green

@ elena and lindaa. You must first of all understand, elena, that all medical systems will make mistakes in their treatments of their patients from time to time. This means that the advanced affluent indutrialised western nation which does operate on the universal health care system will occasionally screw up. This also means that the business-driven health care system will also screw up. This is human nature, is it not? It can be argued that the two systems are likely to screw up for different reasons. In the case of the financially driven system the screw-up may stem from a cutting off of further funding. In the case of the universal health care system in an advanced industrial nation the screw-up is likely to be a question of dumb human error. It certainly will have nothing to do with the cash flow being cut off. As for you, lindaa, I am inclined to persist with my initial assessment of you as being someone who is both mean-spirited and judgemental. You see, I have been spending a fair amount of my past blonde 10 to 20 years reading up on such issues as morbid obesity, addictive personalities, depression and other forms of seemingly self-indulgent psychological misbehaviour, and, within this framework, a host of other questions upon which hinge the individual's emotional and psychological life. The latest genetic and neuro-chemical studies are kind of fascinating. They would seem to indicate that many of the behaviours which you have categorised as falling within the framework of moral failures are not; they are medical issues and these individuals certainly do not need someone like you deciding as to who will or who will not qualify for help. Let me explain. Research has been done on a genetically pure Amerindian tribe who suffers from obesity. These folks are desert people and their ability to survive on little food was extraordinarily valuable in their remote past. Now this means that everything this gang eats translates to lard and the tribe is troubled by morbid obesity. Of course there are horrible health problems which come on the heels of this. I read about this study 15 years ago and over 50% of this tribe were morbidly obese, were suffering from diabetes, cholesterol, and heart-related problems. Are you going to say to these individuals that you have brought this on yourself? You've been eating too much? Are you going to kick these people to the curb? People who suffer from mental illnesses are more likely to self-medicate. Indeed this is now considered to be a response to feelings of psychological distress and is an indicator that the abuser should be assessed for emotional problems. But it looks like you are ready to kick a drug abuser or an alcoholic to the curb, does it not? You should be aware that mental illness is something which is outside the individual's choice and is often a genetic issue. I really cannot see that there is anyone who wakes up and says to themselves that their goal in life is to become an overweight, dysfunctional, chain-smoking, drug addicted alcoholic. I do believe that very bad things can and will happen to all sorts of families and that this is due to bad genetic luck or tragic family circumstances or whatever.... I also believe that the rich are insulated from the financial fall-out of these tragedies because they have the bucks. The rest of us are not insulated and that this is the generous philosophy which the affluent industrialised counties which do have universal medicine operate on. You must remember that you as a single individual will never be required to pay the entire tab of someone's lung transplant, you know. You should also know that hospitals are not in the habit of giving away valuable spare parts to those folks who have treated their own equipment carelessly.

I don't think that it is so much as those individuals won't learn English but that in many cases the older folk simply can't. This would be for reasons of natural inability to pick up another language, age, or, in the case of many immigrants, both legal and illegal let it be noted, these folk tend to or are forced to remain within their own protection/comfort zone; they stay with people of their own tribe. Their kids, however, learn English and integrate into the host society. I see this where I live. Our new citizens will sponsor older family members, their parents and grandparents, to come over to live with them. These folks will likely never learn English, will remain fearful of our culture, and will never assimilate. The ones who have sponsored them will speak English with an accent and may have great difficulties with the language depending on their natural abilities. It is the children who seamlessly blend into our culture. As for unwanted immigrants, there are a number of European countries who are going through similar problems at this time. These are those countries who have had colonies and who are now find themselves on the hook and must accept immigrants from their former colonies. The formerly very white Britain has been receiving an influx of immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, certain African nations, and its many colonies in the Caribean for the past 50 years or so. France now has a sizable Muslim population, one which is primarily drawn from its former North African colonies. These folks are different from the French both in terms of race and religion. The French call them les arabs and this group currently occupy a position in France which is roughly analogous to the position traditionally occupied by Blacks in America. Germany has been hosting a sizable population of Turkish people for generations now. They call these people gastarbeiter - guest workers - even though these families have been living in Germany for some generations now, long enough that they really are no longer Turkish, and yet their status in Germany is ambiguous. These are just a few examples of the social upheavals which are currently going on in Western Europe. You see, all of these nation are old nations with deep roots and a fairly rigid sense of nationhood because of this. These are European nations which, historically speaking, have had trouble dealing with other Europeans. I believe that we who live on this side of the Atlantic are ahead of the game in certain respects. We are accustomed to welcoming variety. Democratic ideals have always been the treasured norm and the new world has been built upon immigration and impure - hooray! - genetic blood lines. I don't know how many times that I have read a poster say well, I am part Cherokee or my background is Italian but my mate's family is .... I have lived in France and I have European relatives and let me tell you that one does often not run into these blends which over here are considered to be the norm. People over there are more insular in some respects. In other respects, however, they are a lot cooler than we are. The establishment of the European Common Market has meant that anyone who lives in any of the member countries has the right to treat all member countries as his or her home. Member citizens can choose to live and work anywhere they want inside the European union. This means that a Portuguese can move to England and a Brit can move to Italy without any beaurocratic stress. This should be viewed as legally sanctioned uncontrolled immigration or migration within mainland western Europe and Great Britain. This block is growing: certain former east European countries have or are about to be added. Poland is now a member of the Union; Britain is now flooded with cheap Polish labour as a result. Turkey is agitating to become a member. I think, and I might be wrong or wrongish, that we are operating from both a position of strength and weakness. We are ahead of the game in that our history has been based on democratic and inclusive ideals. We are used to living in an egalitarian and pluralistic society, one that recognises that we were once all immigrants. This means that we are more open and accepting of our fellow humans and their differences. Indeed we tend to prize individuality. Our strength is that we are more open, more interested in others who are unlike ourselves, less racist and less bigoted. On the other hand, our geographical isolation has often acted against us. Those European nations (which are for many of us our parental roots) are all geographically jammed up against each other and have had for this very reason a long and bloody history. At the same time there has been a great deal of intellectual cross pollination and most Europeans do end up speaking fragments of a number of other languages just because they are in the vicinity. (My own father spoke 7 languages.) All of these countries have within modern times experienced the experience of dreadful wars fought on their own soil. The Second World War lasted from 1939 to 1945. From all that I have read on the subject France never did recover from the effects of the First World War, a war which was fought on her property, by the time that the Second War was underway. The above paragraph may seem in the way of a digression but my point is that we who live over here are used to feeling pretty much isolated from the rest of the world thanks to our geographical situation and our affluence. But the world will intrude in one way or another and the world is complicated business. (Something which George W and his gang of white hat-wearing gang of cowboys didn't realise when they went charging into the Middle East. Forgive me for this digression, eh.) Anyhow, it does strike me that there are oil and gas reserves on this side of the hemisphere (and here I am thinking of Venezuela, at least I think that it is Venezuela???:help:) and that it might be an interesting approach for us on this side of the Atlantic to think outside the box. Perhaps we could structure a union which would be more along the lines of the European model. Certainly this would permit for the free flow of personnel between member countries but, on the other hand, all migrant workers would be street legal and thus required to pay into the local, state/provincial, and federal tax pools. This would also mean that highly trained personnel or, for that matter, retirees who wanted to shift from the northern American or Canadian (ugh!) climate to the member nations of the Americas' member block which are south of the American border are entirely free to do so and will not be subject to any local penalties, limitations, or fines. I suggest this because I see that the globe has fractured into trading blocks and into emerging economies. The emerging economies are those hugely populated nations which are able to provide us with cheap goods. The European Common Market is a trading block. NAFTA, a trading alliance which encompasses Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, is a flaccid immitation. Canada is now attempting to become a member nation of the European Common Market I believe; of course I may have misread the newsreport but I kinda hope not. I am, afterall, a Canuck, eh. What I would like to see is a pan-American economic and social structure, one which would eventually parallel the European Common Market. Our neighbours to the south have the manpower and they have the raw materials, including fossil fuels, which we are anxious to secure. And certainly these nations are anxious to be invited to the feast. What this means to Americans, for it is you who are bearing the brunt of this unchecked immigration which is destroying your local infrastructures, is that your government must take the giant leap and step outside the current box. It is certain that Canada would follow. Canadians are big on supporting these kind of initiatives, eh. Quite frankly, I would stop dumping money into the middle east and Africa. Iraq was an exceptionally dumb idea and the only real attraction there was gaining access to those fossil fuels. As for Africa, the food aid goes directly into the pockets of the local dictators. The Central and South American countries do understand the idea of democracy. Fossil fuel reserves do exist on this side of the Atlantic. The Americas are also rich in precious metals. And you will note that there is little terrorist activity indigenous to the Americas. A president can invest his country's money wisely, you know. As for Anglo-speakers learning Spanish....ugh! and why shouldn't they? I am Canuck and so I was subjected to years of French. I had a succession of lousy teachers and the language irritated me even though I had a certain feel for languages. I did brilliantly in German and in Latin and I barely passed my ass in French. Years later I washed up in the south of France and it was then that I started to really learn how to speak French, a most annoying language. I am under the impression that most people will not trouble to learn anything unless they are forced to do so. This is the role that school is supposed to play in our lives when we are young, is it not? The whole school thang is designed to stuff as much learning as possible down our gullets as the system can get away with before we choose to bail. Up here in Canada there has been this vague hope that all Anglophones (English speakers) might successfully learn our other official language. This has been our politically correct hope since the centennial of Canada's existence, July da 1st, 1967. This hasn't been all that successful but we do still live with all items which are available for consumption in Canada available only in a format which is bilingual. This worked to my advantage when I did find myself, an English-speaker, living in the south of France. I had lousy grammar but I sure did have a surprisingly extensive vocabulary en francais and this is how I was able to rabbit on about my problems with my hemmorhoids. Of course I did eventually acquire facility in the language because I was forced to. Listen up! When I was young I hated learning French, a language for which I felt no natural kinship, from a gang of truly lousy teachers. Now I hear that some of you are bitchin' about your kids being forced to learn Spanish. In my opinion any knowledge is better than no knowledge. And the acquisition of Spanish as a second language is much more useful than the acquisition of French. This is a question of global economics of course. To be forced to learn another language is a privilege. This is how my father learned how to speak 7 languages; he was forced to learn most of them. Knowledge, however ya get it, is both power and a privilege. The reason that so many children are overtaking American kids with respect to academic performance is because they are housed in school systems where kids are expected to learn. That is their job. Nobody is fussing about the Spanish language crap. Once again, an overly long post. Sorry.

@BJean: yes, you are right. North of the border we do have a large middle class. This may be in part due to the power of the unions for many blue collar workers earn what might be considered to be "white collar" money. It is also true that these jobs are as available to new Canadians as they are to anyone else and this improves the general cash and social flow throughout the community. People buy more. They go out to restaurants more often. Their kids get involved in local soccer and hockey clubs. The parents get involved with these events. Our large middle class may also be due to the fact that our immigration laws are now very strict. Though many of our applicants are from under developed countries we only admit the cream: the healthiest and best educated ones. Of course once they get here we don't necessarily recognise their qualifications, especially if they are doctors or lawyers. There are many Canadians who feel that Canada is doing a bad thing by robbing those countries of their much needed elite. Of course what America is receiving in terms of a new work force is the opposite; you are receiving an uncontrolled flood of the hard-scrabble poor and desperate. I am filled with sympathy for them but I also filled with sympathy for the American citizen. As I have noted in previous posts, this flood is placing unmanageable stress on your local financial and social infrastructures. This is a very, very serious business.

@ Derrick: both my husband and I are pro-union types and I was in the same union as he is before I retired. I used to build aircraft and that is how we met. North of the border you will find a number of strong unions and this is part of the British tradition which has been imported here. The teachers have a very, very powerful union and a huge investment arm which manages their retirement fund which can and does affect our financial sector. Public employees also belong to a powerful union, as do the police, the workers in some of our grocery store chains, the Toronto public transit workers.... You get the idea. When Walmart opened up here there were isolated attempts to unionise certain stores but Walmart either threatened to or did close down these stores; they figured that the Walmart customers would shop at the next nearest store. The only Walmart employees who were successful at unionising were ones at a store in a remote region of Quebec, I think. It was the only Walmart in the region. The union to which my husband and I belong is a powerful one but unfortunately the aircraft industry has got our local by the short and curlies; you see our company has been busy shifting our work between its many international operations for sometime now. Its latest stunt is to develop new plants in those countries where the workers come cheap and so my husband has spent a month teaching Mexicans how to do what was formerly Canadian work. He told me that the Mexicans do have a union but that it is very weak. This is to be expected; there are a lot of people in Mexico who want those jobs and a strike would likely be ineffective. Sad....

:biggrin1:Thanks, kiddo, for them kind thoughts.:kiss2:

The continued "infidel" presence in the mid-east enrages extremist muslims and is likely to only aggravate terrorist activities at home and abroad. They view these lands as theirs and don't welcome the presence of the infidel. As we know, these people are riled up these days. Their behaviour is almost incomprehensible to most of us....

We're still living together before marriage and we have been together for over 22 years. We don't want to jinx the relationship, eh. LOL

Most of health care is not about handing out replacement parts. It sounds to me like you are a very judgemental and mean-spirited individual. Anyone can get cancer or heart disease, have a stroke or be badly damaged due to a car accident or because of some other kind of bad luck. Not every seriously ill individual is a hard-drinking, morbidly obese alcoholic on welfare with a drug problem. There are a huge array of genetic and environmental factors at play, as well as blind bad luck, when it comes to who will fall seriously ill and who will not. My ex-husband fell ill with non Hodgson's lymphoma when he was 13 years old. He was hospitalised for a year and was expected to die. He was not a smoker. He did receive radiation and chemotherapy. Chemotherapy was a brand new treatment at the time and it was this which saved his bacon. He was still undergoing preventive chemo when we were married in our early 20s. He died when he was in his mid-50s from cancer caused by the radiation which he received as a 13 year old. He was never a drinker or a smoker. His medical costs during his year long fight as a kid with cancer were covered under our system; had they not been they would have bankrupted his lower middle class parents.

By the way, my mum, who was born in 1918, did a little bit of test driving. Nothing wrong with making sure all the equipment - emotional and physical - works, eh. :eyebrows: I myself kissed, or, er, whatever, a number of frogs before I found the one who turned into my prince.

Oh, but this made me laugh! Your story reminds me of the experience which one of my closest girlfriends had. She had been living with a guy whose idea of intimacy was to roll on top of her, thrash around for a few minutes, and then roll off. After he brutally dumped her by driving her to her parents' house and leaving her there she finally started dating again. Well, for the first time in her life she got some foreplay. As the guy was kissing her belly she freaked out, grabbed him by his hair, and shrieked "what is this, this...HOLLYWOOD SEX!?!" :faint: Yep, you have definitely got to test drive 'em.

It sounds like you came from a third world country. Up here in Canada we do have air conditioning, central heating, and clean sheets. The same holds true of such countries as Germany, France, Sweden....

Sorry for the lengthy post but I have tried to give you an honest assessment of the good, the bad, and ugly of our health care system as I understand it.

Lapband surgery is not covered by our universal health care system. This is a sad business indeed and there are truly horribly long waits for the much more invasive surgeries which are covered. Indeed there was a recent case of a relatively young morbidly obese man who died while waiting for surgery. This was covered by our newspapers and was rightly called a tragedy and a wake-up call for our health system. As for regular medical care, we are generally not required to wait for days in doctors' offices. We do, however, need to make appointments. I have always been very well served by our medical system as had my parents up to their deaths. My father had died in his mid-80s of cancer and was treated well. My mother died when she was in her late 80s but when she was in her early 80s had received a knee transplant and had been receiving hands-on care for her vulnerability to strokes/heart attack during her final decades. Where our system is now falling down is in the arena of certain elective surgeries which ironically the overweight boomer population are demanding. It seems that knee replacement surgery is a key area where people may be required to wait and there are problems in government-funded treatments of obesity, as I have already mentioned. And our health care system can be slow to pick up on some of the latest ground breaking techniques, another reason why you see some Canadians opting to go south of the border. But then I wonder how quickly the HMOs are ready to accept and cover the cost of those same new advances.... The other problem is one which a private care system would be unwilling to correct. Much of Canada, unlike the States, is very thinly populated. Some of our provinces number fewer residents than live in my city. It is increasingly difficult finding doctors as the old ones retire who are willing to practice in these rural areas and it certainly is not cost effective to set up major medical centres in these areas, areas which may be the size of some of your states, by the way. These people do have problems receiving the same degree of medical service as we city folk do and it may be that it is some of them who are complaining about our medical system. It is unlikely that a dollar-driven private health care system would change this problem. Here are a few additional things which I can say about our health care system. Research was done into who are the primary and regular users of the health care system in my province (the health care systems up here, though federally mandated, are provincially run) and it was discovered that the primary users are the middle class and the elderly. The poor tend to only use the system on an emergency only basis. I found these results interesting but not all that surprising once I thought about it. I myself am a fairly heavy user of our system for a number of reasons which are too boring to go into and whenever I am in my doctor's waiting room, one which she shares with a group of other doctors, I see mothers with their children, entire families, highschool and university students, elderly people, and nicely groomed middle-aged individuals. I don't see any broke-down poor types or street psychotics. And I live in the heart of the city, not the suburbs. The other thing which I will mention is that my brother is a doctor who used to practice medicine up here but who now works south of the border. He can't stand our climate! :heh: He has told me that his treatment of his patients is now constrained at times by the demands of the financial bottom line, something which doesn't happen up here. And up here we read that HMOs will drop patients who have serious and expensive diseases such as heart disease, cancer, MS.... This leaves the middle class families on the hook and now they are not permitted to get out from under the financial burden by declaring bankruptcy. This never happens in those countries which have universal health care. And of course our taxes are graduated here, just as they likely are south of the border. The rich pay more than the middle class who in turn pay more than the poor whereas the financial burden of private health insurance is not something that is on a sliding scale of cost per income. A couple of years ago I saw figures which gave a breakdown of the cost per capita of your health care system vs the public health care systems of a number of industrialised nations. The annual cost per capita of your present health care system was approximately $2000 more than the cost of the most expensive universal health care system. It strikes me that $2000 per American per year is an enormous sum. This is the price of big business it would seem.

I am sorry to hear about your mother-in-law, Marimaru.

In those countries which have universal health care nobody gets dropped on a technicality.

Oh, I sure was having terrible cramps and spasms along with everything else. But now, after 6 weeks of Hell, it is finally gone!!!! And I successfully avoided the dreaded harvesting bizness. Ugh.

You make good points in the above quoted post, BJean. Once people are working legally and paying into the system they will not have as much cash to take home. Then they will be united in demanding better pay and better working conditions. Another point is that both the rich and the working poor all consume roughly the same amount of the basic necessities: toilet paper, personal sanitary products, dish soap, etc. And the poor, like the rich, need shelter, food, clothing, transportation, and access to education and health care. This is the union's reasoning behind the comparatively little disparity between the hourly wages of the skilled and the less/unskilled labour in my husband's unionised plant. Toronto is an expensive city to live in - primarily because shelter and food are expensive here - and so everyone needs money to live in a decent manner. The better jobs are better paying but not by very much; they are, however, a lot more interesting.

Oh, I can't watch any surgeries at all. I am very, very squeamish. I like to imagine that my insides are made of india rubber - that is to say, entirely solid all the way through. :straight I have never changed a diaper or cleaned up sick for this reason. :help: I am easily grossed out. (Re the dysentery problem, after 6 weeks it went away without me having to do anything gross. I started swallowing down handfuls of acidopholus. I think that did the trick. phew! )

Gibson, seeing the effect that my weight loss had had on the folks who live in the next cottage to my in-laws was definitely a strange experience for me. It was an affirmation that the band was working and that I successfully lost a lot of weight and that was a good thing. You see, I tend to still think of myself as being more or less the same size as I was. I still think of myself as a big grrl. At that same time I hadn't realized that people had been noticing that I was fat. I thought that they had always been seeing the essential Green and not paying any attention to the outside envelope. I guess this was dumb on my part. Duh!!! By the way, your boyfriend sounds like a honey and very much like my husband, a goodlookin' guy who has always found me gorgeous. :Banane10:

Greed is very much the name of the game. My husband has just come back from spending the past month in Mexico. His mission was to assist in training Mexicans to perform highly paid unionized Canadian jobs in the field of aircraft manufacturing. He is a union member himself. He opted to go down because he was told by the company that these local jobs were leaving the country no matter what and if the Mexicans didn't work out the work would be sent to China. In light of this information he chose to go to Mexico even though he felt like a traitor to his own country. What he found when he arrived depressed him still further - a state of the art facility which puts our local plant to shame. In the Holiday Inn where he was staying he found many American and Canadian businessmen who were all down in Mexico for the same reason: they were working on the transfer of Canadian and American jobs to Mexico. The city where all this activity is going on numbers approximately 1 million inhabitants, is situated in the interior, in the mountains and thus the summer weather isn't unbearably hot and humid. The local newbies at the plant make approximately $500 Cdn/month including overtime. My husband who is a leadhand in his field makes close to $30 Cdn/hr straight time + benefits. The average Canadian worker in his field doesn't make much less. The difference in these figures is stunning, I think, and I believe that more and more companies will shift manufacturing operations down to Mexico. This will lead to Mexico becoming one of those emerging economies, just as India and China are emerging economies. This economic growth may eventually solve the illegal problem north of the border. Up here we will be facing other problems, however; we will be without those highly paid unionized manufacturing jobs.

Barbie at my cousin's house tomorrow. He is a carnivore, a cook, he has a pool, and there is a local heat wave!!! It's gonna be protein city for Green!:eyebrows::whoo::hungry:

I should clarify the victims of the lousy Chinese antibiotics, the ones whom I described in my earlier post, were in fact Chinese citizens.

Aha! Mission accomplished.

Remember that almost all advanced economies, with the exception of the U.S., have universal health care. The countries who have this save a lot of money because we cut out the businessmen. More taxes but no premiums, eh.... Everyone is on the hook one way or another but those countries who do have universal health care are not underwriting the lifestyles of a cadre of Big Biznessmen.

but they are certainly not bankrupted, you know.