Michael James < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote in message news:934fde96-ff90-4d1c-a535- Tim if I am not mistaken the UK system is similar to that in Canada. *AND* to please some of our American friends, yes it is not perfect. Nothing is perfect and there are always room for improvement. The system on a whole works fine. There are situations where there are problems. For example hip-replacements. Their are many people waitng for tht type a treatment and not enough doctors etc. Why? because the system has only so much money, and EVERYBODY has a right to treatment, since we ALL contribute to the cost of healthcare through a percentage of our taxes. Do we want to pay more taxes so their will be more doctors? ***So, some people could end up crippled for life? Ah! Just like they do in the USA if they haven't got enough money! I see... Tim. One option people are considering is the two-tiered' system, where private cliniques are available. for people who do not wish to 'wait in line' Many people could afford that, Not only would that leave the present system intact, but it would lessen the load of the public system making it more efficient as well. ,When it comes to emergency, life threatening situations our health care system is fine. If an emergency case arrives at a hospital,any elective-surgery is postponed until after emergency patient is treated. And the treatment they give is excellent . I can verify that from persona experience as well as the experience of others in my millieu. We are alive and well BECAUSE OUR SYSTEM WORKS. One last point. I noticed while watching some American TV that they think the elderly do not get the same care as younger people . that is a pile of crap. Old people are treated the same as young people. ***They are in America, too. The TV program you watched was wrong. Not quite..Everyone in Canada get a Honda Civic, if you want a Mercedes then pay for it. You seem to think that everyone should have a Mercedes, when a Honda Civic is a good car and will get you where you wnat to go.  despite traffic jams. ***I think everyone should have whatever car they can afford. Personally, if I had the money, I would have a Lamborghini to run around in for fun. Forget that it only has a city MPG rating of 8 and 12 highway. Well am glad to see that the UK has enough  money so that everyone gets a Mercedes (or a Rolls)  but unfortunately we are obviously not so well off as you Brits, * but*  we can afford to give everyone a Honda Civic.  I am sorry if that does not meet your standards. I hope this  analogy is crystal clear. EVERYONE IS CARED FOR ***Correction: Everyone is cared for if you live long enough for your name to reach the top of the list. That American actress who died in the ski accident in Canada last winter died as a result of lack of care by the Canadian system.

You can't. You can toss words around like socialism or other obfuscation, but you will not address that simple equation above. ***I just did. Nothing the federal government touches has ever been cost-effective...absolutely NOTHING.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care David Gratzer Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market. Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux-a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body-and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin's insurance didn't: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies-in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada. When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin's favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab. But if Canadians are looking to the United States for the care they need, Americans, ironically, are increasingly looking north for a viable health-care model. There's no question that American health care, a mixture of private insurance and public programs, is a mess. Over the last five years, health-insurance premiums have more than doubled, leaving firms like General Motors on the brink of bankruptcy. Expensive health care has also hit workers in the pocketbook: it's one of the reasons that median family income fell between 2000 and 2005 (despite a rise in overall labor costs). Health spending has surged past 16 percent of GDP. The number of uninsured Americans has risen, and even the insured seem dissatisfied. So it's not surprising that some Americans think that solving the nation's health-care woes may require adopting a Canadian-_style_ single-payer system, in which the government finances and provides the care. Canadians, the seductive single-payer tune goes, not only spend less on health care; their health outcomes are better, too-life expectancy is longer, infant mortality lower. Thus, Paul Krugman in the New York Times: Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-_style_ single-payer system? Well, yes. Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore's new documentary Sicko celebrates the virtues of Canada's socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance. Some are tempted. Not me. I was once a believer in socialized medicine. I don't want to overstate my case: growing up in Canada, I didn't spend much time contemplating the nuances of health economics. I wanted to get into medical school-my mind brimmed with statistics on MCAT scores and admissions rates, not health spending. But as a Canadian, I had soaked up three things from my environment: a love of ice hockey; an ability to convert Celsius into Fahrenheit in my head; and the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people. When HillaryCare shook Washington, I remember thinking that the Clintonistas were right. My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic-with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks. I decided to write about what I saw. By day, I attended classes and visited patients; at night, I worked on a book. Unfortunately, statistics on Canadian health care's weaknesses were hard to come by, and even finding people willing to criticize the system was difficult, such was the emotional support that it then enjoyed. One family friend, diagnosed with cancer, was told to wait for potentially lifesaving chemotherapy. I called to see if I could write about his plight. Worried about repercussions, he asked me to change his name. A bit later, he asked if I could change his sex in the story, and maybe his town. Finally, he asked if I could change the illness, too. My book's thesis was simple: to contain rising costs, government-run health-care systems invariably restrict the health-care supply. Thus, at a time when Canada's population was aging and needed more care, not less, cost-crunching bureaucrats had reduced the size of medical school classes, shuttered hospitals, and capped physician fees, resulting in hundreds of thousands of patients waiting for needed treatment-patients who suffered and, in some cases, died from the delays. The only solution, I concluded, was to move away from government command-and-control structures and toward a more market-oriented system. To capture Canadian health care's growing crisis, I called my book Code Blue, the term used when a patient's heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him. Though I had a hard time finding a Canadian publisher, the book eventually came out in 1999 from a small imprint; it struck a nerve, going through five printings. Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada-they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled-48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave-when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity-15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren't available. And so on. But single-payer systems-confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists, and substandard treatment-are starting to crack. Today my book wouldn't seem so provocative to Canadians, whose views on public health care are much less rosy than they were even a few years ago. Canadian newspapers are now filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care:

Michael James < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote in message news:934fde96-ff90-4d1c-a535- Tim if I am not mistaken the UK system is similar to that in Canada. *AND* to please some of our American friends, yes it is not perfect. Nothing is perfect and there are always room for improvement. The system on a whole works fine. There are situations where there are problems. For example hip-replacements. Their are many people waitng for tht type a treatment and not enough doctors etc. Why? because the system has only so much money, and EVERYBODY has a right to treatment, since we ALL contribute to the cost of healthcare through a percentage of our taxes. Do we want to pay more taxes so their will be more doctors? ***So, some people could end up crippled for life? Ah! Just like they do in the USA if they haven't got enough money! I see... Tim. One option people are considering is the two-tiered' system, where private cliniques are available. for people who do not wish to 'wait in line' Many people could afford that, Not only would that leave the present system intact, but it would lessen the load of the public system making it more efficient as well. ,When it comes to emergency, life threatening situations our health care system is fine. If an emergency case arrives at a hospital,any elective-surgery is postponed until after emergency patient is treated. And the treatment they give is excellent . I can verify that from persona experience as well as the experience of others in my millieu. We are alive and well BECAUSE OUR SYSTEM WORKS. One last point. I noticed while watching some American TV that they think the elderly do not get the same care as younger people . that is a pile of crap. Old people are treated the same as young people. ***They are in America, too. The TV program you watched was wrong. Not quite..Everyone in Canada get a Honda Civic, if you want a Mercedes then pay for it. You seem to think that everyone should have a Mercedes, when a Honda Civic is a good car and will get you where you wnat to go.  despite traffic jams. ***I think everyone should have whatever car they can afford. Personally, if I had the money, I would have a Lamborghini to run around in for fun. Forget that it only has a city MPG rating of 8 and 12 highway. Well am glad to see that the UK has enough  money so that everyone gets a Mercedes (or a Rolls)  but unfortunately we are obviously not so well off as you Brits, * but*  we can afford to give everyone a Honda Civic.  I am sorry if that does not meet your standards. I hope this  analogy is crystal clear. EVERYONE IS CARED FOR ***Correction: Everyone is cared for if you live long enough for your name to reach the top of the list. That American actress who died in the ski accident in Canada last winter died as a result of lack of care by the Canadian system. Correction you are obviously ignorant about our health system.  She diedbecause she refused treatment and when she changed her mind and hour later it was too late. Enough of your lies!! I live here and I know may people who are alive because of the efficacity of our health system.  The fact that I am alive and typing this reply is just on person's proof. I had a stroke two years ago. The ambulance got there is minutes got me to the hospital;where I received immediate care and the emergency room the switched to intensive care for a week, a ward for two weeks. I was treated by top neurologistsm, using the most up to date equipment. After three weeks they  tranfered me to a Reab hospital for two months, where I was cared for and fed and washed, I received physio therapy and went froma wheelchair to be a cane .  I had courses in Ergo therapy learning how to do common things . THAT IS A TRUE STORY...are you going to say I am lying? AND IT HAD NOTHING TOP DO WITH WATING ON A LIST I could tell other stories of how well our system works and  people whose lives have  been saved. You read my  post I stated QUITE CLEARLY where some things could be improved. But I am telling the truth and you are not!

http://politicalanalytical.newsvine.com/_news/2009/05/18/2834179-we-a... We Are a Constitutional Republic, Not a Democracy: There is a Difference News Type: Event - Mon May 18, 2009 10:24 PM ED There is a fallacy in America that rarely gets corrected. It has become conventional belief that the United States of America is a Democracy. Politicians, pundits, and activists use the term to describe the American system of government. However, our founders were not proponents of such a system. In fact, they equated democracy with tyranny. Instead, to avoid what they viewed as mob rule, they created a constitutional republic. In 1620, before landing in what became known as the Plymouth Colony, the surviving voyagers of the Mayflower signed a document known as, The Mayflower Compact. In this document the colonists essentially agreed to govern themselves. The colonists agreed they would, . . . combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation. By agreeing to the Mayflower Compact they in fact created a democracy wherein the citizens agreed to directly participate in the governance process. Of course, there were only 40 colonists, so having all colonists involved in self-government was workable. As our country expanded, however, having the body politic responsible for every governing decision became unrealistic. Accordingly, the founders conceptualized a constitutional republic for the colonists, wherein the American people would only be indirectly involved in the governing process. In effect, for the sake of efficiency, the citizens were asked to delegate the governance to the sovereign (government) through the election process. Despite the fact that the founders moved the government from a Democracy to a Constitutional Republic, today many Americans wrongly believe that the terms Democracy and Constitutional Republic are interchangeable. However, the founders saw a real distinction between these terms. As the third Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall reminds us: between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos. Our founders saw the tyranny that a majority could inflict on a minority. James Madison admonished the country in Federalist 10 of the perilous nature of factions and asserted that the Constitution was partly an antidote to the fear of a majority faction reigning. For Madison, Democracy is: the right of the people to choose their own tyrant. Accordingly, Mr. Madison and his colleagues set up a constitutional republic with checks and balances among the three branches of the federal government, and a system of federalism in which power is partitioned between the federal and state governments. The result of this was the creation of a system in which a minority faction is protected, even a small minority faction. In addition, public officials are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution they created. Sometimes there is an inherent tension between the majority will and the wording of that document. For example, in 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Newdow v. U.S. Congress, ruled that the Elk Grove California School System could not lead students in the pledge of allegiance with the phrase: under God. While the Court was excoriated for this decision by an overwhelming majority of Americans who disagreed with the ruling, the Court was simply interpreting the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution: Congress Shall Make No Law Respecting the Establishment of religion (The Fourteenth Amendment extends that restriction to the states). The court did not genuflect to the public opinion but interpreted the wording of the U.S. Constitution as they saw it. In this case, the rights of a small minority were protected. The term Democracy has become synonymous with Constitutional Republic despite the immense difference between the two entities. It is quite interesting to ponder what Thomas Jefferson had to say about democracy, A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.