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1. 

   Atma said, 6 months ago

   I’m an American living in the Netherlands where yes taxes are high, but my health care insurance covers everything above a very modest co-pay, all for about $1200 a year. Thankfully I’ve never needed to use it but a friend did. He got care that was just as good (and fast) as in the USA and didn’t have to sell his house to pay for it. Dental costs here are roughly 40% of what they are in USA (that’s without insurance) and also top notch. So what’s all this nonsense about keeping the status quo? What good is “health care” if you can’t afford it?

   What everybody needs is a system that rewards people for staying healthy and doctors for helping their patients be more healthy, not for letting them get sick so they can be soaked financially. You want to change people’s attitudes about health, teach them from an early age and give deep discounts for maintaining and improving health! The cost of preventable sickness should be more fairly placed on those that won’t change.

2. 

   parkersinthehouse said, 6 months ago

   thank you atma and welcome.

   bravo!

   bravissimo!

   smartly argued.

3. 

   arinte said, 6 months ago

   yeah status quo would be to vote for the crappy bill Obama wants to ram up our arse.

4. 

   nomad2112 said, 6 months ago

   Atma - I’ve heard that the taxes there are 50%. Is that true? What percent of your population are actually gainfully employed? I’ve heard that a large portion of people don’t bother to work and stay on government aid all of their life.

5. 

   Jase99 said, 6 months ago

   What do you mean by “large portion?” You’re always going to see some bad eggs leaching off of the government dole, just as you’ll always see some corporations with their hand out begging for government money.

   The taxes may be much higher in Europe, but what does that buy them? How affordable is their health care? How is the education system? How prevalent and affordable is mass transit? How is their quality of life?

6. 

   RussellNash said, 6 months ago

   The federal taxes are higher here until you take into account that there is no state or local income tax. Then it’s not so bad. I’m top bracket and pay 41%. That includes Social Security and such.

   Arinte- Status Quo means the existing state of affairs. If Obama’s bill changes anything for better or worse, it is by definition not the Status Quo. Could your attempted bashing at least make some kind of sense. You are online when you look at this. Couldn’t you go over to Dictionary.com and look up the words you don’t know?

7. 

   Gary Kleppe said, 6 months ago

   As Joel from MST3K once said, “He’s insane. Not everything he says needs to make sense.”

8. 

   Atma said, 6 months ago

   Iif there is to be real health care reform, first reform how we think about health. The medical system prevalent in the west is not a “health care” system, it is a Disease Care system. It blithely lets you get seriously sick and then pokes and soaks you. It is WAAAY too reliant on hazardous drugs and treatments of dubious efficacy. Fact: the equivalent of about 2 jumbo jets of people DIE from the effects of allopathic drugs and treatments every 3 days in the USA (and thousands are injured). If that many died in actual plane crashes that often, there would be an immediate halt to flights and investigations galore, and things would change in a big hurry.

   Changing who pays for the same stuff isn’t going to really change much, the debate shouldn’t be about that; the real change should be in educating and training people young and old how to PROMOTE their own health so they are less likely to do stupid things out of ignorance that make them unhealthy throughout their lives.

   People need to also learn new knowledge about how to stay healthy (or actually the time-tested knowledge, not this ludicrous Diet Of The Month or Vitamin or Treatment du Jour that is later found to be actually useless–or worse).

   There is such incredibly useful and profound knowledge about health that is just recently coming to the west. I’ve learned to enhance my health through Maharishi Ayurveda. Haven’t been sick beyond a cold once in a few years time for over 20 years now. Of course, you have to apply the various aspects of knowledge to get the benefit, but it absolutely works. Allopathic medicine and western dietary knowledge can’t come close to competing, either in benefits or cost.

   I have a friend who got quite ill. The doctors told him his thyroid became dysfunctional. From my own accumulated knowledge of Maharishi Ayurveda I was able to understand from his symptoms what the basic imbalance was, and I’m sure an Ayurvedic health professional would have known how to rebalance it, and at a very reasonable cost. But my friend had gone to the hospital ($$$$). Treatment? Zap the thyroid–that’s right, KILL it–and take thyroid pills for the rest of his life. The drug companies–the most profitable legalized industry on the planet–have the doctors in their pockets. But everybody knows that…right?

   So changing the Status Quo should not amount to just fiddling with who pays or how much, it should in major part be a fundamental shift of focus to understanding what health really is and enhancing everybody’s health from all means that WORK. It means as a nation learning how to balance ourselves–and stay in balance–physiologically, psychologically, socially, and ecologically, so you can enjoy life and feel happiness within (because–surprise!–that’s where happiness comes from). That deep foundation of happiness felt by the mind is what literally–chemically–strengthens health. Health and happiness are two sides of the same coin.

   Unfortunately for the health of the nation, health / happiness doesn’t produce lots of coins for the drug and insurance companies, medical treatment companies, medical real estate investors, lobbyists, and lawyers whose livelihoods depend on people continuing to be unhealthy. If people don’t fundamentally change it, the system will just continue to promote chronic “dis-ease”.