If Health Care is a Basic Human Right...

What is Free about nationalized health care? If it's so great, why do the people who can afford to pay for it out of pocket instead of rely on government run health care? How many people die from treatable illnesses and injuries simply because your government has decided they aren't worth saving?

If it is a basic human right, then everyone who has ever been denied medical care in your country has had their rights violated by your government.

as I said, it's not perfect. there's only so much in the way of funds to go round. but at least it's there. at least when people choose to pay for private health care, that means that the cost of their treatment is availiable for someone else. if you can afford to pay, then that means there's more to go around for those that can't. people mostly pay for private care because they can get treatment quicker. a common complaint about the NHS is the waiting lists for non emergency treatment. from a purely shallow point of view, without the NHS, my facial scars from a dog bite would have been much worse. I could never have afforded to pay privately for the minor reconstructive surgery I had. so the scars would have been much more noticeable. as it is, most people don't even know I had them. whearas with just the emergency treatment, they weren't healing that neatly. and if I couldn't even have afforded the emergency treatment, I'd have had to just leave it. I mean the bleeding would have stopped, infection could be treated at home with salt water, and I'd probably have a really disfiguring scar. but I never had to decide whether or not to have it treated based on finances. and when my partner was in hospital for six months, and aftercare with home visits (at one point his home visits, blood tests and medication probably cost the best part of £100 EVERY DAY, according to a family member who is a nurse in the NHS) well that would have financially crippled us. there's no way we could have afforded it. the NHS doesn't have a bottomless pit of funds, so it has to be selective with some treatments and medications, but I would still not ever want to live in a country where they have no free health care system.

Canada and the UK both send patients they don't want to bother with to the US for treatment. Don't tell me how great their systems are if they are using our system as a fall back or overflow. What are the UK and Canada going to do if we go socialized and they don't have our system to fall back on anymore?

But more to the point of my article... Do any of those countries delay or deny any treatment to any of their people?

There are some delays, yes, but I don't think anyone in "those" countries are denied health care. I think that is kind of the point. Also, delays in other countries are not as bad as you would think. The UK is the worst, but Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, Germany, and several other countries have modified systems that have very little wait times. No worse than here. And yes, there are delays here. I have been waiting over 6 months to hear back from a periodontist who was supposed to do surgery on my gums.

So if you trashed your body in a car accident you should be penalized?

No ofcourse I don't mean that parated, look at what I'm talking about, by trash your body I mean self inflicting poor health on yourself. Very true grammasnook, I supose in an ideal world it would be nice to be able to know exactly who is obese by the cause of illness and who is as a result of poor choices, but ofcourse that's not possible. I think it's a shame that everyone can now claim it to be a result of illness, even if it isn't.

Sometimes being obese has nothing to do with how much food you eat or poor choices. Most obese people have underlying problems such as abuse, thyroid, tumors, main organ problems. So please do not think it is about being a glutton, many health issues can cause obesity. Depression for example lots of those medications cause major weight gain, so the person gains weight and is now even more depressed than before. Just wanted to point out that it is not always a choice.

Well, private insurance isn't any kind of extortion at all. It is a service just like any other. Government forced insurance (however) is extortion.