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Dis
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Las Vegas, Nevada
Feb 2000
time: 21:36
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Yes it has come to American shores. Specifically New Jersey.
The governor wants to increase taxes on those who make over $500,000 a year and send this money for property tax breaks for the rest of the population.
http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,954436,00.html
Essentually this is income redistribution from the rich to the poor. Socialism in my book.
It's hard to believe, but America is turning into a socialist nation.
Although I'm an economic conservative, I admit I like being in a low tax bracket while the rich fat cats pay 35% federal income tax. Although the federal tax is less blatant than what this New Jersey proposal is. As federal tax isn't distributing money directly to other tax payers.
And don't get me started on Robin Hood. The schools always teach the story on Robin Hood. I wonder why. 
I'm not sure how this works, but it looks like it gives property tax breaks to lower income families. But unless I'm wrong, this plan has one glaring hole. What about poor people who rent, and do not pay property tax? This plan looks like it leaves them out.
Either way, I'm against it.
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Albert Speer
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Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:36
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well, this would have the dilemna of poor people renting from wealthy landlords who, to compensate for higher taxes, have to increase rent... that would actually be very much harmful for poorer people who aren't homeowners.
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:36
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 Americans crack me up.
You have absolutely no idea of how the world works. Instead you sit in your trailers, gorging on lard and watching the diseased, infantilist rubbish your networks spew, congratulating yourself on how no one else is really free as you crack open a bottle of meths while your politicians and big business get together to think up new ways of ripping you off.
With socialized medicine. You get sick, you go to the doctor. End of story. Repeat for everyone.
In the US. You get sick. A number of things could happen:
(a) The doctors spend so much time trying to find out whether you are insured that you just die.
(b) You are one of the 40% either uninsured or with **** insurance. You die.
(c) You contribute to the twice as much as a percentage of GDP that US citizens spend on health care compared to their Canadian neighbours because your society is too stupid to organize health care properly.
(d) Your doctor has been bribed by a drug company to overprescibe a certain drug. You have a fit, turn green, and die.
(e) The emergency ward is overrun with gunshot victims because your society thinks it is a good idea that psychopaths have the right to walk the street armed with miniature cannons. You have to wait. Your cut finger turns gangrenous, you die.
(f) The company that runs the hospital is cutting costs. They cut corners. So did the guy pushing your wheelchair, which broke, throwing you off and killing you.
(g) You are a war veteran. **** off, what makes you think you're owed anything?
Aint America great.
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Jaguar
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Montgomery County, MD
Apr 2000
time: 00:36
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Aggi: The only industrialized country with completely socialized healthcare is Canada. Let's look at some articles about speedy healthcare there.
quote:
Diagnostic imaging across Canada: The emperors still have no clothes
By Andy Shaw
In 1999 Canadian Healthcare Technology reported in these pages that Canada had fallen to near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries in its use of high-tech medical equipment such as MRI, CT, and PET scanners. Now, more than two years and $1 billion of federal government fix-up spending later, our situation is little improved, say prominent radiologists. Indeed, such is the continuing vacuum of modern imaging gear in Canada that, despite being potentially illegal, private diagnostic clinics are rushing in to fill the void right across the country.
In Ontario, where a private Toronto clinic will soon offer $2,500 a session PET scans, the head of the provincial radiologists association, Dr. Giuseppe Tarulli, says the provincial government invited such willy-nilly privatization of healthcare by playing sleight-of-hand.
“In September, the Ontario Health Minister announced $50 million in one-time federal funding for new radiology equipment. But then in effect he clawed it back by reducing the funds available to run the equipment,” says Dr. Tarulli.
What’s worse, adds Dr. Tarulli, the $50 million buys only about 300 pieces of radiology equipment in a province limping along with 2,400 outdated imaging machines.
Ontario is not the lone culprit.
In British Columbia, the provincial government was even more blatant in its misuse of federal dollars, according to Dr. John Mathieson, chief of radiology for the Capital Health Region in Victoria.
“The federal government transferred $280 million for high tech equipment to B.C., but the problem was, it didn’t get a written agreement on what the money was to be spent on,” says Dr. Mathieson. “Right away $190 million of that money was siphoned off to cover health budget overruns. Another $40 million of that high-tech money was put aside to settle a doctors’ wage dispute in Prince George. So only about $70 million out of the $280 million was available for new equipment.”
But this purposeful misspending did not end at the provincial level, adds Dr. Mathieson. “Of the remainder, Victoria got $6 million but $4 million of that got spent on buying new beds. Hardly what I’d call high tech.”
Similar tales of being short-changed are being told by other radiologists in other provinces including Nova Scotia and Quebec. Dr. Paul LeBrun, chief radiologist at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax says some of his colleagues are working with 34-year-old X-ray machines and estimates that 45 percent of the province’s imaging equipment needs to be replaced.
That would cost $45 million dollars, estimates the provincial health department, which will receive only about $30 million of federal replacement funds. In Quebec, where about $120 million ticketed for medical equipment renewal has also vanished, Dr. Gaétan Barrette estimates that over one-third of the imaging equipment there remains very outdated. As a result, Quebec radiologists voted to charge $4 extra for each X-ray as an equipment improvement fee – despite being faced by a $2,000 fine for contravening the Canada Health Act by doing so. That got the Quebec government’s attention.
Country-wide, Normand Laberge, CEO of the Canadian Association of Radiologists (CAR), estimates that less than a third of the $1 billion dollars allotted has gone to buying and installing new diagnostic imaging tools.
“There is no doubt that some provinces have been playing games with the money and diverting it to other purposes,” says Laberge. “So we were encouraged when we heard (Health Minister) Allan Rock at the Canadian Medical Association annual meeting point the finger at Ontario and chastise it for paying old invoices with the new money. He has asked for detailed reports from provinces on how the money has been spent as a result.”
Laberge says, however, that such reports have been slow to trickle in and are not the solution to the problem at any rate. “In Ontario, for example, where half the radiology work in Canada is done, when you net out what it’s doing, the province is simply not adding new imaging equipment. So there’s no overall improvement. That’s what’s encouraging the private sector to come in.”
Such an invasion of the country’s socialized medicine would be preferable to the alternative of ever worsening degradation, says Dr. Mathieson. He reads from a recent letter of complaint from one of B.C.’s most experienced cardiologists, a specialist who attempted to insert a pacemaker in a patient using an ancient, fluoroscopic imaging machine to spot the pacemaker’s metal end.
“It was next to impossible to see anything...I have never worked with a worse piece of equipment in my career, including cases I have done in small towns in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. It is unsafe.”
Dr. Mathieson adds that there are some modern imaging procedures commonplace around the world that either can’t or are rarely being done in Victoria because of dilapidated scanners or new equipment scarcity .
“When I was in my student days in San Diego in the early 1980s, we were routinely doing PET scans for pelvic cancer in women,” he says. “They’ve become the standard in most other places, but we still can’t do them here.”
Dr. Mathieson says he as stopped reviewing professional radiology journals because so much of what is reported by them deals with procedures done on imaging equipment unavailable to him.
While some new imaging technology is now operating in Victoria, its shortage creates a dangerous backlog that is all too common across the country.
“I had a young athlete here with an injured knee who badly needed an MRI,” relates Dr. Mathieson. “But he had to wait four months for the MRI,and by then the knee was inoperable. So he lost his full athletic scholarship.”
In a damning story carried by the Knight Ridder news service in 2000, James Frogue, a healthcare policy analyst for the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, wrote: “Waiting lists for emergency surgeries in Canada are sometimes so long that procedures never take place....The reason: (patients) had waited so long they were deemed medically unfit to undergo surgery without an unacceptable risk of dying. Similar examples, equally shocking, abound.”
Good that our shocking state was noted by a policy analyst. It is, after all, government healthcare policy that creates both the problem and at least hope for a solution.
“For five years, the NDP government here in B.C. stopped all funds earmarked to replace broken medical equipment and shifted them all into wages. So equipment that was already ready for replacement went at least another five years. In effect, government policy was based on the assumption that medical equipment would last forever,” says Dr. Mathieson. “And even now the provincial budget still looks dismal for the next two or three years. So the emperor still has no clothes.”
B.C. health policy makers remain vainly unseeing, says Dr. Mathieson, of a naked truth about healthcare technology: “The crux of the problem is that in the medicare model we have in Canada, there is no connection between supply and demand .”
On the supply side, explains Mathieson, there may be rapid and frequent advances in technology as there have been over the past 20 years in medical technology, but getting the government demand side to respond is a cumbersome and lengthy process. He cites the examples of old imaging procedures eligible for funding in B.C. that are so outdated he has never seen them used. At the same time, payments for CT scans are so out of whack with reality, it actually costs a hospital money to do them. So there’s no financial incentive to use better diagnostics.
Back east, there’s also growing recognition that imaging’s problems within publicly funded healthcare are similarly structural.
“ We haven’t managed diagnostic imaging as a whole sector,” says Dr. Henry Phillips, a former clinician and now medical consultant to the Provider Services Branch at the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care. “Traditionally, hospitals here get funding for radiology as part of their block operational grants to run the hospitals. Then there’s separate money for radiology in community clinics. So we end up with friction between them and competition for available funds. We need to fund all of radiology from a single envelope. That way we can also get into province-wide life cycle management of equipment.”
Without such centralized control, an estimated 16 million examinations done annually in the province cost taxpayers about a half a billion dollars a year . And that sum has been increasing at about 5 per cent a year – a growth rate, says Dr. Phillips, that all parties recognize as unacceptable.
“So after a single funding envelope, our next recommendation is that we need a co-governance structure, possibly a separate organization, to effectively manage this pool of funds. That would involve representation from the Ministry of Health, the Ontario Hospital Association, and the Ontario Medical Association,” says Dr. Phillips, who has filed a report to that effect with the Ministry.
“We’ve also recommended that we use cost-based accounting, so that we pay fees that cover the costs, that we place heavy emphasis on quality and standards, and that we institute evidence-based decision making to see if new technologies such as PET scanning should be introduced into clinical care in the province,” says Dr. Phillips.
He points with pride to a recent pilot project that assessed the readiness of PET scanning for insuring in Ontario. The report reportedly said, not yet.
Not the kind of approach to imaging’s calamitous state that Dr. Mathieson would applaud, however.
“If you wait for outcome or impact studies to really prove the benefit of a new technology, you’ll wait years for anything to get introduced,” says Dr. Mathieson, “And besides, you can go to the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) in Chicago every year and find out what 60,000 radiology users and researchers have found out about what works and what doesn’t. Some things just obviously work and you don’t need a study to prove it. From the time the X-ray machine, for example, was first introduced at a medical conference, it took only about three months before it spread around the world and everybody was using it.”
Nonetheless, Laberge of CAR believes the more systematic albeit plodding, co-operative approach favoured by governments will win the day and eventually breathe life into our moribund imaging technology. |
Oh, wait, my mistake! That's about how slow their healthcare system is, not how fast. I apologize for the mistake. 
My sister was born with an occipital encephalocele and several other birth defects, so she has had neurosurgery eleven times now. If she has a headache for more than a few days, it is a sign of a possible shunt failure, and she needs an MRI scan immediately. The last time it happened, we were able to get an MRI scan the next day. My sister would have died several times over by now if she lived in Canada or France. I'll keep my privatized healthcare, thank you.
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20-05-2004 12:24
And we wait only a week at most.
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