Black Christians fighting against moral & economic decline

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

This pastor is from my former home town!

http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/8/172005d.asp

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Democrats need to pay attention, because this is their ticket to winning back much of the "family values" vote.  Family values means a lot more than being against abortion.  It means supporting economic and social policy that helps families stay together and thrive.  The big-money-dominated GOP will never go there.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

I just discovered that this church is 4 blocks from where I used to live.  Far out.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/health/speech_sally.html

It is a speech from a doctor who used to work in the system you hold so dear.

...who is the president of a "free-market" think tank, with an ideological axe to grind, who misuses statistics and "sob story" anecdotes to promote her own agenda.  That agenda being the continued power to leverage the American system for overinflated compensation while millions of other Americans are driven into medical bankruptcy.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Try refuting her findings instead of posting a deeply flawed analysis of her motives.

^^^^

I don't have time to research the findings of a right-wing think tank.  Why should I take anything they say at face value?  Would you take the following at face value, or be compelled to refute these findings:

http://www.healthcoalition.ca/relman.html

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

I don't have time to research the findings of a right-wing think tank.  [/i]

This argument, of course, implicitly constitutes an argumentum ad hominem. You categorically asserted that the findings were incorrect, simply on the grounds that they were found by a right-wing group.

I'm not saying they are incorrect.  I just don't have time to research the veracity of their claims.  And yes, you should consider the source of any claim.  If a speech claimed the wonderful health benefits of eating 15 strips of bacon a day, it would make a huge difference to me whether the speaker was from the American Heart Association or from the National Pork Board.  The former stands nothing to gain or lose from his claims.  The latter is directly self-serving.

This doctor's claims are self-serving.  It doesn't make them incorrect, but it sheds doubt on their veracity.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Here's a more up to date source on the number of MRIs Canada has, and you can't discount it based on bias this time: http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_13jan2005_e

While improvements have been made, they still lag behind.

There is no demostration as to how this is a result of Canada having a single-payer health system.  Only theory.  How do you know there wouldn't be an even greater shortage of MRIs if Canada had a privately-run managed care system like they do in the USA?

Private managed care in the US has produced a system in which insurers, clinics, and equipment manufacturers can dictate prices, and dictate consumption of their product.  Equipment manufacturers find themselves in a position in which they can sell many more MRIs than the market normally would create a demand for.  Why shouldn't they, when the insurers can simply pass on the cost in the form of higher premiums on us? 

Premiums and deductibles go up and up and up, amount of coverage goes down.  Employers are powerless to stop it, because all of the HMOs are price-gouging at every corner.  And more and more insured employees are finding themselves bankrupted because they don't have adequate insurance to cover catastrophic illness.  The free-market system has failed to keep any semblence of control on costs.

So forgive me if I'm not moved by a few cry-baby doctors who can't make $200,000/year when millions of Americans are being financially ruined.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

There are many people around making a lot more than what you think is an outrageous doctor's income, myself included, who didn't make the sacrifices that a person has to make to be a doctor.

You are correct.  Doctors aren't really the problem.  The for-profit insurance system is.  The medical schools also keep an artificially short supply of doctors by making med school unreasonably difficult.  Combine that with the insurance companies making doctors' lives a living hell, and I don't really blame the doctors.  And really, you have the right to make as much money as the market wants to pay you.  I have no qualms about that.

I do, however think that the speaker from Pacific Research is incredibly short-sighted and self-serving.  Canadians are in general happy with Medicare, and I put a lot more stock into the happiness of the people than the discontent of some professionals.

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Canadians don't feel their system is perfect, but less than one in ten Canadians would rather have the American system.  What does that tell you? 

Yeah, I know, that Canadians are a buncha Commies...

Anyone can attack the system of another country by picking out every little shortcoming and making a laundry list.  But it is not logical to conclude that that system is a bad idea when practiced here, just because the system in another country isn't perfect.