green

It sounds like you came from a third world country. Up here in Canada we do have air conditioning, central heating, and clean sheets. The same holds true of such countries as Germany, France, Sweden....

Sorry for the lengthy post but I have tried to give you an honest assessment of the good, the bad, and ugly of our health care system as I understand it.

Lapband surgery is not covered by our universal health care system. This is a sad business indeed and there are truly horribly long waits for the much more invasive surgeries which are covered. Indeed there was a recent case of a relatively young morbidly obese man who died while waiting for surgery. This was covered by our newspapers and was rightly called a tragedy and a wake-up call for our health system. As for regular medical care, we are generally not required to wait for days in doctors' offices. We do, however, need to make appointments. I have always been very well served by our medical system as had my parents up to their deaths. My father had died in his mid-80s of cancer and was treated well. My mother died when she was in her late 80s but when she was in her early 80s had received a knee transplant and had been receiving hands-on care for her vulnerability to strokes/heart attack during her final decades. Where our system is now falling down is in the arena of certain elective surgeries which ironically the overweight boomer population are demanding. It seems that knee replacement surgery is a key area where people may be required to wait and there are problems in government-funded treatments of obesity, as I have already mentioned. And our health care system can be slow to pick up on some of the latest ground breaking techniques, another reason why you see some Canadians opting to go south of the border. But then I wonder how quickly the HMOs are ready to accept and cover the cost of those same new advances.... The other problem is one which a private care system would be unwilling to correct. Much of Canada, unlike the States, is very thinly populated. Some of our provinces number fewer residents than live in my city. It is increasingly difficult finding doctors as the old ones retire who are willing to practice in these rural areas and it certainly is not cost effective to set up major medical centres in these areas, areas which may be the size of some of your states, by the way. These people do have problems receiving the same degree of medical service as we city folk do and it may be that it is some of them who are complaining about our medical system. It is unlikely that a dollar-driven private health care system would change this problem. Here are a few additional things which I can say about our health care system. Research was done into who are the primary and regular users of the health care system in my province (the health care systems up here, though federally mandated, are provincially run) and it was discovered that the primary users are the middle class and the elderly. The poor tend to only use the system on an emergency only basis. I found these results interesting but not all that surprising once I thought about it. I myself am a fairly heavy user of our system for a number of reasons which are too boring to go into and whenever I am in my doctor's waiting room, one which she shares with a group of other doctors, I see mothers with their children, entire families, highschool and university students, elderly people, and nicely groomed middle-aged individuals. I don't see any broke-down poor types or street psychotics. And I live in the heart of the city, not the suburbs. The other thing which I will mention is that my brother is a doctor who used to practice medicine up here but who now works south of the border. He can't stand our climate! :heh: He has told me that his treatment of his patients is now constrained at times by the demands of the financial bottom line, something which doesn't happen up here. And up here we read that HMOs will drop patients who have serious and expensive diseases such as heart disease, cancer, MS.... This leaves the middle class families on the hook and now they are not permitted to get out from under the financial burden by declaring bankruptcy. This never happens in those countries which have universal health care. And of course our taxes are graduated here, just as they likely are south of the border. The rich pay more than the middle class who in turn pay more than the poor whereas the financial burden of private health insurance is not something that is on a sliding scale of cost per income. A couple of years ago I saw figures which gave a breakdown of the cost per capita of your health care system vs the public health care systems of a number of industrialised nations. The annual cost per capita of your present health care system was approximately $2000 more than the cost of the most expensive universal health care system. It strikes me that $2000 per American per year is an enormous sum. This is the price of big business it would seem.

I am sorry to hear about your mother-in-law, Marimaru.

In those countries which have universal health care nobody gets dropped on a technicality.

Oh, I sure was having terrible cramps and spasms along with everything else. But now, after 6 weeks of Hell, it is finally gone!!!! And I successfully avoided the dreaded harvesting bizness. Ugh.

You make good points in the above quoted post, BJean. Once people are working legally and paying into the system they will not have as much cash to take home. Then they will be united in demanding better pay and better working conditions. Another point is that both the rich and the working poor all consume roughly the same amount of the basic necessities: toilet paper, personal sanitary products, dish soap, etc. And the poor, like the rich, need shelter, food, clothing, transportation, and access to education and health care. This is the union's reasoning behind the comparatively little disparity between the hourly wages of the skilled and the less/unskilled labour in my husband's unionised plant. Toronto is an expensive city to live in - primarily because shelter and food are expensive here - and so everyone needs money to live in a decent manner. The better jobs are better paying but not by very much; they are, however, a lot more interesting.

Oh, I can't watch any surgeries at all. I am very, very squeamish. I like to imagine that my insides are made of india rubber - that is to say, entirely solid all the way through. :straight I have never changed a diaper or cleaned up sick for this reason. :help: I am easily grossed out. (Re the dysentery problem, after 6 weeks it went away without me having to do anything gross. I started swallowing down handfuls of acidopholus. I think that did the trick. phew! )

Gibson, seeing the effect that my weight loss had had on the folks who live in the next cottage to my in-laws was definitely a strange experience for me. It was an affirmation that the band was working and that I successfully lost a lot of weight and that was a good thing. You see, I tend to still think of myself as being more or less the same size as I was. I still think of myself as a big grrl. At that same time I hadn't realized that people had been noticing that I was fat. I thought that they had always been seeing the essential Green and not paying any attention to the outside envelope. I guess this was dumb on my part. Duh!!! By the way, your boyfriend sounds like a honey and very much like my husband, a goodlookin' guy who has always found me gorgeous. :Banane10:

Greed is very much the name of the game. My husband has just come back from spending the past month in Mexico. His mission was to assist in training Mexicans to perform highly paid unionized Canadian jobs in the field of aircraft manufacturing. He is a union member himself. He opted to go down because he was told by the company that these local jobs were leaving the country no matter what and if the Mexicans didn't work out the work would be sent to China. In light of this information he chose to go to Mexico even though he felt like a traitor to his own country. What he found when he arrived depressed him still further - a state of the art facility which puts our local plant to shame. In the Holiday Inn where he was staying he found many American and Canadian businessmen who were all down in Mexico for the same reason: they were working on the transfer of Canadian and American jobs to Mexico. The city where all this activity is going on numbers approximately 1 million inhabitants, is situated in the interior, in the mountains and thus the summer weather isn't unbearably hot and humid. The local newbies at the plant make approximately $500 Cdn/month including overtime. My husband who is a leadhand in his field makes close to $30 Cdn/hr straight time + benefits. The average Canadian worker in his field doesn't make much less. The difference in these figures is stunning, I think, and I believe that more and more companies will shift manufacturing operations down to Mexico. This will lead to Mexico becoming one of those emerging economies, just as India and China are emerging economies. This economic growth may eventually solve the illegal problem north of the border. Up here we will be facing other problems, however; we will be without those highly paid unionized manufacturing jobs.

Barbie at my cousin's house tomorrow. He is a carnivore, a cook, he has a pool, and there is a local heat wave!!! It's gonna be protein city for Green!:eyebrows::whoo::hungry:

I should clarify the victims of the lousy Chinese antibiotics, the ones whom I described in my earlier post, were in fact Chinese citizens.

Aha! Mission accomplished.

Remember that almost all advanced economies, with the exception of the U.S., have universal health care. The countries who have this save a lot of money because we cut out the businessmen. More taxes but no premiums, eh.... Everyone is on the hook one way or another but those countries who do have universal health care are not underwriting the lifestyles of a cadre of Big Biznessmen.

but they are certainly not bankrupted, you know.

Dude, it is so much better in Canada. Everyone up here has medical coverage. It is folded into our taxes. The rich pay a little more

Remember, boys and grrls, etc, neutering is a very kind activity which you can do after you do your part by adopting a very nice stray cat or dog. Kudos to Bitter to housing her new gang of puppies. This must be especially difficult given that you are living under Noah Ark-like conditions at the moment. More water, more humidity and this means more bugs and more general smelliness. Many of us have had the experience of smelling a wet dog, eh? Not so nice. Keep on sending us dispatches from the swamps, Bitter. (The sad thing is that it is awful dry where I live.)

Good thing PETA wasn't lurking in the shadows, eh, grrls? *green snickers*

I read a novel written by Lewis (Scooter) Libby. It was called The Apprentice and it was, it seems, a first novel. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed it and I am kind of snobbish. Snobbish enough to wonder why an adult male would agree to allow himself to be known as Scooter(????)! Sh!t, I wouldn't even call one of my animals Scooter. I wouldn't even call a handicapped person in a turbo-charged wheelchair Scooter! The man is literate and he has written a fine first novel but I still don't get this Scooter-biz. What's with the pre-adolescent nick-name, eh? Can someone out there enlighten me?? Perspiring minds wanna know.......

But these are big companies!!! Indeed Cosco has penetrated Canada and can therefore be considered to be a multi-national corporation. As for Tyson Chicken, although I am not personally acquainted with the name, I have no doubt that you are right when you say that this is a big player. This would indicate that you have wealthy corporations who are choosing to by-pass both federal and state legislation in order to hire illegal foreign labour. Why would they do this? Because these people will work for less? Because these companies will not be on the hook for their health benefits and safety costs? The illegals are desperate and will work under conditions which are entirely unsatisfactory and often illegal. This has the effect of destroying the work standards for those Americans who constitute the working class. The end result is that you will find a lot of Americans who are on the dole (on welfare) and a lot of illegals who are working under crappy conditions. And a lot of tax revenue which goes missing due to illegal labour. Of course this is a complicated problem: either our jobs have gone to the third world or the third world has come to us via this biz of illegal labour. It seems that much of our food (agricultural and manufactured) production has been shifted off shore and now, in the case of the huge amount of imports from China, this reliance on cheap stuff is proving to be a fairly toxic treat. We have, of course, read about the pet food scandal. You may not be aware that there is a brand name toothpaste clone which is currently being sold in some discount stores where I live; this stuff has antifreeze materiel as part of its make-up. I also don't know whether you are aware of some of the latest and saddest reportage to come out of mainland China. This is all about a small number of people, maybe less than 15, who have either died or who have been left in a more or less vegetable-like state as the result of an antibiotic which had been manufactured under faulty conditions. According to the report which I read, the government was not especially quick about recalling the bad medicine and the manufacturer, though comfortable with admitting fault, is not willing to either apologise to these families nor pay reparations. The family who was profiled in this article has lost their only child, a 6 year old. They were, it seems, utterly smashed up by this loss. The mother has been unable to work or even to leave the house since her loss and the child's father has quit his job in order to devote his time to fighting for justice for his dead child. I suppose I find myself telling you all this story because I believe that it indicates that those average folks in the emerging economies are certainly not our enemies. And certainly it is not the illegal immigrant, either. These are ordinary people who find themselves being ground up, in one way or another, in larger events. My hunch is that your average individual, when placed under stress, tends to react to events and to, with greater or less success, attempt to survive. This may mean that some of us behave like cockroaches at times.... However, in democratic countries we do rely upon our governments to behave in a more ethical and a more dispassionate manner. It is for this reason that I can understand a family harbouring an illegal member of the family but cannot understand why corporations such as Costco or Tyson Chicken receive nothing more than a little smack when caught employing illegals. These companies should experience the loss of their fiscal gonads :whoo:as well as having a bunch of their execs spend a little time in the slammer. :eyebrows: With or without gonads, eh. :faint::) um, er, ovaries, or, erm, whatever...........

As for those chicks who are eating too much, sounds like you all are in need of a visit to the Fill Doctor.

Yahoo, Dynamo, you da grrl! Congrats on your arrival in wonderland. :D:D You must continue to send us postcards from your new address, you know. As for this biz of the handsome older man, well, I don't know whether that is really true. I remember an incident which occurred some years ago. My brother's kids were called to my city because my father was about to undergo emergency life-threatening surgery. While they were here they saw a middle-aged grey-haired guy driving a flashy sports car. The youngest of the three kids was both enthralled and horrified. "That old man is driving a sports car!" she gasped. "Look! He's driving a sports car!!" Sometimes the handsome older man only looks handsome to himself and to those who have had a peek at the size of his wallet. :heh:

Woohoo, you lucky Canucki! Big congrats from another Canadian, eh.

Well argued, Marjon.

@BJean: yep, I am nervous about the face surgery. This is why I am paying lotsa money in order to go to one of Toronto's high profile cosmetic surgeons. I figure that you wear your face wherever you go - unless you live in one of those Muslim countries - and you don't want to risk something weird a la Michael Jackson happening to it. :help: Afterall, I've been an atheist pretty much all my life and I doubt that I could convert to Islam at the age of 58 just to be able to hide a botched face job under a burqa! :eyebrows: So the facework is going to cost me the price of a car but then I have never bought a car; I don't drive, you see, and I figure that I am kinda shallow enough to want to go for it. I am terribly afraid of the pain which I will experience during the recovery time. And I have been told that the recovery time will be much longer than it was for the lapband. (3 weeks after the lift before I can leave the house without looking like the victim of spousal abuse.) :heh: I guess I also have the feeling that I am cheating in some fashion, a feeling I have never, ever experienced with the lapband although some of the members who post on this site have mentioned that they have/do feel this way.:phanvan I did, though, have a mini-lift which was done by this guy when I turned 50 and the results were splendid. I am still ahead of the game thanks to the work he did then. I recovered very quickly from that surgery, as I did from the lapband. (It seems to be rhinoviruses which leave me sick as a dog for 5-6 weeks. :sick blehhh!) It is a good thing that I have never watched the surgery, eh. :rolleyes