The supply of hearts also determines whether or not a person can get a transplant.
The fact that I’m suspicious of health care reformers is not my problem - it’s just the case.
Steve, Mark,
the French social system is not without its problems, as far as I know it is very expensive and due to France’s deficit problems there might be cuts on the horizon.
Yes, our economies are heavily energy dependent and when we talk of new energy sources we must pay attention to types of energy supplied and required. Oil goes mainly into transportation and for the hauling goods over long distances using planes, ships and trucks there is no substitute for liquid fuels yet. Nuclear and most renewable sources deliver electricity. Using the rail network for hauling goods is much more energy efficient than using trucks and would allow he use of electricity. That is why investment in the US in this sector would be a good thing.
On the transplant issue:
I always thought that the number or donor organs is in fact the bottleneck and if someone could buy oneself an oran, I would find that indeed problematic.
That fact that you are suspicious may be a fact but it has not objective value as an argument. The health system consists of more issues than heart transplants. It is the ideology of people like you that prevents Canada from reforming the health system and everyone suffers.
Most Canadians, me included, accept that it makes sense to contribute to a universal health insurance scheme. On the other hand I, and I would imagine most people, do not want ideologues telling them what they are allowed to do in terms of buying health services for their family.
The health system in all countries are in trouble with rising expectations, rising average ages, and a declining working population. Ideologues are not going to help find solutions that are fair and practical.
As nice as it is to be lumped in with “people like you” and being told that I’m causing everyone to suffer, I would just remind you that I said I have no problem with reforming the system provided that outcomes don’t fall and that people are not able to buy essential services at the expense of those who can’t afford to pay for them. That strikes me as a reasonable position. I also said that European systems seem to do a better job than ours does.
I’m not an ideologue - I barely have any views on the system. I gave up my health insurance in Canada when I moved to Japan and, over the course of my life, have barely ever even used the system.
However, I’ve seen the system successfully and competently be there for my family members through both catastrophic and chronic conditions.
Also, in the Economist surveys where the measure the quality of life for various cities, Canadian cities generally get a perfect score for health services. That must mean something, at least.
What’s not in doubt, in my opinion, is that we were far better off after the introduction of the system than we were before it.
And the fact that I’m suspicious was not made as an argument. It was simply a statement of my point of view. And that means that I will be cautious when examining proposals for health care reform. It doesn’t mean that I am opposed to health care reform. If the major stakeholders in the system come to the conclusion that a reform is necessary or desirable, that’s fine with me. I think people should be looking at systems around the world and adopting a “best practices” approach.
However, I think that there are people who would like to see health care services, and health care insurance, sold competitively on the open market and never mind those who can’t afford to pay. So when people advocate introducing the “free market” into health services, I think it’s not a bad idea to be cautious and make sure that it’s actually an attempt to improve the system and not an attempt to undermine it.
@Ilya_L Thank you for the Savva Morozov link, v. interesting to read. His employees were really biting the (liberal) hand that fed them.
“If you buy shoes does that mean that another person cannot buy shoes?”
Nope. But it may very well be the case that “another person” can’t afford to buy himself and his kids shoes of the same high quality as a rich Lumbermerchant. And it may also be the case that “another person” can’t afford to buy new shoes as frequently as a rich Lumbermerchant. In fact, it may very well be the case that the kids of “another person” have sores on their feet, Steve.
(BTW I’m not making any bones about this. As far as I can see it’s just the rather sad nature of human society that some have plenty and others have little. In a way it would be perfectly logical if this applied to healthcare also.)
Which country does have a health care system that can emulated, certainly not the US, France and their looming budget cuts, strikes and riots used to be the example but now that idea has fallen apart and Sweden isn’t a great example for the rest of us because they’re about as a homogeneous low populated country as one could find. Most people realize that that system can’t be imported to a large pluralistic country like the US or even Canada. So that’s my question:
Who is doing it right? Or at least near right both socially and economically?
I hardly understand my own weird healthcare system let alone the rest of the planet’s.
We should have a separate thread on health systems in the world. A little sleuthing in google suggests that the French have the best system. They also have better life expectancy than their neighbours although that might also be diet related.
Jay, the best way to ensure that everyone has lousy shoes, or any other commodity, is to try to make sure everyone has the same number and quality of shoes, or other commodity. It has been tried.
This is no more sad than the fact that we have rainy days. It is just reality. It is far more important to make sure that there are lots of shoes, or in the case of medical services, and abundant supply of trained medical workers, equipment and medicine for everyone.
I agree that it’s a matter of reality, Steve.
But I have to confess that it does make me sad to think of poor people - especially their kids.
But perhaps this is just a reflection of weakness on my part? Maybe I need to learn to look the other way?
Jay it is normal for people to want a society where everyone can live a live of dignity. The question is only how to achieve it. There are of course differences of opinion on how best to achieve this goal.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but government rationing of the supply of goods and services really does not improve people’s quality of life. It is far more effective to mobilize the creativity, energy and even greed of many individuals who then provide a range of quality and an abundance of these products and services.
Government can then intervene to make sure that the playing field is leveled, between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, to prevent abuses and equalize opportunity. However, when the incentive to take responsibility for oneself is weakened, the results are usually negative for society and for the individuals concerned.
I’m not actually disagreeing, Steve.
As you say, the alternatives to Capitalism have been tried - and we know that they are certain to make the overall situation worse for almost everyone.
IMO The best kind of society would be a form of Christian-Capitalism, where many of those who greatly prosper are moved by compassion to donate some of their wealth towards helping the genuinely deserving poor.
(BTW I have just written a post which manages to touch upon BOTH politics AND religion in one swoop - so I guess you could say I’m a hypocrite, too…!)
@Sanne, you are welcome. The website, as you mighthave noticed, goes on many languages.
@ Steve,
Thank you for the link on the French health care. And also for that, in a way, you have begun answerring my question, what could be your program of changes to the Canadian Health Care were you running as an independen candidate (the thread on multiculturalism). Full support to the idea of a new therad on the health care system in different countries. Must be intersting and educational. Much better then chewing again the global warming.
@ Mark Bortrun and Global Warming.
Steve recently declared it is not an offence to say on LingQ forums that someone says nonsense. Unfortunately Steve then commited the act of self-moderation and deleted the thread. The document is lost, and without it my lawyer cannot not support my case. (in fact I am lazy) But we kindly ask you to provide the court with the evidence from
(quote)
" 99.9% of the world climate scientists that tell me that they very strongly think that something is the case."
I think I was too lazy, some explanations are needed (and sorry for the typos).
Mark (Bortrun), You have written:
"As for the environment, I am scared silly by the threat of climate change. [1] I accept that it is happening [2] and that humans are a major, perhaps the primary, cause. [3] I accept that because that is what the vast, overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists say, regardless of the enthusiasm/blindness of environmental activists.
[4]Frankly, I suspect that a lot of activists would be out there screaming “the sky is falling” whether it was or not. [5]But it appears that, in this case, it actually is falling. I’m not a climate scientist, so when[6] 99.9% of the world climate scientists tell me that they very strongly think that something is the case, I’m inclined to believe them."
[1] - this I may accept too
[2] - this is still very arguable
[3] - just ordinary people and the journalists say so, with refernse to the majority of scientists.
[4]- that’s what the activists are indeed doing, IMO
[6]- we have the evidence that only 66.3145926% of the world climat scientists say so.
Ilya,
could you please substantiate your claims [2] and [3]? All academies of science of all major developed countries in the world back the conclusion that a) GW is real and b) most likely man made. I doesn’t get more unanimous than that.
Steve,
I do believe in many ideas of capitalism such as risk taking and unleashing peoples creativity, however I also see a lot of flaws: Unfortunately the level field is not level and social mobility in many capitalist country is rather low.
Furthermore I think that the price signals of our financial system are often not very useful at all and do not necessarily trigger the developments of technologies we really need. Capitalism does not factor in ecological cost or ecological services appropriately and therefore distorts true prices.
Another sad fact is that the poorer countries will never be able to catch up to our consumption levels unless there is an unprecedented technology revolution that would allow to expand consumption dramatically within the physical limits of our resourcé base.
Ilya, fair enough. 99.9% was not meant to be taken literally. I don’t have a statistic for that. My meaning was a vast, overwhelming majority. Are there any scientific bodies anywhere in the world, climate-related or not, which dispute human-caused climate change?
Mark, nowadays it is almost as easy to research something on the web as to repeat generalities. Just google “scientists challenge global warming hype” and start reading.
I only looked at a few.
By JOHN R. CHRISTY
November 1, 2007
I’ve had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don’t think I will add “0.0001 Nobel Laureate” to my resume.
The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that’s another story.Large icebergs in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. Winter sea ice around the continent set a record maximum last month.
Both halves of the award honor promoting the message that Earth’s temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.
I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming – around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)
It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.
Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, “Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with ‘At our present level of ignorance, we think we know …’”
I haven’t seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.
Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we’ve seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.
A non-governmental international panel on climate change (NIPCC) comprising over 40,000 international scientists have challenged the findings of all the Four Assessment Reports (ARA 4) written by scientists attached to the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Lead by Dr Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist and Dr Craig Idso, founder for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in the US, these scientists debunk all ARA4 claiming they have been written by a small group of “activist” scientists who are willing to bend backwards for professional and financial rewards.
Challenging all the major claims made in these reports, these scientists question the claim that rising global temperatures from mid-twentieth century have been due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. On the contrary, the NIPCC team attribute rising temperature to increased solar activity and speak about a solar-climate link and how small changes in solar activity manifest into larger climate effects.
Questioning the very foundations of the IPCC claims, they further assert, “the global warming hype has led to demands for unrealistic efficiency standards for cars, the creation of uneconomic wind and solar energy stations, the establishment of large production facilities for uneconomic biofuels, and the demand the electric companies purchase expensive power from so-called “renewable energy sources.”
Steve,
You are much smarter than that. The arena of scientific debate is not the internet but rather laboratories, conferences and scientific journals and there the consensus is pretty clear. Why do you think those skeptics write books rather than peer reviewed scientific papers? Mr. Singer’s NIPCC and his 40,000 scientists? Are you kidding me?
The impression of disagreement about GW in the scientific community is manufactured by well funded interest groups and individuals. I concede that projections of future temperature rises are very difficult with large error bars.
Friedemann,
Why do you think that “those in laboritories” conspire to manipulate and destroy scientic data which doesn’t fit in with their crackpot theory? Why do they conspire to stop any kind of free and open debate on this issue?
Some of these climate-doomsday-cranks have created a huge multi-million dollar industry from making the public believe that the world is about to go up in fire and smoke. But THEY wouldn’t be an “interest group”, of course…
I hate to say it, but I’m 100% with Steve on this one.
TYPOS:
laboratories, scientific
BTW I’m trying to find the exact words of the famous leaked e-mails. (They show some of these “scientists” secretly discussing how to censor sceptical studies from appearing in any scientific journal - amoung other things.)