Driving wise, I live close to Dirt Dad and also see that speeds have gone up a bit but am continually amazed by how light the traffic is. I drove the north side of the DC beltway Thursday between 5:30-6 pm when it is normally a parking lot of stop and roll a few feet. I was doing 60-65 staying with traffic. Drove from Annapolis to Columbia last Saturday evening and would go for miles without seeing anybody on the highway.
I really appreciate Cantab posting about the NZ health care system, as I've run across similar systems in my travels around the world. Right now, we in the US are subsidizing the overhead of every insurance company through high premiums. Plus those who can't afford insurance just use the hospital ER entrance, which is absolutely the most expensive and stupid way to deliver medical care that
we also indirectly pay for. I'd rather not pay for the slackers but every society has them and this chart shows an average for what each of us are losing from our pay checks!
What are we getting? Some of the worst health care in the world in life expectancy, infant deaths, etc! How many dollars would YOU pay to live out this coming week, for an additional 3-4 years? And before somebody says it is just American lifestyle, the Canadians are pretty darn similar and I know a lot of out of shape Brits and Germans so notice the difference in this chart.
I really used to be pretty far right in thinking I don't want the Government involved with my health care, but came to realize that ship has already sailed. The Government is ALREADY running much of the health care, so that thinking just isn't valid and hasn't been for decades. There is no way to un-do it and nobody is going to be turned away by an ER, no matter how far to the right we might be.
At this point I do think we as a nation need to stop trying to straddle this fence and just come up with a Govt basic plan which also allows private plans if individuals want. It's what the ACA was before that plan got bastardized into ObamaCare. Yes, we will finally acknowledge that we are subsidizing the slackers but WE ALREADY ARE so we need to end our doing so in the most expensive way possible. It also is the one and only way to cut the open sore of money going to litigation lawyers to bring down costs of drugs and care, because the Government is the
only entity which can limit litigation against itself.
I have/had family in Germany, Norway, and Canada and all of them have additional plans to go to their own choice of doctor they want to. Heck, even mainland China has done this for 30 years! When I had guys get injured on jobs in China on two trips (Dalian and Beijing - I'm bad luck), what they got was absolutely as good as what they would have here. We were Americans working with counterpart Chinese investigators, so I have no doubt they would avoid taking us somewhere crappy. Even so, the Chinese middle class is so big and so much like here now that I don't think what my guys got was exceptional.
What I have not looked into is why it seems to work so well in some countries and not others. For example, Canada has Govt health care with additional insurance possible yet the Canadians I know bitch about the wait times and expense far more than the Aussies, Kiwis, Germans, Norwegians, and even the grumbling Brits I've known.
Sorry for the rant. It's a rainy Sunday night.