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OT: American Politics

hockeylover said:
I don't really think ours goes far enough even re: dental/prescriptions but that's an argument for another day I guess.
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100%

Dental, vision, and prescription needs to be rolled into the system asap.

With the number of small/start ups booming, I expect this to become a louder and louder political issue between now and the next election.
 
zeke said:
dental costs are craycray.

imagine that was all healthcare. yikes.
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Yeah, there's probably a good in-between answer here but I'd probably guess that some people going without any dental attention at all for a long time results in some pretty bad medical situations that have to be covered by OHIP eventually anyway.
 
hockeylover said:
Yeah, there's probably a good in-between answer here but I'd probably guess that some people going without any dental attention at all for a long time results in some pretty bad medical situations that have to be covered by OHIP eventually anyway.
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yeah im about to fork over thousands of dollars for a dental fix and even that is going to be an incomplete one and leave me with potential worse situation down the road. its a motherfuck.

can't imagine what it would be like to have to make these kinds of choices every time I got hurt or sick.
 
hockeylover said:
Sometimes I think they're asking in good faith and sometimes I get the sense they just want me to say it's terrible and I hate being a socialist.
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I generally find that if an American has left the borders of the greatest country in the universe it is more the former than the latter. Most of the crazies don't even have passports
 
Wayward DP said:
yeah the irony is our healthcare system has LOTS wrong with it. still leaps and bounds better than the clusterfuck down there.
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Yep. It really shows how much better the design of the system is (single payer) that it can produce better outcomes with half the money per capita put into it, while having as many obvious flaws as it has.
 
MindzEye said:
Yep. It really shows how much better the design of the system is (single payer) that it can produce better outcomes with half the money per capita put into it, while having as many obvious flaws as it has.
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i thought somebody was posting info a while back that showed that canadians pay 30 percent less for healthcare than americans
we pay taxes they pay insurance companies
 
worm said:
i thought somebody was posting info a while back that showed that canadians pay 30 percent less for healthcare than americans
we pay taxes they pay insurance companies
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But the Americans also have a single payer system grafted on to their private insurance system (medicare/medicaid) when you look at total health care spending:

USD per capita:

US - 10,948
Canada - 5,370

Health spending

Health spending measures the final consumption of health care goods and services (i.
data.oecd.org data.oecd.org

half the money for better health care outcomes. It really shows the power in true single payer systems, preventative health care and human behaviour. For purely emergency interventions, the US wipes the floor with us on outcomes. If you have a heart attack, stroke, etc in the US you have better chances of survival, shorter recoveries, etc. But because there is up front cost to access health care (co pays, etc) the US struggles like hell on any chronic condition that prevention or early diagnosis shortens treatment times significantly on (cancer, diabetes, etc)
 
MindzEye said:
100%

Dental, vision, and prescription needs to be rolled into the system asap.

With the number of small/start ups booming, I expect this to become a louder and louder political issue between now and the next election.
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Yeah my contact lenses cost me $1800 and glasses aren't an option. There is no low cost option for me because of the condition my eyesight is in. And while my wife's plan and my work plan cover some of it, it's still a big out of pocket cost. I literally can't do anything (work, drive to work) without them. I'm legally blind without them. They aren't a luxury item. I need them to function. They should be covered by the government.
 
Wayward DP said:
I generally find that if an American has left the borders of the greatest country in the universe it is more the former than the latter. Most of the crazies don't even have passports
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Very few Americans I have met when traveling are what I would characterize as "good travelers". They tend to want America brought to them wherever they happen to travel (like Brits in the 19th century did in all the colonies. It's clearly a white/English privilege thing)

I saw American tourists in London, Paris, Munich and Venice try to buy stuff with US dollars as though they were in some third world country where the peasants wanted hard currency over their local worthless money. But France and Germany aren't Mexico or Thailand. They have their own currencies.

In French restaurants it is customary for them to put a basket of bread and a bottle of water on the table. I saw an American couple (from Tucson AZ which, according to them, was "just over the border from you Canadians") try to take the bread with them when they left the restaurant. They got into an argument with the waiter who was, in broken English because they never even attempted to speak any French, that it was there for you to eat while you were there but no doggie bags allowed.

And that's another thing that Americans do. They assume that everyone on Earth speaks English. They don't bother to learn even "please" or "thank you" in the language of whatever country they're in, probably because they don't say please or thank you in the States either. I can't count the number of times I was served in a restaurant in the US and the waitress would serve me my food, I'd say "Thank you" and her response, instead of "You're welcome" was just "Uh-huh".

There's a reason why Canadians will wear Canadian flag pins when traveling abroad. The pins don't convey the message that "I'm a Canadian" they convey the message that "I am not American. Please don't hate me." And some of the more savvy US travelers have picked up on this and are also investing in Canadian flag pins when they travel.
 
WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou said:
Yeah my contact lenses cost me $1800 and glasses aren't an option. There is no low cost option for me because of the condition my eyesight is in. And while my wife's plan and my work plan cover some of it, it's still a big out of pocket cost. I literally can't do anything (work, drive to work) without them. I'm legally blind without them. They aren't a luxury item. I need them to function. They should be covered by the government.
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holy smokes those are some serious contacts!

and I balked at paying like $500+ / year for toric lenses...
 
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