Sicko @ MindSay 
Some fun facts that I learned about the US health care system:
- People in insurance companies get bonuses for denying claims. The more people you deny, the more you get.
- Hospitals dump patients out on the road if they can't pay their bills
- Hillary Clinton was the herald of universal health care, but is now paid by health insurance lobbists (she's the second highest in bought-off politicians). I guess everyone has their price.
- Lobbyist have bought off many politicians, including PRESIDENT BUSH (more than $800,000)
- People who are insured by a certain health insurance company can be turned away by hospitals, even if they need immediate care.
Now here are some fun facts about foreign countries, that have universal health care:
Cuba/ "Those Dirty Commies"
- Has a pharmacy close to each block and has a nearby hospital.
- Some drugs that cost $125 in the US can cost as little as 3.25 pesos (about $.05).
France/ "Those Dirty Frenchies"
- You have unlimited sick days; their productivity rates are higher than those of Americans.
- Doctors make house calls frequently, and the assistance is within the hour.
The United Kindom / Great Britian / "Those Dirty Englishmen"
- You don't pay for prescriptions if you are under 16 or retired; Those in between pay about 6-7 pounds for any medication. That's about $10-14 in the US.
- Doctors in the UK live fairly well off (one such doctor in the UK lives in a half a million dollar home, and drives a very nice Audi)
- Doctors are paid more for curing their patients, as well as getting them to quit smoking, lowering their blood pressure, and lowering their cholesterol.
- National Health Insurance (NHS) was started in 1948, while they were still recovering from WWII. If you studied history, that's comparable to 9/11 happening 50 times over.
Canada/ "Those Canadians" ("dirty" is obviously implied for us Americans)
- Many Americans are going to our northern neighbor to receive free health care . This is illegal however, because you need to be a Canadian citizen to do this.
With the exclusion of Cuba, all these countries just mentioned have a higher monetary value than the dollar. In other words, their pound/Euro/dollar is worth more than our dollar.
Also, all of these countries, INCLUDING CUBA, have higher life expectancy rates than Americans.
So, what does that say about our health "care" system? It's that we're 37th in health care, just beating some Slavic country.
To those of you who say this "socialistic" idea is bad, what about our firemen? our policemen? our mailmen? our teachers? If we all have the right to have someone to protect us, to deliver things to us, and to teach us, why can we have someone to heal us?
The following is a story that shows a avenue to be aware of. ( It can be anyone!) theexposer
Sexual Misconduct in the Church
When Mentor Becomes Molester
Ministers are often granted immediate trust . . . but some betray it.
by Alexa Smith
When Anne's minister first began approaching her sexually, she was utterly dependent on him in other ways. He was her counselor, her mentor and, she thought, someone who had her best interests at heart. She remembers how the mentoring slowly turned sexual. He said having sex wasn't wrong, even though she didn't feel it was quite right.
Why didn't she tell? She would say she thought no one would believe her, a "20-something-nobody" who was new in town and didn't have many friends anyway. "There was nobody to tell," she says. And even though her marriage was emotionally bankrupt, what would her husband do?
| Many victims say it was their absolute trust in their minister that got them into trouble |
"I felt I wouldn't be believed. It would be my word against his. And it was risky--what would it do to my marriage? At the time, people didn't understand the dynamics of the abuse of power, and I didn't either. I just felt I'd done something bad."
"I felt I wouldn't be believed. It would be my word against his. And it was risky--what would it do to my marriage? At the time, people didn't understand the dynamics of the abuse of power, and I didn't either. I just felt I'd done something bad."
 | Like most women, it took Anne years to tell. And though she finally helped draft her presbytery's first sexual misconduct policy, it took a supportive new relationship and years of reflection before she understood how her pastor had simply used her for sex while she was supposedly in his care. |
The Office of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) estimates that there are about 50 clergy sexual misconduct cases every year. Although cases in the PCUSA tend to involve adult women and male pastors, there are sometimes cases reported that involve children and other men.
Some of the cases involve men who are predators, who repeatedly prey on vulnerable women and lack remorse for their behavior. Other sexual abusers are what experts call wanderers--people who have crossed sexual boundaries inappropriately but, with treatment, have a fairly good prognosis for change. For predators, who are sociopathic, the statistics are not as hopeful.
According to the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Seattle, Washington, both categories of abusers tend to have little sense of the damage their behavior causes, have limited impulse control, are often charismatic and talented, but secretive, and tend to confuse sex with affection. They also have little awareness of how much power they wield, and they tend not to recognize their own sexual feelings.
How do women get into relationships with them? Research shows that most women who are abused by clergy are initially approached because they are too insecure or too vulnerable to say no or, perhaps more important, to tell anyone about it. Or they may be in the midst of a life crisis and especially vulnerable. Usually they are women who want to please the man who has become indispensable to their emotional lives, either as a confidante, counselor, priest, or they might even say savior because of the kind of dependency they have felt.
For more:
http://www.advocateweb.org/HOPE/mentormolester.asp
A culture of corruption exists in America that is both extensive and profoundly pervasive. It afflicts all of America’s institutions and is responsible for both the low esteem in which those institutions are held by the American people and this nation’s inability to solve its social and political problems. This culture is so entrenched that it considers itself invulnerable to criticism. When corruption is discovered and publicized, rarely is a mea culpa issued; the publication is usually ignored by the guilty who continue to act as though the discovery were never made. Oddly enough, the low esteem in which the institutions’ are held is rarely transferred to the individuals who manage those institutions; thus, although only 14 percent of the people approve of the Congress as a whole, the same individual Congressmen get elected over and over again and are still addressed and considered as honorable. While the members of a criminal institution are considered criminals, the members of corrupt public institutions are not generally considered to be corrupt even though an institution of any kind can only be corrupted by corrupting its individual members. That fact, perhaps, explains why corrupt public institutions endure and cannot be reformed, and perhaps the only way to reform such institutions is to begin calling the spades that comprise these institutions black.
There is one corrupt institution in America that has so far avoided this disapproval–America’s institutions of higher education, especially their post graduate, their Ph.D. granting, departments. The corruption of these departments is subtle; it is exposed only by the actions of their graduates who are rarely linked to the institutions that granted their degrees. Many of these graduates engage in careers that consist of publishing propaganda in the name of research, and even when their “research” is subjected to devastating critiques, these critiques are completely disregarded as though they never existed. Such disregard displays an almost total degree of intellectual dishonesty and a complete antipathy to truth, and academic institutions that do not instill a devotion to both intellectual honesty and truth in their post-graduate are corrupt to the core, for the traditional purpose of the Ph.D. degree is to educate people for the advancement of knowledge. Without a devotion to intellectual honesty and truth, such advancement is impossible.
I have been a devout critic of such people for some time, and I have not only posted my critiques for public examination, I have always sent courtesy copies to the individuals involved. All of these posts can be read in this blog (http://johnkozy.mindsay.com), but what recently provoked this reaction is an piece written by John C. Goodman (what a misnomer!) that was published in the Dallas Morning News on July 16, 2007 under the headline, “Film buffs may praise Moore’s ‘Sicko,’ but policy buffs can see all its defects.”
Now I am not a defender of Moore or his movie. I have not seen it, and since I’m not much of a movie-goer, I am not likely to see it. But one doesn’t need to see or even know anything about the movie to understand how nonsensical Mr. Goodman piece is. Right from the start, in the second paragraph to be exact, he locks himself into a contradiction. He writes, “Sicko isn’t a movie about health care and how to fix it. It is a one-sided attempt to drive a very specific agenda–single-payer, government-run health care.” But John, single-payer, government-run health care is proposed as a way of fixing our broken health care system. So if the movie is about single-payer, government-run health care, it is about health care and how to fix it; it can’t be any other way.
But it’s Mr. Goodman’s arrogance that is grating. He writes, “A majority of movie reviewers and columnists have praised Mr. Moore’s filmmaking and lauded him for “raising the important questions. The problem is, few of them can speak to the policy issues. . . .” And then, “Why . . . is national health insurance in other countries as popular as Mr. Moore says it is? One reason is that people do not realize how much they pay for it in taxes.” Now how could Mr. Goodman know that either of these statements is true? What evidence could he ever bring to bear to support them? Has he tested people on their knowledge of policy issues? Has he objectively surveyed the citizens of other countries to determine what their knowledge of where their tax contributions go? Of course not. Mr. Goodman’s claims are the claims of a scoundrel. He also writes, “If you have never tried to see a doctor in Britain or Canada, you might even believe it.” Well, how many times has Mr. Goodman tried to see a doctor in these countries? Is his knowledge of the national healthcare systems of these countries based on personal experience or hearsay? These statements and others are not only unsubstantiated claims, many of them are unsubstantiatable.
But what’s even worse, the criticisms he levels at the healthcare systems of these countries apply even more so to the American system.
He says that in Britain, about 1,000,000 are on waiting lists, in Canada, more than 876,000, and in New Zealand, more than 90,000. But he neglects to point out that in America more than 47,000,000 can’t even put their names on a waiting list. Put these numbers in a list and compare them:
1,000,000
876,000
90,000
47,000,000
So even if his numbers are true, the criticism is absurd. And then he writes, “In fact, people in other countries often have to pay out of pocket for care that has been denied them by the government.” This claim may very well be true, but in America, the insured have to pay out of pocket even for insured procedures. Hasn’t Mr. Goodman ever heard of co-pays and partially covered procedures. An American with health insurance goes into a hospital for even a minor procedure and comes out owing thousands of dollars on top of what his insurance has paid. That never happens to a Canadian or Britain or a New Zealander.
The real “in fact” is that Mr. Goodman is a shill for a corrupt, inefficient, and mediocre healthcare system. Within the past year, the New England Journal of Medicine published a piece showing that Americans of all income levels are being subjected to sub-par medical care and we’re paying more for it, as much as one and a half times more, than the people in any of the countries whose healthcare systems Mr. Goodman criticizes.
And there is example in Mr. Goodman’s piece that utterly baffles me. , “Why . . . is national health insurance in other countries as popular as Mr. Moore says it is? . . . A third reason is that most people are healthy.” Why so, I wonder? Is it because they have better healthcare?
Finally, the worst thing about Mr. Goodman’s piece is that not an iota of it is original. Robert Weissman has a piece on the web at http://www.counterpunch.org/weissman07182007.html titled “More Humane and More Efficient National Health Insurance” which contains the following paragraphs:
“The health insurance industry and its allies have worked hard to respond to SiCKO by promulgating a series of deceptions. It's awfully hard to defend the current U.S. system, so their emphasis is on criticizing other countries' healthcare systems.
They have a lot of practice at this stuff. Get on a call with people like Sarah Berk of Health Care America and Sally Pipes and John Graham of the Pacific Research Institute, and they will compellingly recite three key misleading arguments:
* People in other countries have to suffer through long waiting periods before seeing a doctor or getting treatment.
* National health plans ration care.
"Government-controlled healthcare" or "government monopoly healthcare" is inherently of inferior quality.”
Mr. Goodman not only lacks a devotion to intellectual honesty and truth, he even has to copy other people’s stuff. He is a spade that surely should be called black.
© 2007 John Kozy, Jr.