HG, could you possibly be saying something less relevant?  Old people don't have kids.  If someone on medicare is having children, someone needs to shoot them.  The risk of severe retardation at that age is obscene.

The relevancy is that not always is ones impact on society apparent during their lifetime, and In my hypothetical scenario the impact would have out weighed the cost. surely I figured you would have been able to gleen a bit of the meaning without having to pick it appart.

 Also your saying they spent over 1.2 million to beat it? on average the typical highschool graduate earns 1.2 mil over their life time.. so either many of your family never graduated atleast highschool muchless college, or the treatments were in excess of 1.2 mil on up depending on how many children he had.

over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million.

Persons with doctoral degrees earn an average of $3.4 million during their working life, while those with professional degrees do best at $4.4 million

Particularly pages 425-430.  Mandatory end of life canceling and limited care for older people is in the bill.  This is one way that socialized medicine in other countries cuts costs, because older people typically have higher health care costs.   

Control = reelection.  If lobbyists supply you the money you need to run expensive reelection campaigns and the voters depend on you for their retirement and health care, it makes it more likely that you can get reelected. 

We need health care reform.  They should start with the programs that they already control, Medicare, Medicaid and the VA health services.  We need tort reform.  About 25% of all testing is CYA by the doctor to limit lawsuits and medical malpractices insurance adds a lot to their overhead. 

The bottom line is that we can’t afford the plan before congress now.  And it isn’t a good plan for those that would be on it.  This is how you can tell-an amendment was introduced into a house committee that would have made it mandatory for all congressmen to be covered by this plan and it was voted down within an hour.  If the people creating the plan don’t want it for themselves or their families—then you don’t either

Meech Lake (Failed by some Alberta's natives & by Newfoundland (not yet tied with a silly Labrador ampersand) prime minister intervention & indirectly by the Night of the Long Knives backstabbing of other Provinces against Québec) or Charlottetown constitutional "agreements" about First-Nations rights & distinct society amendments (Which only New-Brunswick, Newfoundland, Ontario, PEI & NT (soon be split into TWO Nunavuts territories) voted for, btw)?

Or the Québec's sovereignty **Local** Referendum on 30/10/95? That resulted in a 50.6 to 49.4 democratically & extremely slim margin, IIRC... with a 96%+ participation ratio (some of which freshly received as Canadian and International immigrants into mostly Montréal urban area.) Need i remind you of the "Sponsorships Scandal" commission which proved that a result could be bought or influenced enough to tilt in favor of a country suddenly aware that unilateral secession was quite legal & probable?

None of which were about French/English "relations" but more about specific political controls over de-centralization of some economic sectors & focused development decisions that concern provincial populations at best.

PS; sorry for straying a bit off-topic but i HAD to ask which "Referendums" you meant, the_Monk.

Just a little acticle that was written in "LA RESSE" on August 19th 2009 in Québec.

In english Via bable fish translastions sinc ei am short on time. But I did a few translation corrections so it make sense and proper sense.

Basicaly the Canadian healtcare systemt hat teh oposition is bad mouthing to try and prevent this reform will find it's self improved by the U.S. reform. For the simple fact that the salaries of doctors in the U.S. (highest in the world by a  long shot) will go down some bit. So this should help stem the bleeding tide of the doctors we have going south.

I never stated obama care was affordable nor was I promoting it.. infact if you read all of my post, I believe if they get involved they will fubar it, Goverment has a way of messing things all up..

What I said tho is the people are getting tired of working their whole lives and not being able to afford health care, because of the rampant prices to be treated.. and if the Medical profession wont listen then the people will turn to the government to step in.. as is what is happening now.. The Top heavy Medical administration really need to decide if they must have 2 summer homes, a villa in Tuscany, a $80,000 a year membership to a country club.etc or which Roll's to buy for the Mrs...while the majority of the work force dies off before ever getting a chance to retire.

And I was Making the point to psychoak that having the scrooge like attitude that the poor should die off quicker to ease the burden on the wealthy, could have catastrophic ends. Not all great contributors to society came from wealth, so to lessen the value of their contributions to the world is absurd. As well as not all contributions to society can be measured by ones dollar worth.. Rousseau Died broke and alone, but his contributions to society and the awareness of our contract to each other is imeasureable..

Lets say the Water companies decide to act like the Healthcare profession and raise their prices 500% Why not ? they give life sustaining water to the masses. Without it people would die so why not milk them for all they can too? If they tried it there would be over night rioting, the Healthcare profession has done it slowly over years..but it is coming to a head.

As i said earlier If the Healthcare Corporation wont start trying to reform/regulate them selves, the people ( for the good or bad) will get the Gov involved.

Or perhaps they think that their training and abilities are more valuable than what public healthcare offers? I suppose it's unethical to ask for a raise when you need to finance the education of your children, right? Why do teachers' unions lobby for higher salaries? Shouldn't teachers accept their role and put "ethics" ahead of salary?

Money is not evil.

There is something else I read (but forgot about) and just heard again from an investigative reporter whose work I trust: Greg Palast.

Before the conservative right starts dissing anything he says on behalf of him being a partisan liberal (which he isn't), please read this first:

Greg Palast is against the health care reform if the drug company bargain deal cuts in.

What concerns him specifically are behind-closed-doors negotiations with drug companies. The article I read had something to do with drug companies suddenly supporting the health care reform efforts in exchange for some shady deal.

In essence Obama allegedly agreed to stop trying to legalize importing drugs from countries and the government will be barred from bargaining prices.

Link to the interview: http://www.gregpalast.com/Podcasting/09_08_20_palast.mp3

(The interview is rather long, but the relevant stuff is mentioned in the first five minutes.)

Quite disturbing and another motive to oppose the reform as long as that deal stands.

Was this topic highlighted prominently anywhere in the media?

Okay I didn't get to finsih that post since I had to go to class. But what it means for americains is simple. It means the wait times you see in Canada in the opposiion's scare tactics is simply just that scare tactics for the problem they are pointing is not a problem of the Canadian healthcare system but one cause by their neighboor.

Also you shoud point out how much more money your wasting on doctor salaries: http://www.worldsalaries.org/generalphysician.shtml Lower more reasonable salaries woudl have mean't cheaper healtcare and thus more people would have been able to get covered by the private insurance compagnies, MAYBE.

As for being unetical to ask for a raise, your only taking nto account a US system once more as in other contries that is also mostly free. I would also mention that even here in Canada should a Doctor want to pay a private school for children they can easyly. A boat is also a very commond thing. Basicly their isn't a Canadian doctor should envie to a US doctor in terms of qualaty of life except for the bigger pay check. US doctors become millionaires. Canada theya re the wealtiest people that recive a paycheck.

Well pharmaceudicals have always been over pricing their medication. The biggest fraud in the whole of the healtcare system in every contry is the Pharmacedical Compagnies. Now there is something that will requirer a world effort to look into, investigate and regulate the pricing. Also I would point out that the majoraty of medication pharmacedicals research and produce are medicationt hat will not cure you, but rather keep your healty as long as you keep taking the medication. Why because they can make more money on you if you need to take a pill for the rest of your life instead on takign 20 and being cured.

To find real cures that will truely cure you it's gorvenement funded labs that find and develop them. Even those those gouv labs are much fewer in number to private labs they find more REAL cures then private labs. Hell I wouldn't be surprised at all if we would one day discovered that a rpivite lab found a cure to a deasseas but instead created a treathment you need to take forever. I dunno but to me the more I look into how the healtcare works on a private for profit system the more I see that we are gettign ass fucked by it.

There are so many things wrong with this post I simply don't know where to begin.

In most of the world, drugs are artificially cheap. You simply are not paying the full cost of R&D, and are stiffing the US for it. You sure don't seem to mind benefitting from our research, but you don't pay for any of it. Drug companies do not make excessive profits considering the risks they take on in going about their business. I earlier mentioned that researching a new drug may cost half a billion dollars; that was in no way an exaggeration.

Not only that, for every drug that makes its way to market, there are dozens of other blind alleys the researchers explored. Those are slightly less expensive, but still tack on untold millions in R&D costs. Failures generally cost less becaause they can stop researching them if they find an obvious problem. They still aren't free.

I don't know about how the Canadian system of public research funding works (poorly, I assume) but in the US public grant funding is probably the most wasteful way of funding research known to man. I work at a university, and see the logistics behind grant funding first hand. You would not believe how much money gets spent on computers, office furniture, unnecessary equipment, etc simply because the money goes away if they don't spend it before an arbitrary deadline. I kid you not, I've seen a professor buy an iPod with federal grant money. It was billed as an "80gb mobile media presentation device". (In his defense, he *did* use it as a mobile hard drive to carry around powerpoint presentations and stuff.) One got so much money from No Child Left Behind (and other similar programs in earier administrations) that he handed out laptop bags, T shirts, coffee mugs, etc instead of buisiness cards at events. Ironically, looser controls on how money is spent from federal grants would result in more of the money getting spent on what it was intended for.

The only possible legitimate point you have is the possibility of suppressing cures in favor of treatments. Good luck proving something like that, though.

A couple points from the article I posted, which either no one read or no one felt worth commenting on:

For fun, let’s imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let’s add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn’t cover even five months of our health-care expenses.

That's from page three. This is from page 4:

Consider the oft-quoted “statistic” that emergency-room care is the most expensive form of treatment. Has anyone who believes this ever actually been to an emergency room? My sister is an emergency-medicine physician; unlike most other specialists, ER docs usually work on scheduled shifts and are paid fixed salaries that place them in the lower ranks of physician compensation. The doctors and other workers are hardly underemployed: typically, ERs are unbelievably crowded. They have access to the facilities and equipment of the entire hospital, but require very few dedicated resources of their own. They benefit from the group buying power of the entire institution. No expensive art decorates the walls, and the waiting rooms resemble train-station waiting areas. So what exactly makes an ER more expensive than other forms of treatment?

Perhaps it’s the accounting. Since charity care, which is often performed in the ER, is one justification for hospitals’ protected place in law and regulation, it’s in hospitals’ interest to shift costs from overhead and other parts of the hospital to the ER, so that the costs of charity care—the public service that hospitals are providing—will appear to be high. Hospitals certainly lose money on their ERs; after all, many of their customers pay nothing. But to argue that ERs are costly compared with other treatment options, hospitals need to claim expenses well beyond the marginal (or incremental) cost of serving ER patients.

In a recent IRS survey of almost 500 nonprofit hospitals, nearly 60 percent reported providing charity care equal to less than 5 percent of their total revenue, and about 20 percent reported providing less than 2 percent. Analyzing data from the American Hospital Directory, The Wall Street Journal found that the 50 largest nonprofit hospitals or hospital systems made a combined “net income” (that is, profit) of $4.27 billion in 2006, nearly eight times their profits five years earlier.

Just some food for thought.

The full article is here. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

Please note I don't support his conclusions at the end, but at least he has some idea of how we got here, and what the issues we need to address are.

Well, I'm glad that we reap the benefit of a Canadian taxpayer-funded education. Perhaps your system is flawed then, hm?