2012 US Presidential Election

[Alaris]

I choose OWS.

[Kael Valeran]

Ok, this is something I can agree on.

The stance against public healthcare is valid when it comes to not wanting to support the poor. Some people are more "survival of the fittest" than others. I oppose it personally, and I consider it very anti-christian, but ...

Not enough doctors to treat the patients? Good point.

However, if less money is spent on medication (because they're vastly over-paying those atm) and scam insurance (who can then choose not to pay for healthcare), perhaps that money can be sent to helping doctors be more efficient, or for educating more of them, or something.

Even adding more nurses into the system would do a lot of good as far as the poor are concerned.

Your analysis is accurate here. Potatoes are doctors, and there is a lack of doctors. To pass medical school, one requires an IQ of about 116 minimum. That is less than half the US population, the only reason why people grind so hard to become doctors is because the job is lucrative. The incentive exists only because of a dominant private healthcare sector. Less people will want to become doctors if the job is not as lucrative. I know of many friends who stayed in the UK after taking the USMLE paper even though they passed. They said that their score is 'not enough to guarantee them a lucrative job' and that going over with a low score would make them end up as a low-income doctor. Many of these people originated from other countries and there is no preferences from the UK, a good number of them come from all over the world including Canada(for some reason many Canadians come here).

Many of them have been to the US(that is what sparked them to want to go to the US) and commended the quality of US medical students. In other words, the quality of UK doctors isn't as good as that of US. You don't have to look far to see what public healthcare is like. Look at UK for example, it cannot afford to hire its junior doctors, there are no parking lots for doctors, and in many hospitals, some doctors have to cover double jobs. There are no overnight rest facilities and if you google, there is a big case talking about an FY1 dying due to sleeping on the way back. I know there are at least 2 cases but only the first was publicly announced. I did not hear much on the second case. Also, the quality of healthcare is significantly reduced. Eating the hospital food would make you want to kill yourself. And, people do die while waiting... The wait is incredibly stupid. You also get a price tag put on your head, and there comes a point when it does not become cost-effective to treat you anymore, whether you are rich or poor.

You can always lower the quality of doctors and have more doctors, that is one solution, affecting quality of healthcare in general and more people die. The other solution is to offer a double-standard healthcare, but doing something so blatant will not get votes, so.... there is a fine balance here, but we need to know which direction to tip the balance. Once you lower the quality of doctors, you will also lose a lot of external funding, such as from medical tourism. People only want to tour the best and US is one of the best places to go to(because other countries lack what US already has to begin with). Be grateful, many countries want to emulate US.

@Kael Valeran

I fail to see what you're trying to compare here. The US (which is what I'm assuming you're comparing things to) has a for profit healthcare system that is overspending more then any other country in the world, that is not adequately covering or caring for it's populace and you're trying to compare it to a finite amount of potatoes and how they should be cooked? If you're short on doctors and nurses then you probably need to hire more. If it's a money problem either you need to look at what you're spending money on (drug costs are a huge one right now because of the Pharmaceutical industry holding patents so there's no cheap generics), find what wasteful practices or find better ways to deliver care like preventative care. I'm sure there's many other things that you can do as well. None of this has anything to do with a public or for profit health care system. They'd both have to deal with this. The difference is if you're working for a for profit system, then they're going to want to make money. That's a pretty bad conflict of interest going on there.

Remember, non-patent drugs can treat most diseases out there, the only difference is effectiveness and side effects. Currently, the system only allows pharmaceuticals to hold a patent for a fix number of years. That same law applies everywhere, UK and US, and will affect both private and healthcare systems. There are some new drugs that can treat exclusive diseases, I agree, but it is quite limited to the rich. However, whilst drug production is not limited, research is limited. Research requires funding, and the pharmaceuticals deserve the 20 year patent because they forked out the money for the research in the first place. Without that incentive, we will lose many drugs, even the 20year old non-patent drugs from the market. The poor are actually benefitting because the rich are willing to pay the pharmaceutical companies to do the research. The complains occur only because there is a double standard which is the original solution in the first place.

@Zalis: agreed, but I was referring to Santorum getting "free votes" in particular. I'm sure Clinton, Obama, et al also got their fair share of free votes. I heard though that a greater proportion of republican votes were regardless of candidate, whereas democrat votes tend to be less so. Honestly though, I am not sure how they'd go about measuring that.

I do want to see less partisanship and less media lying... perhaps when that happens the US can really turn around and start fixing itself.

People should actually protest against the media. Seems like the problem isn't bad enough to create incentives for people to do so. Pretty sure the elections in US are not rigged.

[Alaris]

The incentive exists only because of a dominant private healthcare sector.

(1) This is not necessarily true. The gov can set high-enough wages for given professions such as medical doctors.
(2) I didn't ask to socialize medicine anyway, I asked to socialize the insurance. Wages would still be a private affair, with rich people still being able to afford better care.

The other solution is to offer a double-standard healthcare, but doing something so blatant will not get votes

Actually, some people would be fine with this if done properly. There's a debate around this in Canada at the moment.

Remember, non-patent drugs can treat most diseases out there, the only difference is effectiveness and side effects.

Patent only affects supply side. There are countries that afaik ignore patents entirely, and hence have substitute drugs at lower cost that cure all the same things.

People should actually protest against the media.

If they did, where would you hear about it?

Do you really think Fox News covers protests against them? And on the rare occasions that they do (e.g. their ongoing fight with Daily Show), do you think they are fair and balanced about it?

As for elections being rigged, I think they're mostly not rigged (there have been incidents)... but media bias goes a long way towards messing up elections.

[RD]

For the record, part of OWS is against the media; the media largely ignored the protests for over a month and they've pretty much stopped reporting on them (even though they are still going on), so Alaris is spot-on.

[Alaris]

I was going to mention OWS as an example ;)

Also, Fox News likes to belittle both the Daily Show and OWS. It's quite common for Fox News to refer to OWS protesters as "unwashed college dropouts ..." for example.

[Ringsgold]

Carlin says dirty words

Isn't there an option to vote none of the above in the US?

[Art]

Yeah, but President Brewster changed all that.

-Art

[RD]

In other news, the girl who sits behind me was looking at the Obama 2012 site, saw the header at the top that said "OBAMA (LOGO) BIDEN," called me over, and said "What does this mean? 'Biddin'?" and pointed at Biden's name.

This is why my country has been allowed to reach the state it currently is.

[Alaris]

In other news, Obama is still black. Probably Nigerian or something.

[Giggles]

some naughty words