>The fact is that the poor in America get better treatment than
>any of the middle class in the nations with socialized medicine.
Being in the coveted position of having been poor both in the States and in Finland, among others, I can assure you that poor people get far better treatment where there is universal health care. And I am not alone in my opinions:
"Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world's median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us?
Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries.
American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations...
Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year-or close to four hundred billion dollars-on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita."
Dept. of Public Policy: The Moral-Hazard Myth: The New Yorker
- cruiz-euro