Why we need NATIONALIZED healthcare.

Dom, I think you got it.


Seat belt laws good, nationalized health care good.

No, seat belt laws=nannying people

Mass education about the importance of seatbelts=educating people

Nationalized healthcare=taking care of people

I completely agree with Doc, nationalised health care is an important part of a nations health. We pay texes for police/fire/ambulance rescue to protect us, for army/navy/air force to protect us, we pay taxes for nice roads that are safe to drive on and for the cleaning of streets and taking away our rubbish, we pay taxes for buying things and we pay taxes even when we inherit the riches. Why not pay taxes for a health care system that helps look after us/protect us/keep us in a clean state of health and so we can survive longer for our children to inherit our riches (financial or otherwise lol).

I'm glad I live in a country with "free" national health care, I feel very privilaged.

If people want to pay for special private care thats fine, I still feel I get value for money from my tax

Yup, and I'm still waiting for Stone to explain how this compromises individual liberty in any way.

Firefighters...

They don't drive up to your door in a fire engine, see your house is on fire and then decide not to put the blaze out... Although they used to... In days gone by if you hadn't paid for fire brigade insurance the fire engine would turn up at your house, see that you didn't have the badge which denoted that you were a member and then drive off leaving your house to burn down.

A while back (in the UK at any rate) people decided that it was more important to stop people's houses burning down then to maximize the amount fire fighters could charge. So the fire service became a socialized service which would help everyone when their house was burning down.

...and I'm pretty sure I pointed out how nationalised heath care infringes on doctors civil liberties in my last post. The thing is it's a toss up between the 'rights' of a doctor to charge as much as he can in a free market (which will be a lot as people will pay whatever they can to ensure they are healthy if they are sick) and the rights of all citizens to receive health care.

Either way someone loses out... But in my eyes making doctors (who aren't badly paid people over here) treat poor people seems reasonable. Leaving poor people to suffer because they aren't rich doesn't seem so reasonable. When the NHS was founded in the UK the government was shocked at how many people needed glasses, dentures and other fairly straightforwards treatments for ailments they had often had for years but could not afford to have treated. Additionally within a few years of its launch contagious diseases were down about 80% in the UK as people actually went and got treated instead of passing the disease around to a bunch more people who also couldn't afford treatment. Trading the freedom of doctors not to treat poor people to sort these problems out seems like a fair trade to me - there are numerous situations where you have to weigh up this kind of situation where both decisions involve a certain loss of liberty, and in this one I think the freedom of doctors to choose rich patients is less important than the freedom of poor people to get treated.

The average GP in the UK earns over 100,000 pounds a year. That's not exactly bad money. If you don't think that's enough money to live a comfortable life with then you have issues... Besides which... If you want to be a doctor you ought to do it because you want to save lives and help people become/stay healthy, not because you want to make as much money as possible by only treating rich people.

I'm in Australia and I cannot believe that the most powerful country on earth and possibly the richest doesn't have nationalized health care. What's more, it's not even a very hot topic (from what I've seen from the coverage of the presidential candidacy). In Australia, if your income is under a certain amount (basically, if you don't earn a small fortune), all of your hospital needs are covered, most of your general practioners, and many essential medicines are covered by a pharmaceutical benefits scheme. Whenever I hear people complaining about the long wait for in the E.R, I think of the US and feel greatful.

The problem with the user pays system of the US, where you pay for everything, is that it assumes that everyone has the same ability to look after themselves. The minimum wage earners (and let me tell you, US minimum wage is just laughable, its SO bad) of the world are just as important as everyone else and without them, no economy could function. They work just as hard as everyone else so why shouldn't they have access to essential medical care? The idea that if you can't look after yourself, you go without is ridiculous in my opinion - if that were the philosophy to adopt, we'd be leaving the elderly, disabled and even children on the street to fend for themselves! Doesn't make much sense, does it?