This is when you know reform is needed:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The Economist praises the Swedish health care system over the American on issues of incentives.

Article linked here:

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13899647

Also....an image worth keeping in mind for defenders of the broken system:



Now, there's something wrong with this picture. See if you can tell me what it is.....

X-posted from my own LJ.

Comments

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

The 'circumstantial variables' being that we are getting fucked in the ass hole by people who we hold our cheeks for and then thanking them for their slab of meat.

No, 'reform' isn't needed because they keep kissing us on the cheek and telling us that they are fucking us for patriotism, thank you very much sir can I have another.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

I don't see a problem, there. Much of the time, the only way Americans seem able to turn a profit is to screw one another over. General Motors does it, oil companies do it, why shouldn't health care do it, too?

Besides, its not necessarily an exclusive condition due to profiteering -- although profiteering does play a big part. America has by far the most lawyers -- maybe as much as 70% of all the lawyers in the world. It doesn't take a mega sized leap of imagination to theorize that an abysmally high number of employed lawyers results in an abysmally high number of lawsuits which drives health care prices in a vaguely upwards direction.

Yes, health care might be as expensive in these other countries IF they had as many lawyers as we do. It doesn't necessarily imply health care suffers from systemic failure in a way which implies extraordinarily dysfunction.