This is beyond ridiculous

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Then why can't you explain the fact that countries with some form of socialized medicine spend so much less on healthcare despite the fact that everyone is covered? I don't think markets for food and markets for healthcare have a valid comparison. The properties are very different, especially when it comes to emergency care. When someone is experiencing an immediate medical emergency they often don't have the time or energy to shop around.

I also disagree with the notion that health insurance is a resource that can be made more efficient. Insurance companies are middle-man. They do not produce anything. The only way they can increase their efficiency is to become more sneaky in the ways in which they can deny coverage. Making it extremely difficult for the customer to be well informed on the product they are buying is essentially fraud.

The girl in the video has been exposed as Emily Schrader, the California state chairman of Students for Rick Perry and some sort of Israel fanatic. It appears the video was staged.

the actual passage in the book btw

I like how you worded the question. Countries with single-payer systems do spend less per citizen on health care and everyone is covered, but what type of health care do they receive? Canadian and British hospitals do not have as many CT scanners, MRIs and surgical instruments as US hospitals. They also have fewer physicians and wait times for surgery are much longer. They are forced to spend less out of budgetary necessity. If they raised salary caps on physician's pay to achieve parity with US doctors they would have to cut funding for other state departments or raise taxes. In some of those countries tax revenue is 30-40% of GDP. So they do spend less but they get less.

Telekon may have a point, yet I can imagine socialized medicine encourages people to show up for preventative care and checkups. While I imagine many Americans are trying to treat and diagnose themselves at home on Wikipedia.

Me I do lean Libertarian yet also am fine with experiments such as Romney care at the state level. I mean States run Unemployment insurance maybe they should have the authority over this to if people want to try it.

The problem is that many in the US don't get any care at all. You're basically saying, "We could all eat hamburger, but it's better for you to starve to death so that I can eat steak."

Another thing that nobody wants to consider is how unsustainable the current system is. Before the reform bill there was a study done by the insurance industry that concluded that one reasons premiums would continue to increase was because of a shrinking customer base....

The base was shrinking because more and more, businesses were dropping their health plans and individuals could not maintain the policies. People are not opting out of coverage because they want to. But fewer and fewer can afford to pay.

The dirty secret, the elephant in the room, is the fact that healthcare has become a millstone around the economy's neck. The cost of healthcare helped to bankrupt the airline and auto industries and the high cost of benefits regularly kills jobs. These days it is much cheaper to pay insane amounts of overtime than it is to provide healthcare for additional employees.

You do indeed have more physicians than we do: you have 2.4 physicians per 1000 population--we have a mere 2.3. The United Kingdom, however, beats us both with 2.5 physicians per 1000 population. You also beat us on nurses (in my view an equally important measure), with 10.6 to our 9.0 and the UK's 10.0.

Wait times is certainly the flavour of the decade in criticism of health care in Canada. Median wait time to see a specialist in Canada is four weeks, with 90% of patients being seen within 90 days. Median wait time for diagnostic services is two weeks, with 86% waiting less than 90 days. Median wait times for surgeries is four weeks, with 82% waiting less than 90 days. But at least we collect the data. There is no system of measurement of wait times in the USA. The most comprehensive survey on comparative health care access dates back to 2005, and while the numbers are generally good for US access to care, Germany--with its public, universal system--had you beat.

But wait times aren't always bad. A 1990 study found that 15 patients in British Columbia died waiting for heart surgery. But had they all received surgery immediately, 22 would have died based on the surgical mortality rate. Waiting lists serve to priorize the the higher risk patients, allowing lower risk patient the time to mitigate their presentations, and in many cases be healthier at the time of undergoing surgery, improving their survival rate.

The US and Canada both have a crisis in the number of family physicians, with only about a third of doctors practicing in the field, which is the gateway to medicine. In Europe the number is closer to half. Our best estimate is that we need to reach about 40% to provide coverage here--but we have made significant progress on supporting family physicians in the last 7 years. We are trending up--you're continuing to backslide.

The expenditure statistics are astounding. You spend $7,290 per capita on health care annually, compared with $3,895 in Canada and $2,992 in the UK (all are public and private spending combined). That is 16% of your GDP (we only spend 10.1%, the UK 8.4%). Even if we turn to the more artificial measure of health care as a percentage of government revenues, you spend 18.5% on health, covering only 45% of your costs. We spend 16.7%, but cover 69.8% of costs. The UK spends 15.8% of government revenue on health and manages to cover 81.7% of health care costs.

But does spending ipso facto demonstrate the quality of your health care system? As I see it, there are three major drivers of your health care costs: physician compensation, overtreatment, and prescription drug costs.

Do higher salaries for physicians necessarily result in better quality of care? A 2007 study looked at medical error reporting in seven countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK and the USA). In every category the USA presented higher incidences of medical error than Canada or the European countries. In three categories Australia ranked behind you, but in all the rest you were at the bottom.

Does overtreatment result in better quality of care? Let's look at some important measures:

Life expectancy: Your overall life expectancy is 78.3 years (75.6M/80.8F). Ours is 80.7 (78.3M/82.9F) and the United Kingdom's is 79.4 (77.2M/81.6F).

Infant mortality: Your national average is 6.26 per 1000 live births. Ours is 5.04, the United Kingdom's is 4.85. (CIA world factbook, 2009). UN figures for the 2008-2001 three year average are 7.07, 5.30 and 5.38, respectively.

How much of your health care spending is going to unnecessary prescription drugs? Fully 10% of Americans are now holding prescriptions for antidepressant medication. I consider this class of drugs to be wildly overprescribed in this country--and our prescription rate is half of yours.

But here is what I take to be the most damning statistic of all: In 2005 51% of Americans reported not visiting a doctor, undertaking a necessary test or filling a prescription, reporting cost as their reason for doing so. No other country in the OECD was even close. For all the money that you spend on health care, half of the people in your country have gone without some medical care that they know or they have been told that they need.

If you throw in anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic meds, that figure is around 20%.

I've never cried about politics (and rarely about anything) I laughed at first viewing this video but on second thought I hesitate.
Thinking about it I feel sorry for her. Life must be pretty hard for someone who gets that emotional so easily.