If a conservative is a “liberal who has been mugged”, approved there as the hoary old saying goes, here then a modern proponent of socialized medicine could be said to have been a fiscal conservative who has had more than five health care plans in the last four years (yours truly). I used to be 180 degrees opposed on this, but frankly, what we have is so much worse than even the bad socialized systems that it’s nothing more than ideological idiocy not to join the rest of the civilized world. To say nothing of the fact that we could easily match the French system, for instance, if we think the British or Canadian ones suck too much; and we’d spend less money overall, by all rational estimates (we already spend more public money than the average completely-socialized system; but we spend it stupidly and inefficiently on things like emergency care for the uninsured).
The people opposing such a move continue to spout baloney about waiting times, as if even those of us with insurance don’t wait as much or more in the US (and this matches my experience). For the benefit of equal or worse waiting times, I get to kick in thousands per year, and drown in paperwork (for all the payment plans we’re on to try to make sure we pay out of our HSA rather than out of after-tax money, and of course, to make sure I don’t overdraw the stupid thing). What’s worse is that the modern know-nothings who still push this disaster we live under are lying about the options people really have. You don’t realistically have the option to go to another doctor, even if you’re willing to pay standard (non-discounted) rates. Nor should you accept that as an answer – you’re already paying dearly for health care which these idiots claim is the “best in the world”.
Enough is enough. I’m turning in my capitalist-medicine decoder-ring. Call me Fidel LaFrenchie if you must. Better an honest socialist, if only for pragmatic reasons, than a lying capitalist.
Posted to comments and as letter-to-editor in their new interface, cialis but who knows if this new technology will work, condom so it’s reposted here for your pleasure. The 2nd Hawaii report coming as soon as work calms down a bit.
Commuters will only switch to transit if they are delivered to their final destination – within a couple of blocks. Failing to provide that “last mile” transport can doom an entire regional rail system. If far-flung suburbanites hate the bus, rx and their offices are too far to walk from the last rail or rapid-bus stop, then they’ll just keep driving, however long their commutes.
The part which was left out, in what’s becoming a disturbing trend of analysis-free journalism at the Chronicle, is that choice commuters will also NOT accept transfers as part of their daily commute, unless we’re talking about the Manhattan end of the scale where the transit alternative has the benefit of competing against 50-dollar parking.
Transfers from commuter rail to streetcar will not be any more attractive to daily commuters than transfers from commuter rail to shuttlebus – and choice commuters, as shown in South Florida with Tri-Rail, simply will not do the latter. Once you ride every day, the fact that the streetcar isn’t any faster or more reliable than the bus was becomes very obvious.
It’s time to remind people yet again: we did NOT decide to build what worked in Dallas, Portland, Denver, Salt Lake, Houston, and Minneapolis (light rail, or, what we would have built in 2000 and should have tried again in 2004). What we’re building instead was what failed in South Florida – a transit alternative which is utterly non-competitive with the car and will continue to serve only the transit-dependent at an incredibly high cost, while derailing transit momentum for decades.
Mike Dahmus
Urban Transportation Commission, 2000-2005
