Project Bioshield - President Bush (our greatest President it 10 years)

[KMAN]

Project Bioshield

In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush announced Project BioShield -- a comprehensive effort to develop and make available modern, effective drugs and vaccines to protect against attack by biological and chemical weapons or other dangerous pathogens. Project BioShield will:

Ensure that resources are available to pay for "next-generation" medical countermeasures. Project BioShield will allow the government to buy improved vaccines or drugs for smallpox, anthrax, and botulinum toxin.
Strengthen NIH development capabilities by speeding research and development on medical countermeasures based on the most promising recent scientific discoveries; and
Give FDA the ability to make promising treatments quickly available in emergency situations - this tightly controlled new authority can make the newest treatments widely available to patients who need it in a crisis.
>>More about the Project Bioshield

Medical Liability
President Bush has proposed a framework for addressing the medical liability crisis.

Improvements in health care quality and patient safety through litigation reform.
National adoption of proven standards to make the medical liability system more fair, predictable, and timely.
>>More about Medical Liability

President's Health Care Reform Agenda
Key Components of the President's Health Care Reform Agenda"

Ensuring Every American Can Choose Affordable Health Care That Meets Their Needs
Improving the Quality of Health Care
Effective Support to Increase Biomedical Research and Strengthen the Health Care Safety Net

 

[Oceans11]

President's Health Care Reform Agenda
Key Components of the President's Health Care Reform Agenda"

Ensuring Every American Can Choose Affordable Health Care That Meets Their Needs
Improving the Quality of Health Care

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Americas healthcare system is a sick joke.
Its one of the main reasons why many ordinary people would never even consider the place as somewhere permanent to move to.

Healthcare is such a BASIC right in a civilised society.
40 million of your citizens have zip.
(Of course, they choose to have no cover.

)

And yet you spend more money (% GDP) on healthcare than almost anywhere on the planet.

 

[KMAN]

Eek - I think I misunderstood you! Did you say that no reasonable person would move here?

I have no way of proving this but I think it's safe to say that this country accepts more citizenship applications than any other country in the world, probably combined. So it can't be that bad.

Can you tell me your solution to our healthcare crisis?

Thanks,
KMAN

 

[Phaedrus]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Healthcare is such a BASIC right in a civilised society. 40 million of your citizens have zip. (Of course, they choose to have no cover.)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Healthcare is most emphatically not a right in civilised society. It is a need, in all societies. A need is not a right.

Since it was I who pointed out to you that the Socialist's "40 million" figure included those who chose no health care, and you roll your eyes at it, are you saying that people should notbe free to choose what to spend their resources on? Or that their choice does not count? Or the fact that they choose not to have health insurance still constitutes some form of crisis or tragedy despite the fact that their position is voluntary? I don't understand the aside.


Phaedrus

 

[wilheim]

Tell me what % of the 40 million people today in the US. can afford health insurance but choose not to pay for it. I am not sure what that % is, but am willing to go out on a limb and say it is less than 10% of the 40 million. The real people in jeopardy are the lower income working people. I am talking about people making less than $12 per hour. The companies they work for do not give heath insurance as a benefit to this labor bracket, and they obviously cannot afford it on the money they make. So what happens when someone in this perdicament has a catastrophic medical emergency? Minor medical procedures also become almost impossible for someone with out insurance to treat. Things like high blood pressure, dental or oral disease, arthritis, obesity, etc. These are things that people need to be treated for but are not able to seek that treatment because its a battle every week to just pay rent and utilities, not to mention food.
Do I have the answer, no I do not. I just know it is a very major problem in the US today. Also I am not trying to say it is anything new (Bush Administration), the problem has been around for a long time, it just seems to be getting worse as the population and number of foreign residents in the US grows. IMO. money spent on Project Bioshield would be better off spent on health insurance for the low-wage bracket of workers in our country. Call it welfare or Democratic give aways, or anything else, it does'nt change the fact that a lot of honest, hard working, tax-paying Americans can't afford to see a doctor in the richest country on this planet.


wil.

 

[Oceans11]

If I was going to cash in my chips and emigrate, I would not consider the US because of its poor healthcare system.
A member of my family went to NZ a year ago with his family, one of the main factors was decent healthcare.

The rest of life I can look after with hard work, housing savings etc, but prolonged bad health is the one area none of us have any control over.

Most western countries use a total cover system, where everyone that works, contributes, and everyone is covered.
No system is perfect, but it does work.
And no-one ever has to worry about the basic level thats available when you have a crisis/accident.

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The UK NHS got going after the second world war.
Basically, most of the population had gone through two world wars, and yet there were not even basic things like decent housing and healthcare availble to working people.

The population was somewhat pissed off that they could sacrifice so much, and receive so little in return.

Winston Churchill lost the election immediately after WW2 because he was the leader of the conservatives, who fought tooth and nail to stop the NHS and decent public housing.


BTW: At the end of the war, around 2 million guns got handed back to the authorities by the home guard. The UK civilian population has never really had that 'we must have guns' mindset.

 

[Phaedrus]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Phaedrus

Tell me what % of the 40 million people today in the US. can afford health insurance but choose not to pay for it. I am not sure what that % is, but am willing to go out on a limb and say it is less than 10% of the 40 million.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Take those who can afford insurance and choose not to purchase it(such as myself) and those who cannot afford it and would not purchase it if the otherwise could, and I think that the total number would hover in the 15-20% range of the cited 40 million. Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal, but I think that padding a statistic by as much as 25% weakens the argument right off the bat.

I do not pretend that there is no problem with people notbeing able to access affordable health care when it's needed. However, people on the other side of the issue often pretend that heal care is some divinely-wrought gift which is an unquestioned assumption in life, a "right" up there with housing, food, education and other things which are demonstrably not rights at all. Socialised medicine causes problems for every country that offers it, economic, political, and ironically -- in the nation's overall health levels. People who need not worry about being sick do not take as good care of themselves as those who do.

And in a country like America, the schism between stupid masses demanding a free ride and those with better sense than to think that anything granted by a politician is *free* causes an even greater problem -- because those who are not on the bandwagon pay the very highest costs imaginable for any sort of medical treatment (this includes myself.)

This phenomenon is caused by the seperation of demand from cost which is inherent to any socialised system of medical care. Between subsidised care, out-of-control litigation, cost hikes caused by the FDA's creeping pace of study and approval, and an insurance industry impaled on the pens of so-called consumer advocates the entire medical sector in the US is a shambles. Like yourself, I do not pretend to have an answer, but I think that applying more of what's not working is hardly going to fix anything.


Phaedrus