Post by Rod SpeedPost by ImmortalistPost by milesPost by Michael CoburnThe MYTH that is truly DEAD is the MYTH that
corporations should, or even can, provide health care
Corse they can, particularly while they are still employees.
Post by ImmortalistPost by milesThe MYTH is that the Government can do anything better and
more efficient than private industry. In the end the only thing
that happens is that people become dependent on Government
as the only choice. That is OPPRESSION and that is TRUTH.
What about countries that have national health care?
They haven't had nearly as many problems as the USA.
Thats a lie.
Post by Immortalisthttp://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy/msg/f010ef88b055756a
More lies.
Can you point out the lies in the text I referred to?
Why We're Liberals: A Political
Handbook for Post-Bush America
by Eric Alterman
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Liberals-Political-Post-Bush/dp/0670018600
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/
Chapter 3 - What Does Liberalism Look Like?
As the previous chapter was pitched at a rather lofty level, it now
behooves us to ask what liberals want, not in theory, but in actual
practice, brought down to the level of the reality of everyday life. A
simple way of explaining the overall goals of contemporary American
liberalism would be to point to the success of social policies in
places like western Europe, and particularly in northern Europe. (I am
leaving Canada largely out of this discussion, though a similar case
could be made for it, because Canadians, unlike Americans and
Europeans, do not face any credible military threats, and so see no
need to devote a significant portion of their GDP to defense.)
Conservatives so consistently denigrate the amazing achievements of
twenty-first-century Europeans that one can't help but wonder what has
them so worried. "If you want a lower standard of living,"
conservative policy experts Grace-Marie Turner and Robert Moffit
argued in a December 2006 op-ed, "the Europeans have the right
prescription." Their argument echoes views, as the New Republic's
Jonathan Cohn notes, that are popular across the conservative
spectrum, from News-week's Robert Samuelson ("Europe is history's has-
been") to the National Review's Jonah Goldberg ("Europe has an
asthmatic economy") to the New York Times pundit David Brooks ("The
European model is flat-out unsustainable"). Conservatives have been
making exactly these arguments for roughly five decades now, yet these
same European nations have by almost every measurement—individual
rights and community, capitalist enterprise and social solidarity, and
even personal mobility— proven superior to the United States. Despite
some significant philosophical distinctions, what in practice
Americans call "liberalism" is known in Europe as "social democracy."
By any name, however, and allowing for differences in national
preferences, character, history, racial and ethnic makeup, and so on,
the progress that Europeans have made toward the goal of "justice as
fairness" ought to be enough to make most Americans—and not just
liberals—ashamed and envious.
The workers of France, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Norway
all produce the same goods and services as the United States or more,
and thereby enjoy higher productivity per hour worked than do U.S.
workers. The reasons for this are myriad, but almost all of them
contradict conservative conventional wisdom. According to conservative
ideology, high tax rates are supposed to kill personal initiative and
depress growth, but they are much higher and more progressive across
Europe than in the United States. Welfare payments—again, allegedly
the means by which the personal initiative of poor people is destroyed—
are based in Europe on universal entitlements, with little, if any,
means-testing. Finally, union membership, also the bane of
conservative propagandists in the United States, ranges from 70
percent of the workforce in Norway to over 95 percent of the workforce
in Finland, more than six times its level in the United States.
While these societies are hardly Utopias—much of Europe remains riven
by apparently insoluble Islamic immigration crises and relatively high
unemployment—the benefits provided by many if not most of these
societies would, for most Americans, prove a wonder to behold. Despite
the fact that Americans work nearly four hundred more hours a year
than those famously industrious Germans, and more than workers in
virtually every western European nation by a considerable margin,
these same states somehow sponsor far more generous programs of
training and job mobility, and pay generous unemployment benefits.
Families receive periods of paid maternity and paternity leave.
Europeans also enjoy high-quality public health and education
provisions, and all manner of public services, from parks to efficient
and inexpensive public transport systems, that are not available
anywhere in the United States. To give just one example, Denmark
spends nearly one-third of its gross domestic product on government-
run benefits and taxes its citizens at an equivalently high rate. Its
top bracket is 63 percent, nearly double the highest rate in the
United States. With these revenues, the state spends more than 5
percent of its GDP on the unemployed and more than 2 percent alone on
"flexicurity" labor market programs to help retrain displaced workers.
This compares with a feeble 0.16 percent in the United States, which
is by far the lowest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD). Partly as a result, in mid-2006 Denmark's
unemployment rate was just 3.6 percent, well below the 4.7 percent in
the United States. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit,
Denmark's "Quality of Life" index proved superior to that of America
as well, with advantages like universal health care and day care, and
a poverty rate of just 4.3 percent, compared with 17.1 percent in the
United States. (America has the second-worst record among OECD
nations.) Meanwhile, Denmark is, at this writing, enjoying a small
budget surplus, equal to approximately 0.65 percent of its GDP. The
United States, meanwhile, is saddled with ever-exploding deficits,
currently reaching 4.5 percent of GDP, and rising.
Denmark is hardly exceptional. In Finland, for instance, citizens are
entitled to state-funded educational, medical, and welfare services,
literally from the cradle to the grave. Finns pay nothing, ever, for
education, including both infant and child care as well as medical and
law school— to say nothing of their monthly stipend for expenses. And
they produce perhaps the best educational test results in the world.
(This is true even though they don't go in for standardized tests.)
According to 2003 OECD surveys, Finland ranks no. 1 in student reading
ability, no. 1 in student science ability, no. 2 in student problem-
solving ability, and no. 2 in student mathematics ability. The United
States, by contrast, ranks no. 12, no. 19, no. 26, and no. 24,
respectively.
When comparing social policies in the United States and the advanced
nations of Europe, such disparities are the rule, rather than the
exception. According to the most recent census figures, nearly sixteen
million Americans are living in "deep or severe poverty"—a category
that includes individuals making less than $5,080 a year, and families
of four bringing in less than $9,903 a year. Of these, barely 10
percent receive "welfare in the form of Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families and just slightly more than a third receive food stamps.
Apart from cases of "severe poverty," one in six American households
earned less than 35 percent of the median income in 2000. (In Britain,
among the least equitable of European nations, that proportion is
fewer than one in twenty.) America's relatively niggardly welfare
system, even in its most generous incarnation, raised poor incomes
only moderately, and reduced the proportion of adults in poverty from
26.7 to 19.1 percent. In Germany, France, and Italy, meanwjiile, the
proportion of adults in poverty hovers at around just 7 percent. As
for the elderly—where America's social security program presents the
country at its most beneficent—the nation manages to reduce poverty
levels from nearly 60 percent before transfer payments to just below
20 percent. Yet the Europeans improve on this performance by
significant margins as well. Germany, France, and Italy leave only
7.6, 7.5, and 6.5 percent of their elderly populations living in
poverty, respectively. And what is perhaps worse, while roughly a
quarter of all American children are condemned to grow up in poverty,
the analogous proportions for the countries cited above are just 8.6,
7.4, and 10.5 percent. The lack of progress in this area in the United
States is one reason American conservatives insist on making these
programs so stingy. The truth is that, when it comes to social
mobility, these European nations prove far more successful in
providing what might be called "the Nordic Dream"— or even "the
British Dream"—than the romantic notion of "the American Dream" that
schoolchildren are taught to cherish. This is true at nearly every
level of society. According to two separate studies based on a set of
data collected over a period of five decades the Nordic countries
enjoy considerably greater degrees of social mobility than do
Americans. In the United States, a son's earnings are more than twice
as likely to be closely related to those of his father than inmost
Nordic nations, and even Britain does a much better job at offering
second-generation earners a higher probability of economic improvement
than does the United States. This is true across the board, but is
most dramatic for those stuck at society's bottom rungs.
Europe's more generous welfare system has actually proven more
successful than America's in reducing the size of these payments by
moving people off welfare—which is, after all, supposed to be the goal
of such programs. In the Nordic nations, for instance, three-quarters
of those on welfare had moved up and out of the system by the time
they reached their forties, but barely more than half of their
American counterparts had. As the editors of the Economist put it, "In
other words, Nordic countries have almost completely snapped the link
between the earnings of parents and children at and near the bottom.
That is not at all true of America." In Britain, too, fully 70 percent
of those enmeshed in the welfare system had moved out within a single
generation—again, a higher percentage than in America. The magazine
points to the generous tax and welfare provisions for families as "the
obvious explanation for greater mobility in the Nordic countries . . .
especially when compared with America's."
Now look at some other significant differences:
[No-Vacation Nation] The United States is the only wealthy
industrialized nation not to legislate any paid time off and holidays
for its workforce. Austria and Britain both offer four weeks, Denmark
gives thirty work days, and even Japan mandates ten days. The United
States guarantees nothing, with low-wage and part-time workers, not
surprisingly, suffering the most. Only 69 and 36 percent of them,
respectively, enjoy any vacation time at all.
[Children and Health] With America's wasteful and expensive system of
public health, and family-unfriendly employment laws, its children
face a whole host of impediments to their development potential that
are all but unknown across much of Europe. The United States and South
Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not
provide health care for all of their citizens. Nationally, 29 percent
of children had no health insurance at some point in the last twelve
months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The United
States ranks eighty-fourth in the world for measles immunizations and
eighty-ninth for polio. These figures are particularly shocking given
that Americans spend almost two and half times the industrialized
world's median on health care, nearly a third of which is wasted on
bureaucracy and administration. As the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell
notes:
Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries.
We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We
get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other
Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our
counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower
than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United
States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the
nineteenth per-centile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform
more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than
in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have
more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan,
Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our
system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand
dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—
on healthcare-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada,
for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And,
of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all
its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we
spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any
insurance.
And remember the Finns? Not surprisingly, perhaps, they devote less
than half of what we do to medical care, as a percentage of GDP, and
yet their infant mortality rate is half that of the United States—and
one-sixth that of African-American babies—while their life expectancy
rate is greater. (The United States ranked forty-second, behind not
only Japan and most of Europe but also Jordan, Guam, and the Cayman
Islands, according to the most recent census figures.)
Perhaps all that education has made them smart enough to invest in
preventative care and universal coverage. Conservatives, members of
the American medical industrial complex, and other defenders of the
U.S. status quo frequently berate the European health care alternative
because, they say, the care that patients receive there is both less
responsive and less advanced than that available to Americans, however
much more we may have to pay for ours. These claims tend to evaporate
under even minimal scrutiny. Jonathan Cohn reports, for instance, that
American patients wait longer, on average, for routine treatments than
those in France and Germany. Moreover, hospitals in those two nations
also provide new mothers more than four days to recover, while
insurance companies insist that doctors send American mothers home
after only two. Swedes enjoy better success rates treating cervical
and ovarian cancers. The French best the American system when it comes
to stomach cancer, Hodgkin's disease, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The
French also benefit from more cancer radiation equipment than
Americans. And despite so many American boasts on exactly this topic,
Germans get the most hip replacements. In the area where one hears the
loudest cheers for the American system—making new cancer treatments
available to patients as quickly (however expensively) as possible,
the United States is merely tied with Austria, France, and
Switzerland. Of course, the U.S. system does not do everything poorly.
Cohn points to the world's highest cure rate for "some cancers—
including breast and prostate cancer," but it's hard to connect these
to our system of health care delivery. And finally, he rightfully
asks, if the less expensive, more efficient, and more universal
European system "means worse health care overall, then why do so many
studies show the U.S. scoring so poorly on international comparisons,
including those examining 'mortality amenable to health care'— a
statistic devised specifically to test the quality of different health
care systems across the globe?"
Just how did the Europeans get so smart? The education figures tell a
similar story. Although the United States devotes roughly the same
proportion of national income to education as the European Union
nations, on average, European nations all rank higher in math and
science. They also enjoy, on average, an additional year of education
and have a higher proportion of young people in higher education.
[Toward a Humane Society] Socially, the values of Europe strike most
liberals as far more humane than our own. As amazing as it may sound
to many Americans, candidate countries for EU membership must first
abolish capital punishment as a condition for entry; in fact, it is
the very first condition listed. Gay marriage is the law in Belgium,
the Netherlands, and even Catholic Spain, while gay civil unions are
officially recognized by Norway, Sweden, Iceland, France, and Germany.
Although Americans prove to be evenly divided when asked by pollsters
whether "homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by
society," European acceptance levels range from 72 percent in Italy to
83 percent in Germany. While the names of many, mostly conservative,
European parties do contain the word Christian (as in "Christian
Democrat"), they are far less eager to inject their own parochial
understanding of biblical injunctions into politics. This is
particularly true in England, the most Americanized of "European"
nations. During the 2005 election there, Conservative candidate
Michael Howard raised none of what Americans consider "social" issues
like abortion or gay marriage, which proved so important an element in
Bush's 2004 campaign. When he appeared at the pulpit at the Tabernacle
Christian Centre near the outskirts of London, he mentioned neither
God nor religion during a twenty-minute speech. In an almost perfect
contrast to George W. Bush, Howard called for a massive increase in
British foreign aid, which speaks to yet another of Europe's great
advantages over the U.S. political system: the relatively responsible
positions its conservative parties take toward issues of social
solidarity and genuinely "compassionate conservatism." In Norway, for
instance, even the conservative investment community that manages the
country's enormous $300-billion-plus government pension fund refuses
to invest in companies with whose social practices it disagrees.
Additionally, Francis Fukuyama, the noted political theorist whose
"End of History" thesis so captured the imaginations of American
conservatives eager to pronounce their own society as the final
development point of world political history, finds that the European
Union's "attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power
politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in
line with a 'post-historical' world than the Americans' continuing
belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military." Certainly
the EU has disappointed many of its expectations, but members'
willingness to compromise their sovereignty for the improvement of all
on matters sometimes central to national identity is an example from
which many American liberals also find inspiration.
[Sex, Guns, and Death] Because Christian conservatives and the gun
lobby do not enjoy the power to shape public policy in Europe and
Canada, their children are also safer than are ours. Canadian and
European teenagers do not have to contend with restrictive laws that
deny them access to truthful sex education and contraception, or with
federally funded programs that deliberately misinform them about the
dangers associated with sex to try to scare them into abstinence.
Canadian and European young people are about as active sexually as
Americans, but teenage American girls are five times as likely to have
a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and
seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands.
In addition, the incidence of HIV/AIDS among American teenagers is
five times that of the same age group in Germany.
As for violent deaths, the United States must contend with the power
of the conservative National Rifle Association, which not only lobbies
to prevent background checks to keep guns out of the hands of
criminals and terrorists, but also insists that when such checks are
conducted, the evidence amassed must be destroyed within twenty-four
hours. The result: American children are sixteen times more likely
than children in other industrialized nations to be murdered with a
gun, eleven times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine
times more likely to die from firearms accidents. These figures are
hardly surprising when one considers the fact that the rate of
firearms homicide in the United States is nineteen times higher than
that of thirty-five other high-income countries combined.
One could fill an entire book with examples and statistics that
demonstrate the multiple means by which various European governments
better serve their citizens than does our own. Apologists for American
failures in these areas point to characterological, ideological, and
historical reasons why Americans shy away from more effective delivery
and distribution systems for the services they need to live healthy,
prosperous lives. Liberalism, as the political scientist Paul Starr
correctly argues, derives from different roots than European social
democracy, and the accomplishments of a system based on the latter are
not immediately transferable to the former. But in most of these
cases, what prevents the realization of the kind of government and
society Americans say they desire is less a matter of choice than of
imposition. Powerful lobbies buy themselves the right to rip off
Americans with perfectly legal payments to politicians and then
pretend that somehow this legalized larceny represents the true desire
of a public that is perennially kept in the dark. Policies with strong
majority support such as universal health care and paid maternity
leave are written off as liberal or even socialistic, as if that ends
the argument then and there. What this book aims-to do in the pages
that follow is to tear down those barriers to coherent argument and
pragmatic practice. Remove the bugaboo from the word liberal, I argue,
and the policies of a sensible populace naturally follow.
Unfortunately, doing so is a great deal more difficult that it looks,
and in the following chapter, I attempt to explain why.
Why We're Liberals: A Political
Handbook for Post-Bush America
by Eric Alterman
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Liberals-Political-Post-Bush/dp/0670018600
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/