"The citation is an article in a highly respected intellectual journal written by an expert at a highly respected think tank which the mayor read because he is an intellectually engaged human being" Rudy's smart dangit! hahaha I can't stop laughing at this one.

So he doesn't want the government involved in health care...that would be "socialized medicine". Guess that means the government should get out of highway building ("socialized transportation"), delivering mail ("socialized communiucation"), the military ("socialized warfare") and paying subsidies to mega-agriculture corporations ("socialized farming"). I could go on and on...but won't.

I haven't had the chance to read the original study on which the comments were based, but my guess is that these stats have nothing to do with cancer treatment or cure rates, just when the cancer is diagnosed in its natural history, a term called "lead time bias." Let's imagine two patients who are destined to die from prostate cancer on the same day, regardless of the medical care they receive. But one of them has a screening test 10 years prior to death, thus is alive for 10 years following diagnosis. The other patient doesn't have a screening test, but waits for symptoms to develop, and dies 3 years after diagnosis. The care for the first patient will look better, since he live 10 years following diagnosis, while the other patient lived only 3 years. YET THE MEDICAL CARE THEY RECEIVED DIDN'T MATTER AT ALL!!!!

You get the point....

Ken

Kind of not surprising he's getting his facts wrong--here's a guy who thinks affording lifesaving healthcare is exactly the same as buying a plasma TV.

Prostate brachytherapy--using radioactive seeds--was pioneered in the modern era by a physician in Denmark, whose student brought it to the US

You'd think a guy whose life was saved by this technique would have at least a little gratitude towards that evil socialized medicine of big government Europe.

But Rudy needs a bad guy here. He can't defend the status quo--which is what he wants to do. So he offers a non-solution and then uses fake facts to create a nonexistent boogeyman--socialized medicine--to scare people with.

The details of Rudy's healthcare policy are as follows: "eeww, foreigners."

That's all there is to it. Never mind that he was treated while covered by the NY state insurance plan. Never mind that most Americans with prostate cancer are covered by Medicare. The facts don't matter: saying that foreign healthcare is icky is all that matters to Mister Mayor.

He was sucking up to Gordon Brown not long ago. No principles, no policies, nothing but a rag to wave.

The UK health service has a problem with cancer which they are looking into. It seems a combination of less testing for early diagnosis and not enough radio-therapy machines have the 5-year survival rates as low as countries like Poland which spend much less on health care.

On the other hand, the statistics Rudy cited are bogus wherever they came from. Conservative free-market health care advocate David Gratzer is not an unbiased source.

Rudy was also using New York city government healthcare when treated.

He also was fortunate enough not to need a kidney transplant, where Canada and the UK have much better survival rates than the U.S..

MEDICARE is not socilaized medicine.

Its a government funded single payer system as is Canada's system.

The DOCs are not employees of the government. VA healthcare is close to socialized medicine where many of the DOCs and employees work for the government.

Yes we have slightly better outcomes, but that lead has been rapidly dropping.

And while the other western economies pay 6-8% of GDP, we are approaching 18 percent.. a 300 percent increase in 25 years. And our overall outcomes such as life expectancy are not as good.

Ironicly most Prostate cases are men over 65 and thus they are treated and cured under Medicare and not private healthcare!

Healthcare is now 3 times the percentage of our economy as MFG and yet 20% of the population is uninsured.. This is not sustainable.

If we spent only 12% GDP instead of almost 18%, that would be twice what other countries spend and it would be one hell of a system. Insurance companies which treat no one account for almost 50% of our healthcare costs. And then their are the drugs we buy from the same factory in Ireland that we pay 4-5 times more for. WE subsidize the healthcare of our competitors. In the rest of the world drugs are 20% of their healthcare dollar and here almost 50%.

Regards

THE BOTTOM LINE IS: THE U.S. RANKS 37th IN HEALTHCARE, IN THE WORLD...AND, THAT'S DESPITE THE FACT THAT WE SPEND THE MOST ON IT, COMPARED TO EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!!!!! CASE CLOSED!!!!! YOU, RUDY, ARE AMONGST THE ONLY GROUP OF PEOPLE (THE WEALTHY &/or THOSE HAVING JOBS W/EXCELLENT BENEFITS) WHO ARE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE BEEN ABLE TO BEAT CANCER!!!!!

(continued from my last post)......WITHOUT GOING BROKE!!!!!

Follow the money. Time the "industry" is examined. Take pills. We produce the most yet pay the highest prices in the world? Something is wrong with that. I still say this could be fixed with a combination of things that fall short of complete socialized but that would mean taking the insurance lobby to task and the politicians can't have that. I'd like to add that most I know in Canada (I lived there a couple of years) have additional insurance policies knowing full well the other won't be enough if something big happens. Yes we need a fix. I'd like to see the best choice in a fix tho.

As far as I understand the reason (or part of the reason) US health care takes so much of your GDP is because of the costs of medicine. Most other industrialized countries don't let the pharmaceutical industries dictate the price of medicines. So yes you are spending more but your not getting more.

Most of you are that sound more than happy to pony up YOUR own money to pay for someone else's insurance. If you're all for giving your money to someone else for their health care, how about starting with me. My girlfriend could use better insurance.

The medical debate and ANY other entitlement program is all about Karl Marx and wealth redistribution. Most of you seem to support this. I for one am more interested in the government getting off my back and out of my wallet. The US health care system is messed up BECAUSE the government got involved. A free market system would be the best thing for any country. Without competition, prices will sky rocket like they have.

And someone please tell me when access to health care became a human right? Actually, anyone willing to answer in any way other than "It's not a right" is already brainwashed and a lost cause. A right CANNOT require someone else to do something.

Sean, you seem quite happy that your tax money is going to ensure that insurance companies get rich. I'm sure they send you Christmas cards thanking you for your contribution, moron. Perhaps you put your grandmother on an ice floe and watched her drift out to sea - most of us actually care about the people in our families (and our girlfriends.) We also know that this country is already spending significantly more than any other country in the world on health care. Do you want your hard-earned money to go to a doctor treating your wife's cancer or to a insurance company trying to figure out how to refuse to pay for the treatment that might save her life? Karl Marx has nothing to do with this! You think you can pay out of pocket for catastrophic medical expenses? Insurance exists to spread risk and ensure that people can receive the help they need even when they can't afford it. If truth be told most of us will never make enough money to cover a life threatening illness. What should we all do? Just flipping die because you're never going to get sick? Ha! I hope you never do because like all these heartless members of the Judas (GOP) Party you'll sing a different tune if your life is at risk and you don't have funds stored up from feeding at the public trough like Guiliani.

Terrier-
"Sean, you seem quite happy that your tax money is going to ensure that insurance companies get rich."

Obviously, you don't read very well. I want a free market solution. The problem is government involvement. Insurance wouldn't be so expensive/screwed if the government would get the hell out of the way of the free market. Insurance should only exist to cover the major illnesses, not the "Oh, I have the sniffles and need to see the doctor." It's people like you and the Democrats that created the current situation.

Your ilk seem to think more government can solve the problems that government creates. Just look at everything the government gets involved in, education, health care, security, the drug war, etc. The more government gets involved the worse all of these have become.

One thing I find very telling, most liberals want all of these programs "for the children," but when was the last time you heard of one of them reaching into their own pocket and paying for someone else. Hillary wants to parade all of the "poor" families, but I don't see her reaching into her own $10,000,00+ bank account and actually helping. She and the other libs want to reach into MY pocket to help other people. How about letting ME decide what I do with MY money and life. Stopping tell me how to live and spend my money.

Terrier, so are you ready to put your money where your mouth is and pay for my girlfriends insurance, or do you just want someone else to pay?

I'm paying for her already because I'm accepting a lower salary from my company because they have to pay for my private insurance. You might think I would get that back in lower taxes but the truth is I don't because I have to pay your grandmother's insurance to keep her out of the private pool so insurance companies can make a profit off my insurance. In your free market how do you plan to cover your grandmother? Are you going to force private insurers to cover her? There is certainly nothing "free market" about requiring insurance companies to cover bad risks. What do you propose to solve that? Ice floes still sound reasonable? Why in the heck would I as an insurer even write you a policy to cover only catastrophic illness? I'm betting you'll never get sick? At some point I'll have to drop you either because you got sick or percentages tell me you soon will. What will you do then? Health care is not something that can reliably generate a profit. That is why all this bull about the "free market" is just bull. "Free market" means taxpayers ensure that insurance companies make profits so we can pretend to have choice when they make all the choice and we take all the risks. I'm not asking you to pay a dime to cover me just to join all of us in a pool that shares the risks equally. The current system has never been the liberal solution - not now - not ever. In '46 Truman tried to introduce National Health Care and a bunch of whiners about "free markets" shouted it down. I'll guarantee you that many of them lived to regret that - when they got sick.

Most men get prostate cancer at an age when they are already eligible for Medicare, our own American version of socialized medicine. Comparing survival rates for Britain and the U.S. means comparing the results of two socialized medicine systems. The U.S. won? Well, hooray for our side. It says nothing about the merits of private vs. public medicine.

Kudos to ABC for at least fact-checking Giuliani's ad. Other networks simply ran it as "news", thereby just giving him free air time.

We can eliminate lines for anything - health care, ferry rides or drinks of water at a public fountain.

Step 1: Raise the price.

Step 2: Those without the money drop out of line.

Step 3: If the line is too long, go to Step 1.

Step 4: No Lines!!!!

Well, Rudy would say that, wouldn't he? The unreflectively selfish like him love the sort of bogus demonstration that purports to show the superior efficacy of self-interest trumping that of crappy old equity. At least with respect to comparisons between and among the nations most inflected by the Enlightenment, it's almost always a misconstruction if not an outright lie.

But even if what Giuliani asserts were true, it would to me be irrelevant, because it's not just one corpus of data points joined in battle against another here; first principles are implicated in the real agon. A quotation from the late Robin Cook, the great center-left Labourite who (in a manner quite unlike the too-clever-by-half equivocating that we've come to expect from the craven, self-serving klippoth who float insubstantially around the Democratic Party and other nodes of the Amerikan system of government) had the integrity to walk away from his post as foreign minister rather than ratify Tony Blair's allying the UK with the immoral (and now obviously failed) US adventure in Mesopotamia and otherwise proskynetically capitulating to pressure from the Shrub and his cabal of Podhoretzian disassociatives to assent to an American project bent on making the world safe for unbridled capitalism through cowing it by almost exclusively martial means: “The history of social democracy can be expressed as the struggle to set limits to the market and to define those areas where priorities should be set by social policy rather than commercial forces.” Exactly so. And one of those areas is medical care.

Trapped as we are on this tiny rock with its 13-kilometer-thick biosphere surrounded by light-year upon light-year of unexploitable lifelessness, we indeed function within a zero-sum regime, and I have yet to see how that reality squares in any way with the free-market ideologues' implicit willingness to immiserate some that others may wallow in abundance. My moral stance: Every human is entitled to some minimal level of a decent material existence -- food, clothes, a roof over the head, a doctor both to prevent and to manage infirmity, and education with which to enlarge the individual's intellectual world and better his or her material circumstances, and, thereby, those of society in general -- by virtue just of being born on this planet. Each is also possessed of the right to prosecute within the limits of reason any pursuit not facially vicious -- finance capitalism or Ultimate Frisbee or the composition of villanelles: whatever. In the interstice between these two birthrights -- neither negotiable nor reducible -- arises the mediating mechanism of social democracy.

Naive? So you say. What humans will do and what humans ought to do often enough diverge. An ever-burgeoning number of Americans are arriving at the ethical view that maintains that humans could and should be social democrats -- and you free-market freebooters would do well to realize that you'll be in conflict with ever more of those who espouse this creed on into the future. Lady Thatcher was dead wrong about there being no such thing as society, and the repudiation of her dictum will be essential to the survival of humankind through this 21st century.

Kevin-

"An ever-burgeoning number of Americans are arriving at the ethical view that maintains that humans could and should be social democrats -- and you free-market freebooters would do well to realize that you'll be in conflict with ever more of those who espouse this creed on into the future."

Apparently you think this group of individuals somehow has the right to force us "freebooters" to do what you want us to do. In what demented United States do you live? Have you never read the Constitution? Please tell me where in the Constitution it gives the right or authority to the government to steal my money at gun point to pay for someone else's medical care. Oh, that's right, you think the Constitution is just archaic and out of date, doesn't apply anymore.

No one is stopping any of you getting together and pooling your money to pay for the poor's medical care. That is what a free society is, you are free to do whatever you want as long as you do not harm someone else or someone else's property. So, instead of screaming for the government to solve your perceived ills, get of your ass and DO it.

It would be must more efficient for you all to go find a homeless person and give them a room in your own house. That eliminates all of those workers in the middle who get paid out of OUR taxes. Pool YOUR money and buy a free hospital for the poor. Hell, buy a factory and give them all jobs. Oops, sorry, that's what a free market would do and free markets are bad.

I would actually GIVE to charities that I believe in, but the government has already STOLEN that money from me to waste it before giving to charity. There is a direct causation between increased taxes and decreased charitable giving. That's right, REDUCING TAXES == INCREASING CHARITY. And I wonder who is more efficient?

Terrier-

"In your free market how do you plan to cover your grandmother?"

My grandparents are dead.

"There is certainly nothing "free market" about requiring insurance companies to cover bad risks."

Your right. In a free market, insurance companies wouldn't be making most of the decisions for your medical care, you and your doctor would do that. Much of the cost of running medical facilities is tied up in all of the requirements of government and the insurance industry. A free market removes these expenses. The only expenses are those of the medical care, not of the regulation/insurance staff. This creates greater competition, which is good for everyone.
"'Free market' means taxpayers ensure that insurance companies make profits so we can pretend to have choice when they make all the choice and we take all the risks."

That's only if you assume that we currently have a free market. We don't. Government has done a very good job of making sure that didn't happen for long after getting a taste of taxes in 1913. Government has created the expensive medical care because of their meddling.

As I posted above, if you want to help the poor, then help the poor. Just don't force me to help the poor. I'm more than capable of choosing for myself to give to the poor. I don't need the government telling me how to spend my money. I'm much better at it than the government. Except when I spend my money, I get to express my viewpoint and values, I'm not force to go along with whatever the government has my viewpoint and values are.