--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "feste37" <feste37@...> wrote: > > But your taxes are higher in Canada, I assume. They must > be, if you have virtually free health care.
I will chime in here, to point out that you are making unwarranted assumptions. Re Canada, you are failing to consider whether the actual *costs* of health care might not be lower. Which they are. Same in France and Spain and the Netherlands, all of which I have some experience with. In France, for example, a one-hour doctor's visit (assuming no insurance to pay for it, and *not* being a French resident) costs 30 Euros. One of the reasons this is true is that these companies have not gone down the road that America has for many decades, allowing greedy hospitals, doctors, HMOs, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies to artificially escalate prices to outrageous levels that are completely out of accord with what it costs them to provide their services. No pharmaceutical company in any of these countries could get away with charging what American suppliers charge for drugs; the govern- ments would just step in and refuse to do business with them unless they lowered their prices. Same with the doctors themselves, and what they charge. In Canada (I know because I lived there for some years), another factor that keeps their health care costs low is, strangely enough, differences in the *legal system*. The Canadian legal system mirrors (or did when I lived there) the English system, meaning that all services provided by lawyers are fee-based. Lawyers get paid by the hour or at a previously-agreed-upon rate for a common service. There is no such thing as a "continency fee," whereby lawyers take cases on a speculative basis, knowing that they'll get 30% of any settlement amount. As a result, there has (again, as of when I lived there) a medical malpractice suit for a fee over a million dollars in Canada. (In the US, such suits are often for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, all fueled by greedy lawyers hoping for their 30%.) This also tends to keep costs lower, because doctors don't have to pay as much for malpractice insurance. Finally, but not to be disregarded, having a medical system in which *preventative* care is free or cheap has an *immense* effect on reducing overall health care costs. In the US, where a *huge* percentage of the population has no health insurance at all, their only option is to go to an emergency room and hope that they won't get thrown out. This means NO preventative care, and thus that conditions that could have been easily caught and treated inexpensively escalate into serious diseases that cost a fortune to treat. So get over your belief that everyone who lives in a country with good medical care pays through the nose for it in taxes. This simply isn't true. That's just what the greedy bastards who are profiting from your ignorance want you to believe.
