Is There Such A Thing As A Just War?

My point is we're carrying a disporpioate part of the burden? Why?

 

How many of our poor would live instead of die? Can you show me some evidence that people are dying in this country because they are poor? In this country if you are hungry there are a multitude of places you can get food. No emergency room in the country will turn you away with a life threatening problem. Where are the poor in this country dying?

 

Again, you mis-use "disproportionate." You're looking at numbers, instead of percentages.

It's as simple as your liberal tax view: If I make $100,000 a year, and you only make $20,000 a year, who should pay out more tax? Or should I, as the higher wage earner, use every tax break I can find, and leave the brunt of the actual tax paying on you?

 

A ridiculous statement. A statement that is essentially true but is based on statistics that are off by 1.5% is not untrue. Besides, I could find other statistics which would support my statement. Notice that the numbers for different countries are from different years in the Wiki article? It's hard to get precise numbers but it's not hard to see the pattern.

 

A $1 of military spending from Canada for instance will buy just as much in the way of armaments as a $1 from the U.S. Why are we arming the world? Why did taxes come into this? You're off topic.

 

No, I was using an analogy, not attempting to change the subject.

$1 of military spending is another example of your attempt to rabbit-trail; your subject was the number of troops sent, which was supposed to support your argument that only one or two countries were involved; your subsequent support was that countries who sent only 200 troops (which has been shown to be wrong) "don't count."

To which I still respond, admit that this premise was faulty, and get back to your original subject.

 

[deleted because it wasn't necessary]

 

Almost 50M people in America don't have health insurance.

“Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States. Although America leads the world in spending on health care, it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage.” —Institute of Medicine

You say that poor people can get health care from emergency rooms. Well, that's the least efficient way to provide health care and it doesn't come for free. If the hospital is for profit it comes out of their profits and raises costs for the insured. If it's a not for profit hospital somebody pays. You guessed it, the taxpayer.

We spend more money on health care than any other country and yet are ranked 37th in the world in the quality of our health care, barely above Slovenia and Cuba.

http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html

But we're right up there at the top in military spending.

 

So, let's see the odds of someone dying within a certain year, if they don't have health insurance, is 1 in 2777. Interesting.

The odds of a person dying due to unintentional injuries each year is 1 in 2517.

The first order of business should not be health insurance. It should be eliminating these unintentional injuries. More legislation will probably help!

So your idea is to spend even more money on it? Obviously spending the most money in the world isn't helping us. Why don't you try coming up with something besides spending more money on it?

 

What I'm saying is we have to change our health care system. I don't have a plan. Do you?

 

Yeah...stick with what we have. I have no problems with it.

 

Still satisfied?



World Life Expectancy by Country
List by the CIA World Factbook (2007 estimates)

1 Andorra

2 Macau ( PRC)

3 Japan

4 San Marino

4 Singapore

6 Hong Kong ( PRC)

7 Gibraltar ( UK)[4]

8 Sweden

9 Australia

10 Switzerland

11 France (metropolitan)

12 Guernsey ( UK)

13 Iceland

14 Canada

15 Cayman Islands ( UK)

16 Italy

17 Monaco

18 Liechtenstein

19 Spain

19 Norway

19 Israel

22 Jersey ( UK)

23 Faroe Islands ( Denmark)

24 Greece

25 Austria

26 U.S. Virgin Islands ( US)

27 Malta

28 Netherlands

29 Luxembourg

30 Montserrat ( UK)

31 New Zealand

32 Germany

33 Belgium

34 Guam ( US)

34 Saint Pierre and Miquelon ( France)

36 United Kingdom

36 European Union

38 Finland

39 Isle of Man ( UK)

40 Jordan

41 Puerto Rico ( US)

42 Bosnia and Herzegovina

43 Bermuda ( UK)

44 Saint Helena ( UK)

45 United States

 

Yeah, I'm good with that.

 

If you accept mediocre medical treatment in the U.S. I can't argue with you. I don't

 

You can't draw a conclusion regardig the medical treatment in the US from the "World Life Expectancy by Country" list that you posted. There are many factors that deal with Life Expectancy, not just medical treatmnet. Things such as exercise and diet play a very large role in life expectancy.

If we did want to draw conclusions based on your list then we can see that the world at large's life expectancy is 66.26 (note that I am using a slighter newer version of your list, the 2008 version). The US's is 78.06. So, a person in the US has a life expectancy that is 11.8 years longer than the world's life expectancy. That's what you call mediocre? I'd call that above average!

 

So you're satisfied with the U.S. being "above average." That's quite a way down from where most people consider us to be.

I agree that life expectancy is a function of more than the quality of a country's medical system. So let's look at the quality of the medical system itself.

The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems.
Source: WHO World Health Report - See also Spreadsheet Details (731kb)
http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html


The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems was last produced in 2000, and the WHO no longer produces such a ranking table, because of the complexity of the task.


________________________________________
Rank Country

1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
37 United States of America
38 Slovenia
39 Cuba
40 Brunei
41 New Zealand
42 Bahrain
43 Croatia
44 Qatar
45 Kuwait
46 Barbados
47 Thailand
48 Czech Republic
49 Malaysia
50 Poland

 

what does any of this have to do with the subject of this thread?

 

Post # 82 took it in this direction. Go ahead, contribute to the OP.

 

Most people are wrong then. The list that you provided shows that we are above average when it comes to life expectancy.

You really should pay attention to the reports that you cite. If you had read through the report, you would know that it is not a ranking as one would normally consider a ranking.

A quote from the report itself, "It compares each country’s system to what the experts estimate to be the upper limit of what can be done with the level of resources available in that country."

What that means is that there is not a actual standard that each country is being ranked against. Each country is ranked against what the investigators deem to be "the upper limit of wha can be done.....in that country". That's not a proper ranking! The health care in the US could be just as good as the health care in France, but if the investigators decide that the US has a higher upper limit than France, then the US health care system can be ranked lower.

Sorry, that doesn't cut it for fair ranking. For a fair ranking there needs to be a standard that each country is compared against, not a moving target for each individual country.

 

Post #82 was a response to you.