Well Sponge, I guess the only appropriate response to "Iraq has free health care and I pay for it" is:
Please, please move to Iraq. You are getting ripped off - you are paying for something you can't even use (according to your argument). You better get over their fast, so you can get "your fair share".
Tip - take an air conditioner - I heard it's kinda hot over there this time of year...
Its simply human compassion that happens in every western industrialize nation but ours because we have naive people who get conned easily by the pharmaceuticals and the insurance companies because they are greedy pricks. Just wondering did some of you just become so self centered because of your mom and dads up bringing or is it just because you are staunch supporters of Fox News? Now Saint here is another thing i will beat down of yours that is absolutely not true. You say everyone waits. Well first off they don't have 47 million people left out of the line. If they did there wouldn't be a wait. Secondly read this about the wait.
This isn't the whole truth. CNN pulled out a statistic about elective procedures. Of the six countries surveyed in that study (United States, Canada, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Australia) only Canada had longer waiting times than America for sick adults waiting to schedule a doctor's appointment for a medical problem. 81% of patients in New Zealand got a same or next-day appointment for a non-routine visit, 71% in Britain, 69% in Germany, 66% in Australia, 47% in the U.S., and 36% in Canada. (The Doc's in, but It'll be AWhile. Catherine Arnst, Business Week. June 22, 2007
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2007/
tc20070621_716260_page_2.htm)
"
Gerard Anderson, a Johns Hopkins health policy professor who has spent his career examining the world's healthcare, said there are delays, but not as many as conservatives state. In Canada, the United Kingdom and France, 'three percent of hospital discharges had delays in treatment,' Anderson told The Miami Herald.
'That's a relatively small number, and they're all elective surgeries, such as hip and knee replacement.' One way America is able to achieve decent waiting times is that it leaves
47 million people out of the health care system entirely, unlike any other Western country. When you remove 47 million people from the line, your wait should be shorter. So why is the U.S. second to last in wait times? And there are even more Americans who keep themselves out of the system
because of cost -
in the United States, 24 percent of the population did not get medical care due to cost. That number is 5 percent in Canada, and 3 percent in the UK. (Inequities in Health Care: A Five-Country Survey. Robert Blendon et al, Health Affairs. Exhibit 5. http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/21/3/182)