ScreamingDoom wrote:
A study was done in the 1990s to find the average wait time for surgeries that were elective, but life-threatening (things like bypass surgeries, cancer removal and the like) through English-speaking countries. Only the United States had a sub-double-digit waiting time; Australia had the second best if I recall correctly at 13 months. While socialized medicine may be cheaper for individuals, the actual quality and speed of medical care may not be as good or better and evidence suggests it is significantly worse in most cases. It's not a simple matter of "government pays for everything == everything is better!"
I am not familar with the study but I wouldn't be surprised if the only effect the socialized healthcare actually has on the wait time is that more people are requesting the procedures because they can afford them whereas in America there are a lot of people who need such procedures but can't afford them (or worse don't even know they need such procedures cause they can't even afford to see the specialists that would make such a diagnosis). Ultimately the advantage of universal healthcare is it gives the lowest costs due to the nature of insurance (the bigger the pool the lower the risks and thus lower costs) and treating problems earlier before they become more serious (without insurance a lot of people are forced or choose to ignore health problems until it lands them in the emergency room which costs a lot more).
I don't know what you're referring to as far as "restricting women's bodies". Is this an abortion thing? Because abortion is and has been legal in the United States for a long time.
Legal yes, restricted hell no. While federal law prevents states from banning abortions, many have found a work around by passing numerous restrictions and requirements on abortion clinics to the point that barely any can operate in their state due to a ruling that they could regulate them as long as the don't place undue burden on the clinics which they chose to interpret fairly loosely. Examples include requiring hallways to be wide enough for two gurneys to pass each other (bear in mind that the vast majority of abortions require no surgery) and requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals (which are often difficulty to get due to the hospitals political stance or financial situation, is entirely unnecessary because of safe abortion procedures are and hospitals don't just turn away patients, and bs because similar requirements are not place on other facilities despite having greater risks).
The US Government stance on global warming has been pretty clearly in the "support" side for decades. It's only recently that convention has been challenged. This is a good thing, as it's revealing a lot of the problems in the methodologies and studies (one of my favourites is using evidence from ground sensors in urbanized areas to discount evidence from plant studies and satellite data). Surely you can't be against that, yes? Surely being accurate is more important than being ideologically pure, yes? This is exact thing the episode is talking about, in fact.
More accurately the stance has been to acknowledge it but barely do anything about it. The convention being challenged would be a good thing if most if not all such challenges were based on misinformation or plain bs (I am not familiar with the study you mentioned and could find it so please provide a link). The fact is the climate is getting warmer and climatologist using a variety of data sources from numerous disciplines have near universally agreed that man made greenhouse gases are the cause.
Gun control laws don't actually fix the problem. First of, there is very little correlation between availability of guns and violence. Secondly, gun control laws have not proven to actually restrict the use of firearms in criminal acts -- criminals, unsurprisingly, are perfectly capable of breaking gun laws to get their hands on firearms if they want them. This also means that the common claim that "an armed society is a polite society" is also wrong, by the way.
The fact is, if one has a violent society, then people are going to use whatever means they have to cause violence. If guns aren't available, then they'll use knives or bombs or cars or whatever else they can.
One can make the claim that gun controls are meant to restrict random violent acts -- like the one guy shooting up Vegas -- since guns are tools that are specifically designed to cause injury and death and if someone just snaps then their ability to kill people is going to be a lot more limited (suddenly crazy people aren't likely to have the patience to try and plan the way to kill the most people rather than just go do it as soon as they can), but it is hardly as black-and-white as you seem to imply.
I strongly disagree. First, for your correlation, the US has the most guns per person out of any country and is the only nation where mass shootings have become such a problem. Second, that criminals will ignore a law is not used as an argument against any other law because its silly and in the US the government is forbidden from funding research examining the connection between gun control and gun violence. Third, its a lot easier to deal with someone with a knife than a gun. Fourth when people talk about improved gun control it is primarily to address the problem of mental ill individuals getting a hold of firearms and killing people. Doing nothing about this problem is morally irreprehensible. Even the people in congress who argue it is more of a mental health issue (which I agree is a component and steps should be taken to improve the situation) still do nothing to attempt to fix the problem.
