cosmic your missing the point. I just watched sicko and i WATCHED a women who couldnt pass a neuro assesment because of a head injury dumped into an unsterile eviroment. This isnt a transfer to nursing home facilites (i KNOW nursing homes, spent most of my placements transfering pts between nursing home and hospital). Im talking about someone with an acute need being dumped in the street.
My wife spent most of her career working as a social worker in a hospital. The quality of medical care in America has been dropping precipitously for about 25 years, ever since the government began taking over the health care sector. (This is the "leftism" you advocate: let the government bureaucrats have control of everything because they're all so smart and noble.) As a result of the bureaucratization of medicine, hospitals are now run by accountants and attorneys rather than doctors. Every medical decision is made by a person who is not a medical professional. A lot of this is understandable defensiveness. The government rules for medical care are so complicated that it takes an army of lawyers to make sure they aren't violated, and the regulations are so coercive that it takes an army of accountants to make sure that the entire industry doesn't go bankrupt. Doctors and hospitals can be sued by patients for practically any reason, and the "leftist" government court system allows it because "the little man" needs their assistance. As a result, malpractice insurance is one of the largest expenses in a doctor's operating budget. Hospitals need huge staffs of attorneys to protect themselves against malpractice suits. This is the socialist worker's paradise that the leftists built for us. Nobody has any rights any more, the government controls everything. Our educational system is just as bad for the same reason. Schools have more administrators than teachers, because of government regulation. Children have more rights than adults, because they need "protection."
Affirmative discrimination is another reason for many problems in hospitals. In south Los Angeles they built a new hospital 40 years ago named after Martin Luther King. Since it was in a region with a majority of African-American citizens, they mandated that the majority of the doctors be African-Americans. The problem was that they couldn't find that many good African-American doctors. (I can go into this too. Our universities were required to produce African-American graduates, even if they hadn't learned anything, and some of those graduates were MDs.) Just last year or maybe in 2006, MLK General Hospital was
shut down because patients were getting such poor medical care it was literally a crime. This again is the result of the leftist movement to allow the government to take over the education and medical industries, in addition to attempting to make up for two hundred years of racism by instituting reverse racism.
Your political system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, your legal system could do with a work up, even the consitution needs to be re written.
Azzy, I'm sure you'd be the first (well maybe second after Sam) to insist that Americans have no right to tell Iraqis how they should run their country. Well then please shut your yap and stop telling us how to run ours. Okay? Have you even lived here to learn what it is that we like about it so much that we'll put up with the faults?
Your country is just one big leach eating its own people
That is the type of insult that is a violation of the rules and should not be made by a moderator. You can't go around making inflammatory statements about entire nations.
Australia and Australians have done plenty of nasty shit. Your treatment of your aboriginal people was just about as horrible as ours, and your policies toward immigrants with dark skins, until recently, was arguably worse than ours.
Your history is very similar to ours. You moved in and took over the land of a Mesolithic people who were culturally incapable of understanding the full import of what you were doing and in any case were technologically incapable of resisting. Civilization had never been built on this land so its natural resources had never been exploited--topsoil, minerals, forests, even game--all there for the taking. Immigrant population density was low so you had wide open spaces with lots of opportunity for everybody (of European ancestry). You built a patriarchal society like ours and treated your women arguably worse than we did, but until recently unquestionably nowhere near as fairly as your heroes the post-WWII French.
Life is easy in that environment and you don't have to develop much of a sense of social responsibility. We started about 100 years before you so we ran into the problems caused by these attitudes and we're still struggling to overcome them. One of the things we tried was "leftism" at a time when people needed more control over their lives rather than less, and it's turned them into sheep.
You've been able to learn by watching our mistakes and so you've managed to avoid making some of them. You're adopting leftism at a time when your country still has a massive surplus of wealth and energy, so it's working for you. But it's just good luck. Don't brag about it. Come back in fifty years and tell us how well it's working then. Leftist societies have a tendency to produce a "negative surplus." Once you use up the unexploited wealth left by the Abos, life might not be so sweet.
In the meantime lay off the insults, okay? Americans have an irrational love for Australia because you remind us of America when it was younger. You're like the British and the Israelis. We would throw our entire national effort into helping you if you needed it and not stop to ask if it's a good idea. We also love Angus Young. Don't blow it.
