I can tell you have not even read or researched this issue.

Here coyote ...read this..
http://arguewitheveryone.com/showthr...illion+dollars

Like I said, if the Government could find a way of producing said insurance without actually administering such as anything with the exception of bean counting it could work......as we pay more than enough already to have every man women and child insured.

But I have experienced Government controlled and administered socialized medicine through the VA system and I know first hand that everything the government runs directly will be tired up in red tape with no oversight of responsibility....as everyone simply passes the buck to an underling and awaits their "retirement" and will not make any "real" decisions in fear of losing their cushy civil servant jobs....with not oversight. In other words if one of them fell from a second story window it would take them two weeks to hit the ground. BD

Cheese Headcases
Wisconsin reveals the cost of "universal" health care.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Wall Street Journal

When Louis Brandeis praised the 50 states as "laboratories of democracy," he didn't claim that every policy experiment would work. So we hope the eyes of America will turn to Wisconsin, and the effort by Madison Democrats to make that "progressive" state a Petri dish for government-run health care.

This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the "single-payer," universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is "free" health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden. "At least federal taxes pay for an Army and Navy," quips R.J. Pirlot of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business lobby.

As if that's not enough, the health plan includes a tax escalator clause allowing an additional 1.5 percentage point payroll tax to finance higher outlays in the future. This could bring the payroll tax to 16%. One reason to expect costs to soar is that the state may become a mecca for the unemployed, uninsured and sick from all over North America. The legislation doesn't require that you have a job in Wisconsin to qualify, merely that you live in the state for at least 12 months. Cheesehead nation could expect to attract health-care free-riders while losing productive workers who leave for less-taxing climes.





Proponents use the familiar argument for national health care that this will save money (about $1.8 billion a year) through efficiency gains by eliminating the administrative costs of private insurance. And unions and some big businesses with rich union health plans are only too happy to dump these liabilities onto the government.
But those costs won't vanish; they'll merely shift to all taxpayers and businesses. Small employers that can't afford to provide insurance would see their employment costs rise by thousands of dollars per worker, while those that now provide a basic health insurance plan would have to pay $400 to $500 a year more per employee.

The plan is also openly hostile to market incentives that contain costs. Private companies are making modest progress in sweating out health-care inflation by making patients more cost-conscious through increased copayments, health savings accounts, and incentives for wellness. The Wisconsin program moves in the opposite direction: It reduces out-of-pocket copayments, bars money-saving HSA plans, and increases the number of mandated medical services covered under the plan.

So where will savings come from? Where they always do in any government plan: Rationing via price controls and, as costs rise, waiting periods and coverage restrictions. This is Michael Moore's medical dream state.

The last line of defense against this plan are the Republicans who run the Wisconsin House. So far they've been unified and they recently voted the Senate plan down. Democrats are now planning to take their ideas to the voters in legislative races next year, and that's a debate Wisconsinites should look forward to. At least Wisconsin Democrats are admitting how much it will cost Americans to pay for government-run health care. Would that Washington Democrats were as forthright.

Sign me up to see Sicko....Michael Moore is doing my laundry at my house!

http://www.examiner.com/blogs/Yeas_a...h-Your-Laundry

I filled out the entry form!
http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/sickocontestform.pdf

__________________
Cotton in full glory: http://www.arguewitheveryone.com/lob...would-win.html

My fans;
http://www.arguewitheveryone.com/lob...amesake-4.html

And you completely ignored my question, of the $7.6 Billion and $4.7 billion Pfizer and Merck respectively spent on R&D last year how much was to develop new drugs vs. “me too” drugs? Considering how much of an expert in pharmaceutical manufacturing, you claim to be, you shouldn’t have any trouble answering this question.

I’m starting to doubt that you know anything about industry. Are you aware that all industries spend more on marketing then on R&D? Compared to almost every other industry the pharmaceutical companies spend far more on R&D.

There are about 300 million Americans and last year 600,000 filed for bankruptcy, that’s less than 1%. I don’t see how anyone could consider that to be a “crisis.” http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/18/pf/b...n=money_latest

One might ask why they have to share the burden in the first place? If this is a crisis we have a bigger crisis: the top 5 percent of income earners pay 50 percent of federal income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent pay just 3.3 percent. In a democracy, those who provide little of the government’s income have more of a say-in the form of combined votes-over how to spend government funds than those who provide most of the money.

Of course this is not to suggest that the votes of the big taxpayers should be weighted more than those of smaller ones. It’s just to point out that government spending is inherently inefficient because those who actually pay for most government services are not the ones who determine how the money is spent.

They kept the there over the weekend and didn’t even perform any tests. They just woke me up at 5am sharp to take my blood. It’s hard enough to get to sleep in hospital beds in the first place.

No tax payers shouldn’t have to pay for it at all. It should be up to the drug consumer to decide how much he or she wants to pay.

Michael Moore's cure is worse than what ails American health care
By Liz Mair
August 5, 2007

On June 22, Michael Moore's new film, “Sicko,” debuted, and in the weeks since, buzz about the film has not died down.

Millions have seen the movie, renewed calls for socialized medicine in the United States have been made, and attention has been focused on the not-insubstantial failings of the American health care system, which are depicted grimly in Moore's documentary. But while the film's prompting of a debate over health care policy and its highlighting of the major failures of our own system are worthwhile, its depiction of systems of socialized medicine is far off-base. And I say that as someone who for 10 years was a patient of one of the systems given the most attention (and praise) in the film: Britain's National Health Service, or NHS.

“Sicko” depicts a perfect NHS, the answer to all of our prayers, equipped with pristine and beautiful hospitals, friendly doctors, helpful pharmacists and happy patients, all getting the care they need in a timely manner – and all for free. But the image is inaccurate and Americans should be careful not to fall for it when determining our own priorities when it comes to fixing health care in this country.

In creating “Sicko,” Moore must have overlooked some of the major news stories about the NHS from recent years. Stories such as one from the BBC stating that in September 2006 more than 6,000 patients in eastern England had to wait more than 20 weeks to begin treatment already prescribed by their doctors. Or a BBC story, also from 2006, noting that over 40,000 patients in Wales had to wait more than six months between being referred for, and actually having, an outpatient appointment. Or the recent London Times story regarding an admission, by Britain's Department of Health, that some patients will have to wait more than a year for treatment, and that 52 percent of hospital inpatients are currently waiting more than 18 weeks to receive treatment.

Or stories such as those widely publicized in 2006 and 2007 about cancer patients who were denied access to life-saving cancer drugs by the NHS, which had refused to make them available because they were not “cost-effective” (i.e., cheap).

Or they might even have included the spate of stories in 2005 about the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant MRSA infections being spread throughout the National Health Service due to poor hygiene in NHS hospitals, and which in 2005 were blamed for 20 percent of the 5,000 deaths occurring each year in British hospitals. Or maybe even one 2006 story from a Glasgow newspaper that indicated that despite the supposed wonders of the NHS, average life expectancy in one part of the city was just 53 years.

These are all stories readily found through a quick Google search, and yet utterly ignored in Moore's “assessment” of the relative quality of health care in the UK. They were disregarded, just like the stories of countless patients who have experienced some of the worst care in the world, courtesy of the NHS – like the 23-year-old with mild endometriosis who was told to have a full hysterectomy, because treating her illness with birth control pills or minor operations was “too expensive”; or the woman who was suicidal but was told it would take six months to get her to see a psychiatrist, despite the urgency of her condition.

Those are both stories from within my immediate circle of friends, and together with the stories publicly reported they indicate that no matter how great socialized medicine may sound, the best that it achieves is dishing up very poor care for all, as opposed to good care for all, or even most. And that, largely, is the result of bureaucrats working to cut costs, which has the same basic effect, only a more widespread one, of insurance companies looking to maximize profit (the major problem Moore identifies in our system).

Ultimately, we can have the debate about whether it is better to have a health system that prioritizes something basic, and quite poor, for everyone, or something good for the vast majority. But Moore is wrong to pretend that socialized medicine delivers real quality of care over and above what we see in America today. And he is wrong to portray Britain's National Health Service as an entity where quality of care, as opposed to budgets, always comes first.



Mair is a political columnist, commentator and consultant operating out of Arlington, VA, and previously out of London. She writes daily at www.lizmair.com and regularly with The New York Sun.