Saturn

Saturn, have you ever been to Finland or Sweden?Comparing Finland to the United States is like comparing Jonquière to Toronto. It's almost meaningless. The simple response to this study is to say that correlation does not mean causation. Because some high tax countries have good standards of living does not mean that if a country raises taxes, it will have a high standard of living (and in effect, that's the argument you're making Saturn). It's like the little boy who decorates a Christmas tree in July and is then surprised to learn he gets no gifts. The Soviet Union had high taxation rates (the government took most of what people produced and used it for the collective good) and yet it had a dismal standard of living. This is the kind of mindless nonsense the CBC occasionally regurgitates. There is clear correlation between taxes and the quality of life in a country. I won't claim which is the cause and which is the effect but clearly developed countries have higher taxes and third-world countries have lower taxes. The relationship between taxes and quality of life is not linear either. There are optimal levels for everything, taxes included. Paying 80% of your income in taxes is clearly not the optimal level, but neither is 20%. Whether you should raise or lower taxes depends on where you are relative to that optimal level. Lowering taxes regardless of where you are is not the right approach. This is the kind of mindless nonsense that comes out of the Fraser Institute, the Taxpayers Federation and every conservative publication out there. Your statement about the Soviet Union is incorrect because a huge chunk of the money the government took simply went into the communist party coffers and the politburo members' pockets, not into the public good. On top of that the standerd of living in the former SU has fallen sharply since the free-market took over, along with a 5 year drop in life-expectancy, 5 fold increase in infant death rates, and a host of other problems that plagues Russia and most of the former soviet republics.

I see your point. But I also realize that not everyone is born equal and I have different expectations from different people. I consider myself lucky to be who I am and where I am. I could have been born to a 16-year-old drug addicted mother. I could have been born with physical and mental disabilities. I could have been in a wheelchair after a car accident involving a drunk driver. None of these things would have been my own doing. But I am none of these things and for that I consider myself lucky. I don't agree that that the kid of a 16-year-old drug addict should be denied health-care because his mother is a **** and won't pay the $30 you suggested earlier, while the kid of a billionaire has a team of expensive doctors to care for him. A kid in the Waltons family is not a billionaire at birth because of his own efforts - the Waltons empire rests on the sholders of millions of workers. So I expect the Waltons kid to pay more taxes than his share of services, so that the poor kid can have health-care when he needs it. I agree to define a just society as one where everyone would consider fair regardless of where their starting point is. Would you consider your $30 per ER visit and paid education society fair if you were born to that drug addicted mother?

It was done in many provinces by cutting numbers of medical graduates in a cost saving measure. They found there was a hidden cost in that. Well, we always want cost savings without consideration for what happens in the long run. Can you blame governments for giving us what we want and what we vote for?

Gee, are you telling me that I can't have children because they will use your health care system. Your argument seems to go around some evil newcomers (like newborns) who are ruining your health-care, education and your entire life it seems. How about retirees? They use health-care far more than anyone else and they are not productive at all. They are just a burden, so should we kill them off? I find your whole train of logic very confusing.

One of the reasons there are fewer doctors and nurses is because governments capped their numbers. Governments capped their numbers under pressure from the medical associations. I'm not saying that there isn't certain amount of collusion there but the public isn't putting pressure on governments to increase the number of doctors, so governments are unlikely to do it. On top of that the public is demanding that we pay less for health-care, which makes it difficult for governments to afford more doctors (without pissing off the medical associations). So really, it comes down to what we want and what we are willing to push for.

If you do business in my country then I have a say - through my vote - in how you do business. Then, do you through your vote, believe in majority tyranny over other rights, like abortion and capital punishment? Or who you extend rights to? Why are you, and others, so quick to limit economic freedom while demanding freedoms of other types extend beyond majority tyranny? Perhaps you are a believer in complete majority tyranny, and I'm off base with that comment. But I somehow doubt it. Does your vote give you a right to my property? Why? Does your vote give you a right to tell me how to live? Why/why not? No, my vote does not give me a right to your property but it gives me a right to demand from you to take on a minimum number of responsibilities. For example I can demand that you don't kill, steel, or damage my or other persons' property. I can demand from you that you live in peace with others and that you give others the respect they deserve. I can demand that you pay for your share of the roads (because you use them too), for your share of education, health-care, policing, defence, and many other services which you use whether you realize it or not. I can even demand that you cannot dump toxic waste on your property which will contaminate my property. There are a lot of things I can demand that are quite reasonable and necessary for people to live with each other reasonably well. The fact that you live with others means that you have to restrain yourself from actions that affect others negatively. Or you ought to get yourself some spot in the NWT far from civilization and live on your own. Basically, there has to be a balance between your rights and other peoples' rights. I don't agree that you should be allowed to do anything you want at the expense of others. Because others will attempt to do the same and this can only lead to anarchy.

Good. I think I have a right to your money ok, thanks? See how silly it sounds... I have no right to your money, your labours... just as you or anyone else has no right to mine. No, you don't have the right to my money but I'd rather pay more to keep kids in school for example than to have them run on the streets shooting at each other and killing bystanders. You ought to realize that you live in a society and you cannot isolate yourself in some sort of a bubble where nobody can affect you. If you really cannot stand paying taxes than you are always welcome to move to another country that has no taxes or very little taxes. You can also quit your job and live on my taxes (welfare). It's your choice. But don't complain that you can't make ends meet because most Canadians live on less than what you claim to make - I really don't feel bad for you.

LOL, that's just funny. You just get private clinics and tens of thousands of competing doctors and nurses will fall out of the sky. Interesting point!

All clinics are private clinics that bill the gov't. However, this clinic is cash only because they make more money this way. If more people use these clinics, then her wait time will be shorter. Thus, it's a win/win for everyone involved. Yes. You are right that everyone should receive healthcare like they do in the US without waiting. However, it's people like you who prevent this from happening in Canada becuase your using a rich/poor argument. We are in a state of crisis right now that needs to be immediately addressed. There is no solution except to allow American health providers and insurance companies into Canada and let working people or people with savings use them. That will off load the public system so her wait times will be shorter. our country is not 'rich' enough to fix this problem. Wrong. You are again forgeting the fact that you can't get more services from the same number of doctors. To say that the number of doctors will magically increase by privatizing health-care makes no sense whatsoever. One doctor can see only one patient at a time - he can't be in two places at the same time. So privatising health care will only change who waits and who doesn't - the total amount of health-care services won't change. In the public system everyone waits, in the private system poorer people wait longer and richer people wait shorter. The other difference is that the private system costs 50% more than the public system. Again, I already said that if you are eager to pay for health care you can go to the US. In fact, that's what many rich Canadians do.

Most doctors in Canada run private clinics/offices. Your GP is not a government worker - s/he is a private practicioner who just bills the government for the services s/he provides. That's what we call public health care - health care paid for by the government regardless of who provides it. So if you went to that private clinic and the government paid for it, that would be public health care. Private health care is care that YOU pay for. So private health care is NOT accessible to all regardless of income. Now there are some private, i.e. for profit, clinics where you can get services and the government will pay for them. But that means that you can't jump the queue and you still have to wait in line. One of the main reasons for having to wait so long is that we want our health care real cheap. We want good health care that we don't want to wait for but we don't want to pay for it. We call it free health care but it's not free - it still costs money. But we prefer tax cuts instead and since we pay less, we get a poorer service. Canadian taxpayers have made our choice and we've decided that that's what's acceptable to us.

Hey, even the Canadian Medical Association recently fired the editors of its magazine for writing articles that oppose privatization. This field is so saturated with opinions and there is so much spin that it's pretty hard to tell what's reliable information and what's not. All the stats on this topic I've seen suggest that our health-care system is of fairly poor quality for the amount of money we spend on it. But that's just my opinion. I also happen to know a very large number of health care workers (most of my family for example) and most of them just happen to share my opinion (of course I know a couple who barely make ends meet on $300K/year and totally disagree with me). Btw, what makes you think that some journalist knows a whole lot more about health care than I do? I know that journalists have no idea about my area of expertise and write total nonsense related to it, so I'm not convinced that their opinions on other subjects are all that informed and trustworthy.

This is a good example. The government has been saying we need more high tech workers, yet the market has been saturated with them. Does a GP have to be that much smarter than a computer programmer ? GPs get $300-400K/year, which is 3-4 times more than a programmer with a Ph.D. in computer science. Somehow, I don't think that GPs are that much smarter and I don't think that they need to make even more.

Why can't I argue that - and I am in fact, arguing that many European (or other) doctors have training which is below Canadian standards. Why should we allow doctors to practice here if they don't meet our standards? I would agree that within the provinces licensing should be standardized. It is my understanding that most doctors from the U.S. and the U.K. can practice here with the exception of a one or two colleges. Your understanding is false. There is no such thing. US and UK doctors have to pass their Canadian medical exams and do their 3-year residency program at a Canadian hospital before they can practice in Canada just like doctors from any other country. In addition, it is your right to wait as long as you want for medical treatment. I don't want to wait. So let them practice and you can choose your doctor. Nobody is forcing you to see a foreign doctor. You want the option to pay for health care and I want the option to choose a doctor to my liking.

Honest to God. My ex-gf went to the Dominican Republic for a 1 week all inclusive type thing. Anyhow, they were sea-dooing and she injured her back. She went to a private hospital in near city and stayed for 2 nights. She said that it was air conditioned, she had a phone, TV, and a room all to herself. She also got assigned a Doctor. She could pick up the phone and dial the doctor directly to come to her room. She got xrays, a menu for food and the best care. I saw pictures from the room, I swear it was a huge room with large windows, nice painted walls, wicker chairs, picture hangings, track lighting.. I couldn't beleive it. I wish I still had those pics. And then she got escorted out on a wheelchair with the Dr. and 2 nurses and they took pics to say goodbye and even the nurse gave her a goodbye card. I was in shock.. I really wish I had those pictures but she deleted them all off my computer. Honest to god, I was visiting a bankrupt Eastern European country when I had a problem and had to go through the medical system there. I saw a GP, two ear, nose, throat specialists and had a CAT scan all in the same day. It was not a private hospital (I don't think that they had any - I'm not sure) and the locals pay 1 l = 60 cents Canadian per visit for those services (the rest is paid for by the government). Here I had to wait 10 weeks to see an ear, nose, throat specialist. Now can you tell me why a bankrupt eastern european country with GDP/capita of less than $10,000 can have a better system than we do?

If this was the case, we'd be losing ever more doctors and nurses. According to the link earlier, the trend has reversed. Some of the reasons given are that the malpractice insurance is keeping some doctors from going south. Please cite your source that says we are losing more doctors than gaining them. I don't beleive we're losing more doctors than what we are turing out. Most people consider this country their home and would prefer to stay here. Some goes for most countries. The wealthy in any society tend to stay where they are becuase life is good there. And yes I do kow about the issue of elites keeping the medical schools small and for the priveleged family members and insiders. I've heard about this corruption. This one guy called up a radio talk show and said that his fiance has to go to Poland to study to become a doctor in order to practice in Canada because there were only 60 seats open at the UofT and the grade cut-off was extrememly high. I'm suggesting that even if this was fixed, the Doctor shortage is not our main issue. We need massive, massive increases in infrastructer, MRI machines, hospitals, staff, etc. A doctor is just one person in the chain of medicare. Do you realize how much equipment we have that is sitting underutilized because we don't have the people to run it? We have multi-million dollar machines that are working only 8 hours a day because we don't have the staff to run them 24hrs. We can run our facturies 24hrs but we can't run our expensive medical equipment. At this point most hospitals are running their MRI machines overnight but until recently they were not. They started running them overnight only when the issue of MRI scan unavailability received great attention in the media. If it wasn't for all the publicity, most MRI labs would still be closed 16 hrs a day. There are billions of $s of other equipment that is sitting underutilized because there isn't much publicity about that. The reality is that if most Canadians knew how those in control of the industry are abusing us for their purposes there would be such outrage that they would have to emmigrate to the other end of the world and change their names to get away from retaliation.

That's because the US pays more. We pay doctors very little. In order to pay them more to stay or live here, we would have have to double their wages which we cannot afford. It's a loosing proposition. We're screwed unless major change happens. Ya, $400K/year is very little. Canadian doctors are the second best paid in the world. There are gazillion doctors from other countries who would love to get this much. So if ours want to go to the US, let them and take cheeper doctors in - they are just as good. If you could hire a US programmer for $80K/year or a Spanish programmer for $40K/year, which would you choose?

Hey, most third-world countries have perfectly free economies and no or close to no taxes. Are they extremely successful? The opportunity is there. I don't see why you have any more entitlement to my money than I do. Taxes to create financial equality beyond keeping enough food in you to prevent death is completely theft. Earn your own damned money. The culture of entitlement in the western world is just disgusting. Give it up. I have more money than you do and I don't want any of your money. It's goint to take you 20 years to pay others for the education, health-care and other services you've used up in the first 20 or so years of your life. You are not yet entitled to complain about paying for others because you haven't paid for yourself yet. In 20 years you may have a point but not yet.

It could also be a measure of how boring the economy happens to be. It seems like everybody in Finnland is the same. One thing I tried to search for in this study is comparing how open these different countries are to immigration and refugees. None of their "indicators" seemed to explore that. [before this issue develops into bigotry, I want to say that I think a country that does accept immigrants is a much more free country than one that does not.] I wonder how open Finland is to immigration?? Let us take a look: Helsingin SonomatOh! How magnanimous of the Finns! Canada's refugee statistics alone are in the thousands. Sorry, guys. I think there is more to the big picture of what makes a country great and honorable. Right, it's the refugees that cause all the trouble. I don't know - India and Namibia don't have many refugees but they somehow don't come out at the top of the developed countries list.

Correct. However, let us look at this brilliant study. Here is a shining example of bias: page 16 of the original study (PDF!!!)Sounds poetic but I can not find in their "study" any defense for all those assumptions. I do not trust these statisticians. Now, let us look at their numbers. same page 16 (PDF!!!)An honest person could also look at those same numbers and simply say: Finland has no rich people. Everybody in Finland is equally poor. Maybe all of their high taxes are helping even out the playing field! I don't see what exactly is incorrect here. The fact is that the greater inequality is - the more everyone has to lose. Very poor people have nothing to lose. They are much more likely to end up involved in criminal activity and make things bad for everyone else (rich included). An extreme example is feodal Russia, where over 90% of the population was effectively "owned" by a small minority of rich people. The owners would take most of the peasants' produce in taxes and many people ended up starving even though they produced enough food to feed themselves. The result was that the poor got fed up with it and one day decided to hack the heads of the entire royal family and a large number of their "owners". Most of the remaining "owners" ended up in Siberia. So did the rich do well after all? Another more recent example is Palestinian suicide bombers. They are poor, unemployed, have no house or car to lose and effectively they have nothing to lose by blowing themselves up. Those who have a lot to lose are the modernized, relatively wealthy Israelis, who have property, families, and lives that are worth something to them. The conclusion is that if there are people who are so poor that they don't care whether they live, they will screw up your life too. Everyone benefits when everyone else has at least a bit so that they have something to live for.

Hey, most third-world countries have perfectly free economies and no or close to no taxes. Are they extremely successful?

What you need to recognize is that grants to government friendly companies are the last thing that is going to go. The first thing that will go is services. That's how human organizations work. If a company is not doing well, the first people to go are the front line workers and those who provide the actual services/produce the goods. The next people to go are low-level management. The last to go are top management but that happens only in very rare situations when the company is on its last legs. The same goes to government - the first thing to go is the services provided by the front lines, then management, and finally the politicians' friends. So if you cut taxes by $100, the amount that will come out of services is $100. The politicians' friends will go only when there are no services left to cut. Another way to look at it is suppose you run a business. If the business is not doing well and you have to layoff workers who is going to go first? Joe, who you don't know, your friend, or your kid? Chances are that Joe will go first, your friend next and your daugher/son will go last. No?

Yes, it is clearly bad. You can't say a system works well when it takes 10 hours to have a basic broken arm or wrist set in a hospital. It takes far too long for cancer treatment, far too long to even get in to see a specialist before the treatment. It takes far too long for diagnostic tests, and far too long for basic operations. Get used to it? I don't choose to. Why should Canadians get used to it when those in other countries do not face such waits? It takes so long because we don't have enough people to perform these procedures. If we have a private system, how exactly is the number of doctors going to increase? We have 50,000 doctors and that's it. Public or private, that number is not going to go up. Or do you intend to let anyone off the street be a doctor in a private system? The number of doctors is a product of poor decisions made by politicians and their policy wonks. Much of the disability in the health care system is also due to incompetence and bureacratic waste and mismanagement. The system needs to be streamlined, and private money added. I really don't see the problem with user pay to a limited extent, to a small fee to see your doctor, or to have a diagnostic test done more quickly. If you want to spend your money on cigarettes, beer, and big SUV while mine goes into the bank - well, so what if I now have money to spend on my health and you don't. How is that unfair to you? What is unfair is that your approach will lead to a US system which is 50% more expensive and is still about as bad as ours. You would rather see $30-$50 billion going into the hands of insurance companies than going into the treatment of patients. This will raise the cost of health-care to unreasonably high levels not just for you but for everyone else as well. If you want to pay too much, that's fine, but you will make everyone else pay too much as well. Your actions affect others in a negative way. That's what's unfair. Now if you really want to pay too much, you are always free to go to the US for health care - they will always take your money. The number of doctors is a product of poor decisions made by politicians under the pressure of the medical associations. The reality is that the medical profession is a self-regulated one and the medical associations give certification only to as many doctors as they want. The politicians don't have the guts to stand up to the medical associations (except for Tommy Douglas but he is long gone). Canadians are effectively being held hostage by the medical associations who will keep us waiting in lines until they get their way.

What is the number leaving now? Good question. Large numbers of Canadian physicians who moved to the US are now returning to Canada. In 2004, more returned to Canada than left for the US. The Canadian Institute for Health Information tracks the numbers. Here are some data: http://www.chsrf.ca/mythbusters/pdf/myth19_e.pdf This doesn't include the number of foreign doctors who move to the US though. Roughly 20% of all foreign doctors who come to Canada later leave for the US because they cannot get licenced in Canada. That's a substantial number of physicians.

We can have a lot more residency positions but the medical associations are against it. Because more doctors mean shorter waiting lists and shorter waiting lists mean no privatization. The reason the americans don't have the shortage we do is because they are smart enough to allow foreign doctors (Canadians for example) to practice in the US. We don't allow anyone from outside the country to practice in Canada. So the flow of doctors goes only one way - from Canada to the US and from overseas to the US (often via Canada). I know of at least a dozen foreign doctors who came to Canada to realize that they have two options - move to the US and practise medicine or stay in Canada and wash dishes. Which would you choose? Somehow they are good enough for the Americans but not for us, so we would rather wait 8 months to get the treatments we need.

Most of these indicators are reported by the OECD. Or maybe 1 finnish year = only 0.95 american years, so the OECD got it all wrong?