Pixiq

Our tax dollars at work. Now why can’t we afford socialized medicine again? Oh yea, because we’d rather waste our money on pointlessness in the guise of protecting our citizenry from false threats like Al Queda, rather than actually protecting our citizenry from the real-life threats that kill us all: cancer, heart disease. Not Al Queda.

You nailed it, Clint.

Another in a nearly endless string of cases that shows: 1. The critical nature of jury selection & voir dire (noth grand juries an petit juries) to the government, 2. The sad state of the resulting rubber-stamp outcomes. My criminal defense attorney friend agree that justice system reform is no longer possible. Time to scrap it and start over.

Uh, Clint, the survival rates for nearly every cancer are higher in the US than in any of the socialized medicine countries, any of them. So I’d pick another example to lead with.

Carlos, do you really want an HMO with the power of the gun? There are a number of European countries that restrict access to medical care for the elderly, with no recourse. Anyway its a difficult topic fraught with emotion.

As for the wannabes, sounds like a lot of dollars spent for negligible results. Like sexting prosecutions of teenagers for “child pornography”.

Juries on fluoride are ever so docile.

“It is a matter of record that sodium fluoride has been used for behavior control of populations. In an “Address in reply to the Governor’s Speech to Parliament,” [Victorian Hanstard, August 12, 1987, Nexus, Aug/Sept 1995], Mr. Harley Rivers Dickinson, Liberal Party Member of the Victorian Parliament for South Barwon, Australia, made a statement on the historical use of fluorides for behavior control.

“Mr. Dickinson reveals that, “At the end of the Second World War, the United States Government sent Charles Elliot Perkins, a research worker in chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology, to take charge of the vast Farven chemical plants in Germany. While there, he was told by German chemists of a scheme which had been worked out by them during the war and adopted by the German General Staff. This scheme was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water. In this scheme, sodium fluoride will in time reduce an individual’s power to resist domination by slowly poisoning and narcotising a certain area of the brain, and will thus make him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him. Both the Germans and the Russians added fluoride to the drinking water of prisoners of war to make them stupid and docile.”

Ariel:

I assume the only way cancer’s survival rate is higher in the US is if you only count the people who pay. What about the ~50M americans who don’t have health insurance? Oops, forgot to count them. When 20% of people have no insurance, nobody pays for their chemotherapy, and they die. I’m willing to bet your statistics conveniently omit that group. Either way, it’s a cherry-picked stat. We are NOT the healthiest country. But I’m sure you’ll cherry pick an excuse for why that is. Gee, couldn’t possibly have to do with 50M people getting 0 treatment.

And if you hate socialized medicine so much, I suggest you not use Medicare, and you not use a Social Security Check to pay for Medicare prescriptions. Rip it up. See how well off you do.

Better start saving your money now.

@Clint: What is a cherry-picked stat is this notion that these other countries have “universal health care.” It’s in name only. Sure, you can say that everyone has coverage. But when all that coverage is absolute garbage, it’s just a label.

Socialized medicine is something I would not wish on anybody.

Actually, xdamousex, there are plenty of places with socialized medicine where your odds for surviving a particular cancer are higher than they would be in America.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/115086.php
America wins many because of economics, not because of our capitalist system. We also lose many.

“Specifically, white women had a 14% higher survival for breast cancer than black women, and white men had a 7% higher survival for prostate cancer than black men. What are the reasons for these racial disparities? The researchers suggest that white and black people receive diagnoses in different stages of the disease, have unequal access to health care, and are different in complying with treatment.”

“For all cancers, Europe had a much lower survival than the US. Survival for prostate cancer in the US is 91.9% compared to 57.1% in Europe – a 34% difference. The difference for breast cancer survival, however, is 10%.”

It seems like the socialized medicine in europe only “gives” you a 10% lower chance of dying of breast cancer. But being black in america “gives” you a 14% lower chance of dying of breast cancer.

Sorry, you lose. Whether a medical system is socialized or not is NOT the ultimate decider. Economics, race, and other factors are.

Need more links? Okay. Here’s one:
http://www.healthcarebs.com/2007/08/21/us-has-best-cancer-survival-rate/
“According to “the most comprehensive analysis of the issue yet produced,” the U.S. has the best 5-year cancer survival rate of 22 countries studied.

Averaging the rates for men and women, the top five performers are as follows: United States (64.6%), Sweden (61.0%), Iceland (59.8%), Finland (58.5), and Switzerland (57.9%). The worst performer was Scotland. England was fifth from the bottom.”

Hmm. Sweden has socialized medicine, but the survival rate is only 3% lower. Gee, how can that be? Maybe it’s because everyone gets “free” diagnoses, instead of languishing and being diagnosed later on (like black people in america who can’t afford health care aso ften as white people).

Quite simply put, the mode of a health care system is NOT the indicator of whether you will survive or not.

I should mention the 3 countries with the highest rates seem to be USA, France, and Japan:
http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20080716/cancer-survival-rates-vary-by-...
“Survival in the USA is high on a global scale but varies quite widely among individual states as well as between blacks and whites within the USA”

There are a lot of rich white people in our country who help bring the stats up. There are a lot of poor people who have much lower chances than anyone in Europe; they drag our numbers down. But the worst off in America are far worse off than anywhere else. If you’re poor and sick, America is one of the worst systems to be under.

But fuck the poor. We’re rich enough to afford medical insurance. We can choose not to care about them. They’re scum and deserve to die, right?

test. my last comment seems to have been eaten.

Wow. I spent 10 minutes on that comment. Anyway, xdamousex, you’re dead wrong. Cancer survivability rates vary from nation to nation, city to city, state to state, cancer to cancer. The regional variance is far larger than the variance of comparing whether the medicine is socialized or not. And if you are poor and sick, America is the place you’ll have the lowest survivability.

But fuck the poor. They deserve to die.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cancer+survival+rates+in+different+...

^ Note that the difference between blacks and whites in america is far greater than the difference between america and japan. now note that japan has socialized medicine. your race is a far larger factor in survivability than whether you are in a country with socialized medicine.

BTW, even more numbers that back me up:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_dea_fro_can-health-death-from-cancer

Wait! Why aren’t we at the top of the list? Because the poor who can’t afford good care drag our stats down. WE should execute them so they don’t take down our stats. Then we’ll be able to prove how much the only capitalist medical system in the industrialized world RULEZ MAN

Jeezus, I can’t believe I’m getting into a healthcare debate here.

But seeing as how you’ve put all that effort into the post, allow me to make a couple quick points.

America wins many because of economics, not because of our capitalist system.

First of all, as a libertarian, I take issue with referencing the American economy, particularly with regards to health care, as “free market” in any fashion. There’s nothing free market or capitalistic about a nation where the government is in bed with corporations, inflates the money supply, sinks itself into debt to bail out a privileged few who are “too big to fail” and regulate the health care industry to the point that costs are in the stratosphere.

Obviously, the poor are disadvantaged in our health care system. The government shoots itself in the foot by regulating health care to the point that it’s cost-prohibitive to get health care. Simply requiring the existence of a universal health care system through legislation is not going to change the fact that it is bankrupting the country in the state it’s in now. Reduce regulations on the industry and it becomes less cost-prohibitive, and therefore entrepreneurs will be able to find a profit in marketing some form of health care to the poor, albeit not as good as one offered to the rich.

The inherent flaw in socialized medicine, as in all socialized systems, is that it doesn’t offer a system that is good. It just gives everyone equally terrible service so no one can complain about someone getting better service than someone else.

And now, back to police officers violating our civil liberties.

xdamousex, I actually agree with everything you said up to the 2nd to last paragraph. But if socialized medicine is “a bad system”, why is Sweden’s cancer survivability only ~2% lower than ours? I’ll leave you to mull that over on your own time, because this is indeed very off topic.

@Clint: If you can find me a truly free market health care system, then perhaps we can compare statistics. But to me, the United States has simply discovered an equally f***ed-up way of doing things.

Sorry, Carlos, for this digression.

No, videotaping isn’t illegal. However, the overt act required to prove conspiracy doesn’t have to itself be illegal. Example: We conspire to rob a bank, and you are dispatched to buy guns at Wal-Mart, a legal act. The act of buying the guns isn’t now illegal, but it is the overt act completing the conspiracy.

I don’t know the facts of this case, but IF they had agreed to commit a crime, and the videotaping were to advance that crime, it is sufficient for the conviction.

I have to agree with torgeaux here.