If I t wasn't for our "free" healthcare and welfare, I'd likely be dead now, rather than a productive member of society. Food for thought.

kronoman hit the nail on the head. Want help? Help yourself.

Nope, but Arthur has the same mentality kronoman described. In more ways than one.

You need help with that money problem? Help yourself.
You need help with depression? Suck it up and help yourself.
You need help with moving? Fuck you.

OK I don't know about the moving part but it seems to fit with the rest.

According to somebody (and ignoring inflated hospital fees as per that article somebody quoted showing US medical costs are 10x the norm) that operation cost over a $1m.

If he'd had it done when he noticed the problem 5 years prior, it would have cost maybe $100 in fees and injections.

Do you know how many friends the average blind person or deaf person has ?

A link to two essays I find interesting wirth regards to this debate:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:A_Day_In_The_Life_of_Joe_Conservative

The first one exposes how Conservatives in the USA, Canada, or Europe think despite all the benefits that they enjoy. The second essay describes life how life would be like in a country where the government is as the conservative leaders and plutocrat fat cats want it to be.

Edit oh and these ones:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Welcome to the plutocracy.

Like I said, I'd be dead without the assistance I got. if my family could have helped more, they would have. My mom did a great thing and bought a place for me to live in. That helped a great deal.

And I do help people. I pay my taxes, and my taxes go to government programs that help people.

Some people mooch. And some people mooch off their families. That will never go away. Refusing to help anyone because of a few ass holes is a really stupid thing to do imo.

Theres a lot of people who commit crimes, but we don't need no police, lets just do it ourselves!

Oh and take away knives, people could use them for murder!

The suggestion that family could do anything significant about a medical issue is an absurd cop-out in my opinion. Is family supposed to make the medicine and provide the regular medical care and surgeries?

The bottom line is that we might save someone for free in an emergency room but when it comes to chronic care, people without health insurance are screwed and are basically left to die in the USA. Frankly I'm surprised the guy got his testicles removed in the first place here but he got a lot of notoriety because of the grotesqueness and “humor” of his situation. Lots of radio shows put him on because it was amusing. He basically had to make a fool of himself to get his life back.

The other issue I see is that the USA has generally exported a huge chunk of our jobs to China and India and elsewhere despite that fact that it basically requires a “full-time” job to have affordable health insurance here. Oh and then they want even more of our money to “create jobs”.

That's because your system sucks, and has for decades. The private hospitals have NO incentive to provide more than the absolute bare minimum of care, and even then they skimp and charge many many times what it actually cost.

If you think about it, those hospitals have incentive to not heal you. Why? because then you have to go back over and over and over again.

I'm not saying our system is perfect, but its a lot better than yours.

Another interesting tid-bit, its cheaper for insurance companies to pay out death benefits than disability/hospital fees over your life after a major issue. So yay, they'd rather you die.

Prevention is far preferable to treatment. If you notice anything out of the ordinary I suggest at the very least a checkup. Catch things early and you can cut it off at the pass, rather than waiting till you're dying. It's cheaper too. For both yourself and the country as a whole.

My mother has some thing where the main veins in her legs swell up and could burst and she would die. She has to have surgery every few years. I don't know how much it would cost if it wasn't covered under our health care system. Instead we just pay a reasonable amount of tax like everyone else, and most people are happy doing so. It's not perfect, and sometimes there are wait times, but not just anybody is qualified to perform surgery you know. That's the only complaint I've ever heard from people - that there are delays sometimes. At least they're not 5 year delays for serious things. Everyone here generally agrees that overall we have a great healthcare system and I don't think anybody would trade it for the US system.

Last winter I tried a job cleaning houses on base, I was constantly on my feet or hands and knees for maybe 8 hours a day, my legs swelled up to where I could barely get my pants on and my big toenails turned black, with one toenail falling off. I was also going to the local plasma center and they saw my swollen legs, gave me a physical, and told me implied I have congestive heart failure, and couldn't return until my ankles weren't swollen anymore. Among other things, they told me I had to stop drinking Pepsi(TM)(Nectar of the Godz) because of the high sodium content (it has very very little sodium).

Anyway, the woman hiring me quit, so after a couple months I returned to normal on my own, and the plasma center said I was healthy enough again, but they asked what medication I was taking to make the swelling go down, as if that was the only possible solution.

It probably would have went away sooner had you taken at least the intention of the advice. aka: take care of yourself and cut back on things causing the issue.

But the plasma center doesn't normally have doctors on staff, usually only nurses and aides, so I'm not sure you should be slaging everyone off for that.

As for pepsi and sodium, one can of it has 15mg of sodium. Depending on how much you drink and what else you have that has sodium in it, if its a lot or not.