Larry,
The price of health care has nothing to do with the price of oil. It
IS a good thing that gasoline prices have gone up in the US, because
hopefully it will lead people to make wiser choices when buying cars,
when deciding how far from work to live, etc.
There is a very simple reason why (until now) the average American
uses twice as much energy per dollar income as the average European--
energy in the US has been artificially cheap, because the
externalities (pollution, greenhouse effect) have not been part of
the price faced by individual consumers and businesses. Now the
market is doing what no US politician has dared do (increase gas
taxes). Good.
Nathan
On 25-mei-2008, at 3:04, Larry wrote:
>
> But, the prices are far overrun by the strangling cost of
> healthcare or
> health insurance here. Having US gas prices equal Australian gas
> prices
> would easily make you feel that its just simply what we deserve - but
> absolutely no health professional here is willing to help you stay or
> get well in any way unless you go broke either preparing for when you
> need them at thousands a month or die, or figure out which time to get
> into debt to pay off costs if you can't afford insurance.
>
> This will never change here because health industry lobbyists can
> be so
> stratospherically convincing that even the most staunch politician
> after
> all their good intentions, just takes his reward and says "well,
> whatever, let my public keep paying". That plus there are always the
> loud bunch in the populace that think the government covering all
> aspects of keeping its citizens healthy as in other countries is a
> horrible idea (as it must be in all the other countries that do offer
> this - ignorantly wrong as dramatically shown in "Sicko"). The ones
> that
> think its a horrible idea are always the few who have all or just
> about
> all of every healthcare need covered by their job or whatever union
> they're in - out of the less and less employers offering this - or
> those
> wealthy enough to pay all their (and their family's) healthcare costs
> and not even really realize the money is missing.
>
> Health problems from the intense stress of gas/home heating oil prices
> rising will be summarily ignored by the healthcare industry here
> unless
> you choose to go broke from that before going broke from oil prices.
>
> No. Its not "about time" our prices rose dramatically. It is
> killing us.
>
> Andrew Fildes wrote:
>> But the fact remains, murkins are doing quite well in terms of prices
>>
>> Time to pay the rent.
>>
>
>
>
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