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- From: livesey@solntze.wpd.sgi.com (Jon Livesey)
- Newsgroups: sci.econ
- Subject: Re: I want a GERMAN standard of living
- Date: 11 Nov 1992 01:06:39 GMT
- Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Mountain View, CA
- Lines: 35
- Message-ID: <1dpmavINN633@fido.asd.sgi.com>
- References: <BxB3t5.8Ar@apollo.hp.com> <1992Nov6.222402.14999@news.acns.nwu.edu> <BxBJAD.5oF@apollo.hp.com> <1992Nov10.231040.8808@kestrel.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: solntze.wpd.sgi.com
-
-
- In article <1992Nov10.231040.8808@kestrel.edu>, king@reasoning.com writes:
- >
- > The relevance is that you want to cure the right disease.
- >
- > If the reason our health stats look bad is poverty,
- > rather than a pathology in our health care system, i would
- > not want to "fix" it with a socialized medicine
- > system,.....
-
- That does not necessarily follow. It may be that the
- issue, as indicated by health statistics, is that the urban
- poor in the US don't have ready access to health care,
- while the poor in Europe do.
-
- In that case, you can't just say "Well, we have these urban
- poor, so we'll just remove them from the health care
- statistics, and count the people who *do* have ready access
- to the system." All that such sleight-of-hand achieves
- is to compare the people on both sides of the Atlantic who
- *do* have ready access to health care, which happens to be
- different sets of people.
-
- As to whether socialised medicine will fix this, this very
- problem (health problems piled on top of economic
- deprivation) was one of the motivations for the
- introduction of universal health care in Europe.
-
- And it does indeed seem to have solved *that* problem to a
- large extent. Comments about whether it serves the needs
- of rich people aren't really relevant since a) they can
- afford to solve their own health care access problems, and
- b) that wasn't the problem it was intended to solve.
-
- jon.
-