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POPS Is Britain's Health-Care System Really That Bad? How does NHS health care compare with U.S. health care? Like most developed countries, Britain ranks above the U.S. in most health measurements. Its citizens have a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality, and the country has more acute-care hospital beds per capita and fewer deaths related to surgical or medical mishaps. Britain achieves these results while spending proportionally less on health care than the U.S. — about $2,500 per person in Britain, compared with $6,000 in the U.S. For these reasons, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Britain 18th in a global league table of health-care systems (the U.S. was ranked 37th). However, there are measures by which the U.S. outperforms Britain: for instance, the U.S. has lower cancer mortality rates.
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POPSHealth Insurance Bankrupts Americans
A Harvard study found that 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses. Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem. Consider the plight of David: David had to stop working as a truck driver after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer and has since been struggling to pay for COBRA during the two-year Medicare waiting period. His wife, Gloria, is his full-time caregiver and cannot work outside the home, and the couple has had to use much of their savings and borrow from friends and family to pay for their COBRA premiums. David cashed in his 401K at a 24 percent loss so that they will be able to continue to pay the COBRA premium until he is eligible for Medicare. Gloria tried to apply for Medicaid, but she learned that their income is too high. "There is not any help for people like us. We are not considered poor enough, but we don't have the money to pay it on our own," Gloria sa
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POPSExposed: GOP Congressman Who Yelled "You Lie" at Obama Speech Received $240,000 from Health Care Ind It was not the first time Wilson — attorney, U.S. Army vet and former aide to U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond — has raised eyebrows by shouting at political opponents. Seven years ago this month, the then-freshman Wilson appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” with five-term Congressman Bob Filner (D-Calif.) to discuss whether to go to war in Iraq, action that Filner opposed but Wilson supported. In the course of the discussion, Filner noted that the U.S. supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iran-Iraq War — a fact revealed by the investigation into the Iran-Contra Affair, which discovered the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, then under an arms embargo, to win support for freeing U.S. hostages in Lebanon and to fund the Nicaraguan contras, a counterrevolutionary rebel force that was fighting the country’s government.
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POPSAnger at BBC Crufts decision Good on the BBC for taking a stand for the the voiceless (and the breathless, lame and half-blind): "The Kennel Club said breed standards had been revised to exclude "anything that could in any way be interpreted as encouraging features that might prevent a dog breathing, walking and seeing freely." Which begs the question: Why did the Kennel Club wait so long before revising their breeding guideliness? If they really have the best interests of the dogs at heart they would have such measures long ago instead of waiting to be outed by a tv doco. Shame on 'em!
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POPSMoney spent on war vs cost of health care reforms According to the Center for Defense Information, the total cost of the war in Afghanistan will reach $439.8 billion by the end of 2009. The United States, which spent exactly 10 times more on Afghanistan in 2008 ($140 billion) than it spent in 2002 ($14 billion), increased such efforts by $33 billion in just the last year. Obama's escalation, largely overshadowed by the health reform's incendiary spectacle, has been swift and significant. It's also showing no signs of slowing down. On Thursday, a Senate subcommittee approved 2010's $636.3 billion defense appropriations bill. Of this, $128.2 billion has been set aside for "overseas contingency operations." Simple multiplication tells us that the cost of maintaining this rate of defense spending for the next decade would eventually make Afghanistan $300 billion more expensive than the health care overhaul's projected cost. And that's just dollars and cents...
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POPSYoung Man Dies for Lack of Public Option I want to tell you about my only sibling, my brother Eric De La Cruz.1 Diagnosed with Severe Dilated Cardiomyopathy five years ago and in need of a heart transplant, my brother Eric passed away far too early this July 4th. All because the health care insurance system in the United States is broken. You see, unlike most of us (but like millions of others), Eric couldn't get private insurance. His employer didn't offer it as a benefit. And his heart condition, while treatable, was a pre-existing condition that no private insurers would cover. Sadly, there was no affordable, public option to protect Eric. So he remained excluded from the basic right to life-saving treatment that all people deserve. Although a heart transplant would save him, without coverage, Eric's condition needlessly and slowly deteriorated. Continued at source....+ details of 'support health insurance reform' rallies around the US.
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POPSProf. Stephen Hawking's life is "essentially worthless"' "you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program." If a taxpayer funded health care system is so terrible where are the howls of protest from Canadians, Australians, French, Swiss?
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