If you think messing with Social Security in the USA is a third rail, just try being a politician in any of these countries and propose doing away with their health care plan, and substituting something like the American system.
Your political carreer would be instantly finished as you would be laughed off the public stage.

JC, Here’s where your argument fails miserably. “Messing with SS”? Social Security is a joke and will be totally broke in the next ten years, but just keep that little secret to yourself and your socialist buddys.

Government socialized (subsidized) medicine will be the same joke only worse. Dependence on the government that will eventually own your choices is not the direction this nation should follow. And this is the blindness of the left that has fed the lazyness and hapless to look for others to supply what market forces can do. We have some of the finest doctors and health care in the world RIGHT NOW! What the Hildabeast is proposing will destroy it all.

1) Universal insurance coverage
2) Speedy and effective medical care
3) Controlled costs

Unfortunately, you can only have 2 out of the 3. You can pick any 2, but in the end you must sacrifice one. If you don’t understand why, you failed Econ 101, or had a Marxist professor.

It’s things like this that JoeCitizen and others like him don’t get. Rather, Curt has it right when he points out that just because other countries have socialized health care doesn’t mean it works.

Look at Social Security in the US. We have it, its politically impossible to dump it, yet anyone with a calculator and actuary table knows that it is a ponzi scheme that ultimately is doomed.

So why do we still have socialized health care and Social Security? In a word, Fear. People are justly afraid of being “left out in the cold”. And to an extent, I don’t blame them.

But the response to this fear is not to “give” them socialized anything. We need to move toward more market incentives, not away from them.

Finally, Gregory Dittman talks about “lifestyle choices”, but I’m afraid misses the point. In any HillaryCare system, rationing will be introduced, and the ones who are left waiting will be those who made poor lifestyle choices; drinking, smoking, and obesity come to mind. AIDS patients will be treated ASAP, because the gay lobby has the political clout to exempt themselves.

Whats absurd is your contention that socialized medicine is working in those countries. Thats why we get many of their citizens stopping by to get to our health care system right?

I make the counter contention that people such as yourself who make these kind of idiotic comments shows the rest of us how far your leftists noggins are up your asses. She will NOT be the next president. I’m praying she gets the nomination tho, then it will be a 100% lock she loses.

So quit waving your Hillary banner while you can…

If you list good lifestyle choices and few hospitals vs hospitals and poor lifestyle choice, you will get:
Deaths per 1,000 2007 est. from the CIA’s online The World Factbook:
Mexico 4.7
Iraq 5.2
The Philippines 5.36
India 6.58
Canada 7.86
United States 8.26
Switzerland 8.51
France 8.55
Japan 8.98
The UK 10.09
Germany 10.71

From these numbers, Hillary should be modeling her healthcare plan on Mexico’s or Iraq’s and not Canada’s or the UK’s.

That is so patently aburd, such an absolute falsehood, one really must question your basic integrity for writing it.

Universal health care is in place in all these advanced countries as a result of the expressed will of the people. If you think messing with Social Security in the USA is a third rail, just try being a politician in any of these countries and propose doing away with their health care plan, and substituting something like the American system.
Your political carreer would be instantly finished as you would be laughed off the public stage.

In other words, the people who actually live under these health care regimes think they work infinitly better than what they had before, or what we have.
Ask the conservative politicians in those countries if you need any proof.

Its good to hear people like Steyn make the abusrd, dishonest arguments that he does. It assures me that republicans and conservatives will do everything they can to convince the American people that they are utterly clueless as to the real situation with regard to health care. I guarantee you that pushing the Steyn arguments will guarantee Hillary’s election.