In other words, Americans are almost 20 times more likely to die from medical treatment than from lack of health insurance!

People make choices. Those choices include not buying insurance; not taking care of their families. As Derek points out, the odds of a Gov program fixing this are grim.

Although I do not want to argue about the Canadian system, I can tell you I have 2 relatives that have completed their cancer care in Chicago because of the wait and limited treatment options in Canada, and they did this at great cost… so much for “free” health care being a first choice when it comes to serious illness.

Do you have a link for the Harvard Study?

But the key question is would the Obama health care proposal save them? Not if the complaints coming from the UK are any indication.

You seem to think that I favor letting the ill and indigent just suffer and die. If that’s the case, then I didn’t make myself clear: health care in the United States is far too expensive which restricts care to far too many people. There is no question about that. It is a shame that people in an advanced society have to choose between food and health care.

However, taking a government-run system that the President says is already on the verge of bankruptcy and adding 1-1/2 times the population of Canada to it is a bad plan. The government should limit itself to cracking down on monopolies and encouraging competition to hold down costs. When the government enters a market it distorts the market, and usually not for the better. See the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage debacle.

At least when the government tried to reform the housing market, we only lost our home and our credit rating. We’ve still got our health–for now.

Having no health insurance means an early death to almost 45,000 people in the United States annually – almost two-and-a-half times the number previously estimated -– according to a study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.

Where is the out rage for these 45,0000 people? Never heard you or Mr Smith bring up this shameful number.

It’s still a big problem, no question (I’m sure not happy with the cost), but it’s not as big as the president asserts.

And you are correct that for-profit corporations make life and death decisions every day. But at least with a for-profit provider, the patient has some leverage precisely because providers must turn a profit.

Fair comment about our references to Canadian medicine, but even so, no one has adequately explained why a service provider freed from the pesky responsibility of keeping enough customers happy to stay in business — i.e., turning a profit — has an incentive to provide good service.

Access to health care should be a right, I agree. The president and his allies don’t want to make it a right; they want it to be a requirement.

Decisions are being made everyday by private for profit companies in the US on who lives and who dies.

Americans need to decided whether heath care a right or a privilege.

My last comment is that next time you have an “expert” talking about Canadian health care it would be nice to actualy have on a Canadian.