…the rest of the world gets a free ride because of the contributions of the US economy and corporations.
Luchabee, the question raised by Micheal Moore is whether US citizens should be getting the “free ride”. He clearly thinks they aren’t. It’s also not clear that French, Cuban or other countries’ health care owe much to contributions made by the US economy. The extent to which this may be true, it could be argued that they may be better able to take advantage of advances in technology due to their health care systems.
Specifically, much of the great research and innovation in medical research comes from the US. These advances can only be funded with a true market economy.
Health care and medical advances are two different things. Whilst the US R&D is higher per capita, its “health care” ranks one of the lowest. It is the system that lags behind in relation to expenditure.
Canada, Cuba, and Mexico are not going to be on the cutting edge of medical research because there is no market incentive for such progress.
With the exception of Cuba, these countries have market economies. A national health care system does not imply the country is not market driven. The other major market economies in the world all have a universal system, which includes, Japan, Germany, UK and France. They are all considered to be better than the US model, and have their own R&D budgets and have made significant advances themselves. Many advances are cross national, with foreign researchers contributing to a pooled effort.
In many ways, it is like Europe and Canada’s free ride on military spending. They can devote a larger chunck of their tax receipts to ridiculous socialist programs because they don’t have to defends themselves. They know the US will do it for them.
It was as a result of defending themselves in wars that Europe decided to devote large chunks of tax money on health. I don’t think there is an assumption in Europe that the US will defend it. US military policy is largely dictated by self preservation, not altruism. It took a bit more than colonial ties to entice the US into WWII. But it is correct that less spent on military means more to spend on health.
The same is true for healthcare. If we decided to transfer from a market orientated system to a single payer, it would mean significantly much less inovation and R&D, which would literally means millions of people across the world would die sooner because they did not receive the latest treatments.
Not necessarily. The US spends significantly more on health than other leading economies, but Americans remain amongst the least healthy, with higher child mortality, shorter life expectancy, and higher rates of fatal ailments. I don’t think the US is giving their research away at the expense of their own citizens. If less was spent on R&D and more on health care, it could conceivably save more lives.
Besides, it is amazing what percentage of the uninsured are very young, illegal aliens, or those that are too lazy to fill out the paperwork for Medicare. Do we really want to funadamentally transform the US economy (and curtailing inovation) for this segment of the population?
It is unlikely that a universal system would fundamentally transform the US economy. Michael Moore’s film didn’t focus on the uninsured. He went to great lengths to show that many victims are the insured.
A lot of people have confused his message with some sort of unpatriotic European left wing social reform mumbo jumbo. To see it that way is bit like reading the bible upside down.
