was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor's Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking "wouldn't have a chance," because the National Health Service would consider his life "essentially worthless."

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor's Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain - or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland - which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn't a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

Let's talk about health care around the advanced world.

Every wealthy country other than the United States guarantees essential care to all its citizens. There are, however, wide variations in the specifics, with three main approaches taken.

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.

The second route to universal coverage leaves the actual delivery of health care in private hands, but the government pays most of the bills. That's how Canada and, in a more complex fashion, France do it. It's also a system familiar to most Americans, since even those of us not yet on Medicare have parents and relatives who are.

Again, you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program.

Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers can't discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies.

In this country, the Massachusetts health reform more or less follows the Swiss model; costs are running higher than expected, but the reform has greatly reduced the number of uninsured. And the most common form of health insurance in America, employment-based coverage, actually has some "Swiss" aspects: to avoid making benefits taxable, employers have to follow rules that effectively rule out discrimination based on medical history and subsidize care for lower-wage workers.

So where does Obamacare fit into all this? Basically, it's a plan to Swissify America, using regulation and subsidies to ensure universal coverage.

If we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn't have chosen this route. True "socialized medicine" would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That's why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.

But a Swiss-style system of universal coverage would be a vast improvement on what we have now. And we already know that such systems work.

So we can do this. At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies.

© 2009 The New York Times
Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/17-12

and what is your input , here???????


or are you nothing more than a copy cat???

We all have computers and can look up articles...

you add nothing!

Actually, I appreciate the article. I don't often have time to do massive searches and I've been busier than hell lately so when people post things right in front of my face, it's quite helpful. So, thank you

If you read the article it's probably a very good indication of their input. As Suzin said, I appreciate the article as well. I too don't always have the time to article how I feel so an article that can articulate it better than I ever could works for me.

I don't know if you have heard or not, but Canada's healthcare system is imploding.. So when someone references how great it is, they are being very misleading and or blatantly lying.

There are a couple of sides to that story, might want to get both.

Your verry welcome

100% of the 22,000 who died last year because of no healthcare insurance or being underinsured would be happy with the canadian system. I am sure anyone who lost their insurance due to loss of job would be all for the Canadian system.

Taking Us for a Ride on Health Care
by Jim Hightower

If you get a thrill from taking a white-knuckle ride on a loop-the-loop, you don't have to wait for the state fair — just hop onto the right-wing express, which is plunging into ludicrous levels of loopiness in an effort to kill Barack Obama's health care reform plan.

You'll shriek with astonishment as alarmist right-wing pundits and politicos hurtle you past reality, past credulity and past sanity. Their wildest twist, so far, is that the demonic Obama has included "death panels" at the core of his insidious rewrite of our health care system. Yes, they cry, buried down deep in the bill at page 425 is a bone-chilling provision to create federal review panels empowered to decide whether the old, sick and disabled are allowed to live.

Impossible, you scoff? Well, none other than Sarah Palin says it's so, and we know she doesn't make stuff up. Citing her own elderly parents and her baby with Down syndrome, the ex-veep contender recently wailed that they "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."

In case you didn't grasp the horror of these governmental grim reapers, Palin added this punctuation: "Such a system is downright evil."

Indeed, it is. Which is one reason that Obama and the Congress have not even contemplated such a provision, much less included it in the bill. Section 1233, which Palin claims is the one containing the evil, merely allows doctors to hold voluntary consultations with their patients on such matters as a living will and other advance instructions on the care the patients choose to receive as their inevitable time of death approaches.

The section provides Medicare funding if you would like to have your doctor to help you consider such questions as whether you want to be kept alive in a permanent vegetative state.

Either Palin and her crack team of speech writers never bothered to read Section 1233, or they deliberately perverted its meaning for political purposes.

It would be one thing if this were just another of her goofy flights of fantasy, but the lie about hooded bureaucrats of death whacking grandpa has also been gleefully perpetuated by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Sen. Chuck Grassley, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and a stampeding herd of anti-Obama other truth-stompers.

Rudy Giuliani even invented a new lie to keep the flim-flam going. Conceding that Section 1233 does not create death panels, he insisted that forced euthanasia was an inherent part of Obama's hellish plan. "It is natural," opined Guiliani last week, "that some people would believe, particularly since (the Democrats) have these provisions (in the bill) for end-of-life decision-making councils, that it is natural that people would suggest that one of the ways you would do that is to cut off care for the elderly."

Uh ... Rudy, there are no "end-of-life decision-making councils" anywhere in the legislation. And there's nothing natural about you asserting otherwise.

The loopiest part of the right wing's obsession with and distortion of Section 1233 is that the chief champion of putting it in the reform package was not Obama, nor even a Democrat. It was Johnny Isakson — a Republican, pro-life senator from Georgia. He has been advocating end-of-life planning for years.

"I believe it is every person's right and responsibility to make sure their loved ones are prepared to make decisions on their behalf by discussing and documenting their wishes," he said in 2005. That's what Section 1233 promotes. The claim by Palin, et al. that the section hides death panels within it is, as Isakson so succinctly puts it, "nuts."

Indeed, a similar provision for end-of-life discussions has already been included in Medicare law for some patients. Guess who added it? The 2003 Republican Congress, and the bill was signed by George W. So, in other words, Republicans were for Section 1233 before they were against it.

But such facts are inconvenient to those trying to kill heath care reform. When you get on board the right-wing loop-the-loop, reality is not permitted to interfere with a scary political ride.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/20-9

hardly. it shows the input of another. how about a statement of fact instead of just a rant. maybe an actual article from a real publication perhaps?

The fact is, you cannot compare the french or canadian system to ours in any form, good or bad. The demographics are far different (check out the differences in obesity in france and america). just so you don't have to look it up, france is under 10% and we are approaching a third of our population. canada is half ours and on par at teh worldwide average.

there is also the fact we are the #1 developing nation for medicines and technology. We have to upkeep this innovation. there is a cost for that.

Lifestyles are far different. That is the core of all healthcare. The increased healthcare costs that come with sedentary lifestyles will have far more an impact on costs than profit-seeking.


What works for one does not work for all. For every person you can find here or in France that love their system, I can find one that hates it. It's the nature that in the real world, not everyone can win all the time. Life is hard, pick up your skirt and just deal with it.


I have a question for you, madison:

you (well, the article) states that palin is full of crap in that there will be rationing. With the existence of scarcity, it must happen. If the number of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and other facilities does not change with the almost 1/6 of our population being added to the pool (and the market no longer being the decidor) then who is going to decide who gets care and who does not?

Free enterprise is the greatest system ever invented and government can’t even come close. What else but private industry could have split the atom, or gotten a man on the moon?

you are correct! Moon Landing would not have happened if it were for the following "Private companies":

North American Aviation; Saturn V’s second stage and command and service module

Grumman The lunar module
Rocketdyne Rocket engines for the Saturn V
IBM The Real-time Computer Complex
Douglas Aircraft Rocket booster for Saturn V’s third stage, the SIVB

ILC Dover Space suits
GM Guidance computers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes for the lunar module; batteries that powered the lunar module

Goodyear Aerospace Engine compartment conditioning system for Saturn V’s second stage

Whirlpool Space kitchen and freeze-dried food
Westinghouse Lunar Camera

as for splitting the atom...once again, you are correct.....it never would have happened without private companies/entities....as well as the Brits/Italians/Irish


1. British physicist John Cockcroft teams with Ernest Walton of Ireland to split the atom with protons accelerated to high speed. Their work wins them the Nobel Prize in physics in 1951.

2.1937 5-million-volt Van de Graaff generator built

The Westinghouse Corporation builds the 5-million-volt Van de Graaff generator. Named for its inventor, physicist Robert Van de Graaff, the generator gathers and stores electrostatic charges. Released in a single spark and accelerated by way of a magnetic field, the accumulated charge, equivalent to a bolt of lightning, can be used as a particle accelerator in atom smashing and other experiments.

3. 1942 First controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction

Italian-born physicist and Nobel winner Enrico Fermi and his colleagues at the University of Chicago achieve the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in which neutrons released during the splitting of the atom continue splitting atoms and releasing more neutrons. Fermi’s team builds a low-powered reactor, insulated with blocks of graphite, beneath the stands at the university’s stadium. In case of fire, teams of students stand by, equipped with buckets of water.

The University of Chicago is a "private" university Founded by John D. Rockefeller...

Yes and who brought them all together and funded it?

Yes and who brought them all together and funded it? laugh




Great...so you agree that with out the Private sector none of this would have been accomplished....

That's what "together" means...correct???

A well of course the whole article is just bunk. I should find the right publication with the right facts. I give up Andrew, of course there is only one right way. I keep forgetting.

No, don't give up, I love hearing the left talking points. I can give reasons why I disagree and back them up with real, logical arguments. not one person here has given me a real reason why we need this without bringing emotion into it. It's always comparison to another nation under entirely different circumstances or some other bogus argument that completely contradicts itself or is so incredibly easy to turn around and argue the opposing viewpoint in the same logic, it's laughable.


I'm craving a real argument on this topic, but everywhere I look, I'm finding everyone bringing a proverbial knife to a gun fight in a battle of wits.


an aside... i'd like to point out that my question was not answered...again.

I read the first article, skimmed the second, I don't recall seeing anything about outcomes.
People may be satisfied with the care, or not.
I want to see which scheme results in best outcomes, for the greatest number of patients, for the least amount of dollars.

Socialized anything is BAD. Can't you remember history?

Look at what happened to Germany in the 1930's. First and foremost compare American socialized medicine to the VA. Ever used the VA? If not talk to the vets who have!

Now with illegal immigrants, poor work ethic, and American's who make a living suckling off of the American Teat who is going to front the bill for those not paying into the system?

The Government? You think all they have to do is print more money and everything will be better? Take at least BASIC Economics in college and come spouting this "Why is everyone against Obama on health care?"

Question one, who is paying for this exactly?

Question two, how many people will be taking advantage of this program?

Question three, of that number how many are really legitimate citizens?

Question four, AND WHO EXACTLY WILL BE REGULATING THIS????????????

Obama hasn't got a clue!

PS Also compare our immigration with Switzerland and you will quickly see why they can operate the way they do. Doing things their way is a recipe for disaster. They actually have some of the tightest restrictions on immigration of any country. Their health care works for them because they know how many people they have to service. Illegal immigration taxes us in ways most of the bleeding hearts cannot see or want to believe. Supposedly we are all so wealthy we all can afford to raise other people's children. I can't even afford to have my own.


Damn liberals...