Nilatai wrote:
Seems that he can't accept my point. Medically there is nothing, aside from experimental treatments which may or may not work, available to him that isn't available to me.
You are again restricting the scope of what a health care system does to "treatment". What you're doing is the equivalent of comparing two countries in terms of their respective automotive industries by looking only at the cars available to purchase (and their cost) at the dealerships. And when someone points out that more automotive design improvements are made in one country than another you dismiss that as "experimental car technologies which may or may not work".
I understand that *you* value the end treatment the most when assessing a health care system, but can you at least acknowledge that other people may put more weight on other things?
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I really don't see how you brought up experimental drugs, though, gbaji. I mean, it's not like those are guaranteed to be available.
Huh? When did I do this? I believe the only time I mentioned drugs at all was when I said that the only thing the UK could do to treat an AVM was to treat the symptoms with drugs. The "experimental treatments" specifically involved in AVMs were advancements in embolization systems allowing fine enough control (and size) to actually enter into the brain and seal off small enough blood vessels to starve the AVM without affecting the function of the brain tissue surrounding it. In her case this involved her ability to associatively assign verbal sounds to mental images - so seeing a pen and being able to think of the word for a pen, it's more than just being able to physically speak. Other advancements involve radio surgery techniques and a cool sounding thing called a gamma-knife.
I'm not aware of any significant changes or improvements to any medications she's taken over this time period, and I'm confused as to why you assumed that I was talking about drugs.
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As Xsarus said, it's not like 100% of all medical research ever is done in the USA. Or even as a result of Capitalist means. Last I checked, Universities got their research money from the government.
I never said it was. Again, you are tossing the "all or nothing" strawman at me. What I said is that the US health care system focuses more effort and money on that research than other systems do. You're the one who keeps responding to my statements that it's a matter of how much one system does one thing versus another with the insistence that I name something that US does that the UK doesn't do at all. It's not about that. And surely, you don't make the same argument in reverse, right? The US does everything the UK does, just not as much of it, or as completely, right? I mean, we do pay for health care for people. Just not everyone for everything, and not in the same way the UK does.
You're demanding an unfair comparison. I'm trying to make a reasonable and fair one. The UK focuses more of its total health care dollars on direct end patient care. The US focuses more of its health care dollars on research and development. These are not absolutes and I never claimed they were.
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I'm not denying a lot of medical research is done in the USA, but to say that it is solely due to you purchasing medical insurance is disingenuous. Medical care is free in the UK, prescription drugs are not. Pharmaceutical companies make profit here too.
Huh? Now you're just inventing new things to argue about. When did I *ever* make a distinction based on where the health care dollars came from? And again with the all or nothing argument. So if even one dollar of R&D money comes from public sources, it somehow disproves something I've said? How is that?
Edited, Nov 11th 2011 4:06pm by gbaji