Guadaloopy

I am so disappointed in myself for not catching this reference sooner.

Not 100% true. I went for a nice brunch after my procedure and before chowing down made a stop in the restroom to "decompress", and it came out a bit "lubey".

Lifestyle choices are not limited to food choices or drug and alcohol use. They are not necessarily a judgment on "character." The fact that we are an automobile society with limited public transportation means that traffic deaths contribute significantly to our lower life expectancy. The fact that we are a gun culture with the attendant homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths brings our life expectancy down - could be argued that this speaks to character.

I didn't mean to paint a rosy picture of the US Healthcare system. It's pretty bleak. I'm just pointing out that a country with a 70+ year old universal health care system has major problems as well. Which takes me back to my initial point I started with. Health care is a hard problem to solve.

That's not the point I was making in my post, but I think you know that. My point was that the relatively poor numbers for US life expectancy and health outcomes as compared to other countries have more to do with lifestyle choices than the quality and quantity of care provided by our healthcare system.

I'm not insane... I just live in the real world where governments are hamstrung when it comes to cutting budgets when the economy tanks. When a business hits hard times, it can cut costs and make adjustments. If the government is in the business of being a single payer for a health care system, it does not have the luxury of immediately cutting spending when revenues go down. It goes into deficit spending. NHS took it in the shorts from 2007-2009. The reductions in 2010 had to happen for austerity purposes. The fact that there weren't actually cuts was a testament to the government's dedication to the program. Now this is being thrown back in the government's face as a "slash" in spending.

But that's not how GOVERNMENTS work.

I have a minor in economics and consider it a bit of a hobby. Not to mention that I also have an MBA. I fully understand the math and the mechanisms being discussed. What I question is the hyperbolic language being applied and the assumptions that go into declaring a "funding gap."

No.... I'm not bad at math at all. But I am intimately familiar with the inefficiencies of government agencies that work outside the constraints of profit. I've been in the belly of the beast. Your example has faulty assumptions. It assumes that 1) I need X amount of goods and 2) that every dollar spent on X amount of goods was spent efficiently to maximize utility. It also assumes that my employer has an unlimited capacity to continue salary increases.

Horseshit. My FIL (a retired assistant manager of a cotton co-op in southwest Oklahoma) had a heart valve replaced earlier this year in an outpatient procedure.

It's a pretty wild world we live in where a lower rate of increase in spending is somehow viewed as a "slash" in spending. It's also wild that people can, with a straight face, proclaim that because an unsustainable rate of spending wasn't maintained that there is now a "funding gap."

Where did they "slash spending"?

I wish we could all be honest about how health care is just a hard fucking problem to tackle rather than saying that a particular system is completely broken while another system has got its shit in one sock. Despite general displeasure with the US healthcare system, 71% of Americans are happy with the quality of their personal care. Despite general support of the UK's NHS, only 24% of UK public are satisfied with the care provided by NHS, with 71% saying the number one dissatisfier is wait times for care. The US healthcare system is expensive and by some measures less effective* than other country's systems, but no other country's system comes close to producing the level of consistent investment and advancement in medical innovation/technology seen in the US system. All systems have trade-offs, and anyone telling you otherwise is only trying to win an election. *Poor health outcomes in the US are more attributable to lifestyle choices (diet, transportation, gun culture) than the quality of care provided by the system

You forgot the part where Stanton strains his hammy and is out for 12 weeks.