is talk to people living there at the time. Radio Orange, in the Netherlands, for example, bragged for almost three years about America's contributions, and about the size of their army before any American help of any sort made it to the Netherlands.
I'm not going to say that America's contribution was insignificant. I'm going to say (and I know this will make people hate me, so I apologise in advance,) that America's contribution in the European theatre in the second world war has been over emphasized and exaggerated. Indeed, their contributions may have been a tipping factor, but they were A tipping factor. Not THE tipping factor.
I have no wish to diminish America's contribution or the loss that was felt here. I do have a degree in Modernist European history as it developed under the Third Reich, however. And these thoughts are just my $0.02.
I asked my wife's uncle who's an American (he lived in the US until he was 34) why a lot of you are so dead set against universal healthcare. He said that most Americans value making their own choices to such a degree that it blinds them from everything else. Even if it goes horribly wrong and they end up in the gutter at least they can say they made their own choice.
PlasmaTwa2
The Second-Hottest Man in my Mother's Basement
Man, Europe is fucking dumb. They have nothing better to do than bug the Americans about healthcare? In Canada we barely give a shit about this!
Get a life, you weird hippies.
:2 cents:
Get a life, you weird hippies.
:2 cents:
Ace Bandage
The one and only.
You know why I hate universal health care - because I have to pay for it. No, not for me, but for somebody else. My taxes are going up so that somebody else can get their fucking health care. I don't give a shit about anybody else. If you can't afford your own fucking medical care, then you don't deserve to be treated. It's not my fucking job to provide for some gutter trash and her six children. I take care of myself and so should everybody else.
And when you get sick others will pay for you. That's the whole point, you share the burden.
Well, aren't you just a wonderful human being.
Ace Bandage
The one and only.
NO! You're missing the point. I already pay for health insurance. I have a medical plan through my job. I don't need this shit. But my taxes will pay for other people to have it. That's the point. See my last post for my thoughts on helping them.
Europeans were gloating? Really? That doesn't sound like us, we usually leave that to the Americans. This thread being a case in point.
Exactly. What the fuck would you gloat about anyway?
This is the problem. & the selfish mindset of some people. We are a society not a group of individuals.
We didn't solve the world's problems we helped just like the others involved. Case closed?
There is an incalculable value for the human being to be in charge of their personal affairs. It's true, freedom to do your own will...even if dumb or stupid is cherished by Americans. Rightfully so.
That isn't the primary reasoning for the raucous opposition to something like this though.
It's a long story but the US is unlike many places in the respect that there are those who have an us versus "them" mentality. The US is not a homogeneous society and it is in the interests of some to magnify that because of our history.
The arguments and dissent on health care track similarly to the public education debate years ago. Some people just have a mentality that they don't want to contribute to a system that may benefit people not like them IMO.
Others in todays debate over health care really don't know what they are opposed to other than it is a Democratic policy and their dissent only represents obstructing a Democratic policy...nothing more.
We are both, but the US government was the first and really only one that recognized that we as individuals are more than just a part of the whole... It took the British traditions in the areas of social contract theory and rights one step further. We are individuals with freedom and the right to run our lives are we see fit, responsible for the choices we make, and the only limits on that freedom is when that interferes with the rights of other individuals. It is totally and completely diametrically opposed to the social theories that claim we are only parts of some larger organism (i.e., communism and even fascism).
We live in a society, but we are individuals, not merely a piece/part of that society. :2 cents:
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