Stagnant:
We can damn well try. "Life's priorities" happen to include "keep living". Furthermore, citation needed for your "bankrupt your country". Such comprehensive health care for at least a vast majority of those who need it is working wonderfully in Germany, Great Britain, and other places.

Given the examples I've seen, the horror stories I heard, and the amio/dronedarone example, I'm going to dispute the 'working wonderfully' part:

The National Health Service is today condemned over its inhumane treatment of elderly patients in an official report that finds hospitals are failing to meet "even the most basic standards of care" for the over-65s.

And you miss the point. It could be cancer. It could be HIV, Parkinsons, Chronic Depression, or any number of other diseases that people get and generally cannot afford treatment for. What is the correct answer for a society in such a case? Let the person in question suffer and die? Withhold medical treatment to the richest among us? Bullshit!

The accepted solution in the past was to have that thing called a family, in which members generally encouraged you not to engage in the type of activities that lead to HIV infection, whose presence mitigated against chronic depression, and who could take care of you when you had Parkinsons. My granddad has Alzheimers; we pay for his treatment out of his pension from the work he used to do(his own effort,) Social Security(taken out of his own taxes his whole life), and our own pocket. Medical treatment WAS delayed to us for hours on a real bleeding emergency even when we HAD money-because we didn't have insurance, and the default assumption of the ERs in that area was that people have to have government or private insurance if the condition isn't life-threatening, so they had to fill out 10 different forms of paperwork while my little sister sat bleeding in the ER, and she eventually had permanent nerve damage in that arm.

Financial policies rule the practice, medical treatment will and is being withheld to the non-rich(the rich secretly hire their own doctors if they have any lick of sense, which they usually do, being rich) and your system is only wonderful for the beneficiaries that rarely have to use it. But anyone who wants the best usually goes to America.

"Well, it's worked so far so why change it" is a terrible piece of reasoning. You know what else worked just fine throughout the ages for the poor? Not having refrigerators. Working 16-hour days. Child slave labor. Did it work out okay? Yes! Would it be thinkable today? Fuck no!

Actually it's quite thinkable, doable, and being implemented in countries across the world, quite often to pay for the manufacture of those cheap generics you like, from drugs to shoes to Apple iPhones. Human happiness is contingent on whether they improve their own lot as THEY perceive it, not you. If you limited yourself to buying from your own or other countries with fair labor laws you'd pay more for things like drugs and clothes but there'd be a more general prosperity at home.

I'm left wondering: have you been paying attention to the reality of the situation? In the USA, a place with essentially no health care,

ROFL, where the hell have you been learning your reality from?

you don't have garbage men or construction workers making high salaries. Those are the jobs that nobody wants; the jobs people take when they really, really need a job, and the natural gap in supply and demand of labor means that certain people will need to take these jobs, regardless of the pay.

Not quite, fog-boy. Garbage men actually make good money here compared to most office types, because it's a state job and thus protected by a nepotistic union. It's construction and farm work that's getting hammered with the Mexican invasion of illegals and their willingness to use the emergency room for all their health care (their employers like it because they don't have to pay for it, so they don't bother to spend money on mechanization or safety standards, who knew.)

Your hypotheticals are all well and good, but don't even make the slightest bit of sense when brought up to compare to reality. It just doesn't work that way, as much as it may seem so.

My Magic Hate Ball says you've stepped in way out of your realm of knowledge and you're making up for it by pretending that a guy who works in the American health care system, who has family that works in the American health care system, and who's citing a cardiac electrophysiologist who was the first authority About.com chose to be their general spokesman for heart health.

In other words: Stop being a cunt and cite a link or two for your wild-ass utopian claims of WONDERFUL, BEST IN THE WORLD, AND THERE'S NO HEALTH CARE IN THE USA if you want me to take you seriously.

I did not understand what you meant in the slightest" ≠ "This argument is dumb". Regular checkups are relatively inexpensive and regular. The "irregular and high-cost" comes when you, say, slip and slice off your leg with a circular saw and need a week or so in the emergency room to recover. Or discover that that bump on your skin was in fact a malign tumor and you really need chemo ASAP.

Showing your ignorance again: Those events actually aren't that expensive to treat. (Bump on your skin a malignant tumor? That's pretty close to a 'never event' for your average healthy person AFAIK.) Hospitals and emergency rooms are not going bankrupt over work-related trauma and tumors from out of the blue. What's heavily and prohibitively expensive are the various infirmities and injuries that OLD PEOPLE get, because they're far less able to recover from them, have many complicating cofactors, and require extensive planning from doctors who know what they're doing. The US military, for example, has had a free healthcare model that works quite well-because it serves mostly young people who don't have complicated chronic conditions(they screen for them at recruitment, you see) and they discourage malingering. Matter of fact, given how abominably the NHS treats the old, I'm guessing they're taking something resembling the British army model, which I've heard is much like ours.

...I didn't guess that. I'm also not about to take your word for it. The systems in Britain and Germany work fantastically.

...assuming you're not over 65 and out of their price and treatment range.

Neither the Euro nor the Pound is actually failing because of the health care systems at work, but rather because of an amalgamation of factors, into which health care plays an almost trivial role.

To be fair, health care is playing less of a factor in the financial destruction of Britain than, say, the fact that you respond to the destruction of your social and physical landscape so shamefully.

The systems we have actually beat the ever-loving shit out of the systems in place in the USA in terms of wastefulness and effectiveness by every measure. And lastly, your claims about doctors took a left somewhere down "Bonkers Boulevard". Might wanna double-check that before you start looking like a conspiracy theorist.

It's no conspiracy, my dear. It's simply the logical outcome of what you were taught about how health care should be funded. Elderly patients are expensive to treat and easy to abuse without repercussions, so the cost savings will come out of their experience at the expense of the younger generation.

"Reassessment of life's priorities". You like to bandy that around like it's the answer to all your problems, yet you ignore a key factor here: not dying young to preventable diseases, and not suffering excessively to terminal diseases is a priority for most of us.

And you need a government takeover of your healthcare system, a dumbing down of your doctors, and the degrading of your elderly to accomplish this goal...why, exactly?

This is why this matters in the first place. This is why we care to begin with: we don't want to lose everything we own or suffer and die quickly just because we've contracted a disease like HIV, a disease that you can live for quite a long time with given the proper medical treatment.

Then don't engage in practices that lead to contracting HIV. Gay people can afford it, but gay people have extra cash on hand from that whole "not being married nor responsible for children" thing. If you contracted it because you're a questioning young poor kid who got power-bottomed by the rich viral barebackers out there, reevaluate your life's priorities before begging them for money, punch your nearest schoolteacher for telling you all the time that gay was ok, and call the Daily Mail with your story, as they reach an audience that actually believes in personal charity.

We also care about our fellow man, to the extent that you seem blatantly incapable of doing. Your entire post seems like it's been written by someone who either has never had to deal with such a situation or is a complete sociopath.

Working in an ER does give you a sociopathic streak, but rest assured that the fantasy beliefs are all coming from your end.

Myrmecodon:
Given the examples I've seen, the horror stories I heard, and the amio/dronedarone example, I'm going to dispute the 'working wonderfully' part

You forgot to mention a crucial bit of information about that article:
"A study of pensioners who suffered appalling treatment at the hands of doctors and nurses says"

You can never ever draw general conclusions from a selected sample.

And if you read further, you'd see this is about ten cases in 3 years, on a population of 62 million. That's hardly representative for all the NHS. You need real statistics, not a few anecdotes, most of which can be explained by common miscommunications which happen everywhere all the time, and not only in healthcare.

It's happened to me twice since I began my sidejob as a guard and I heard of more from colleagues. Such things happen. And when such things happen in healthcare, people miss out, worst case scenario, they die. That's shit, definately, but it doesn't change that the cause lay in a common misunderstanding.

Myrmecodon:

Incentives matter:

But as Ayn Rand taught us so many years ago,

This is the point at which this article loses whatever credibility it might otherwise have had. Rand wrote _fiction_, yaknow.