A hint: He had to use toilet paper to avoid touching it with his fingers.
Of course it works. Everything works better in Australia because it is a
smaller country. You have fewer levels of government than we do, therefore fewer nooks and crannies that breed entire new species of bureaucrats to squander our tax money.
Come back in another century when there are
three hundred million of you and we'll see just how efficient and effective your government is then!
The biggest problem with health care in America actually is not a problem with health care but with the
legal profession. We have a glut of attorneys, all aggressively looking for someone's life they can screw up in order to make some money. Naturally they target the most prosperous among us, and so they quickly selected our
doctors. Whenever anything goes wrong in a surgery, a predatory attorney will instantly appear at the victim's family's front door, assuring them that he can get them a million-dollar judgment against the "incompetent" surgeon. (Of course he'll get 75% of that money in fees, but he doesn't tell the grieving widow that.)
As a result, whenever you prepare for surgery, your surgeon orders a dozen expensive, irrelevant
lab tests to prove that he hasn't overlooked anything. In other words, covering his ass so he can't be sued. These tests often cost as much as the surgery. And indeed, a typical surgical procedure in the USA costs about twice as much as in Europe.
This is what's wrong with the medical sector in the USA. We have too damn many
lawyers! And this is why medical care will continue to be outrageously expensive, whether it's paid for by the government or by the patient.
Irrelevant. There's no way it would run so efficiently over here. I'm sure that in Australia it's legal to shoot a lawyer if he becomes unruly. Here they ride around in limousines and contribute tons of money to the political campaigns of the legislators who expand their business with new sources of income like Obamacare.
Another version of this (and I don't have the attribution):
It is not the zeal with which we protect the things we love that displays our character. It is how zealously we protect the things we hate.
In other words, you'd pretty much expect the USA to be really good about "freedom of religion" when the religion in question is Christianity. But let's see how well we do with Islam!
A certain amount of this is inevitable as life becomes more complex. When there was no written language, 99.99% of the population worked 100-hour weeks as subsistence farmers, and the average citizen never traveled more than 20 miles from his birthplace, governing was not too difficult. Now that people have almost as much leisure as the time they spend at work, and they can communicate with people on the other side of the planet, a lot more organization is needed and some of it simply has to be provided by the government.
What works for smaller populations does not work for larger populations. By the time a decent, capable citizen climbs up the political ladder from head of the facilities department in a town of 10,000 people, to the school board, to the town council, to the county council, to a post in one of the governor's cabinet departments, to the secretary of that department, to the state assembly, to the state senate, to the U.S. Congress, he has undergone a dozen selection processes. That process selects for only two things:
- He loves having power.
- He knows how to win an election.
Note that "He knows how to do a really good job and wants to make things better" is
NOT on this very short list.
