Why did not socialism take off in the United States?

[Knife]

It's amazing to me that the US can have a good ratio of imagers/population, when diagnostic imaging is apparently quite expensive in the US. Do they sit around much of the time doing nothing? Are people with good health cover getting scanned for a laugh?

It's actually a side-effect of the for-profit model. Tests are expensive, you can easily convince someone that he needs all of them, and you can bill them to the insurance company for big bucks.

I think it's more devious than that. Medical expenses have gotten to the point of goverment spending, in that everything that's done has to pay off four or five people, some of whom don't even have anything to do with the procedure.

Take that imaging test, of course the hospital gets it's share (usually from the insurance company) and that pays the tech. Your Doc gets a cut,(again from the insurance company), but usually the person who reads the test results and makes the report doesn't even usually work at that hospital. They send the 'data' out to a private contractor who may or may not be under your insurance plan.

If they're not, the patient usually ends up paying the two to five hundred bucks for the test results and report, even though they may have taken the test at a facility under their insurance. And I've come to find out, you as the patient have no control over whom your hospital contracts out for those reports and analysis, so even if you're aware, you can't control it and still will probably be charged.

So yeah, your right. For profit model, but it's not as straight forward and simple as most Americans think, it very well may not be 'your' doctor that's trying to screw you. Just about a hundred other guys trying to cash in on your health problems. And that's a problem.

[PainRack]

Just a question for those north of the border or in the UK, or elsewhere, has anyone had any major problems with the "socialist" health care system of Canada? The anti-socialist argument in the US tends to rail about how National Health Care will equal more ineffective government, and that the systems of other countries are equally inefficient.

Insufficient capacity. Throw in economic catchment and it gets worse. The fact is, to ensure equitable healthcare, you have to spend money to put facillities in places which doesn't generate profit. Australia is a prime example of this, where medium towns are slowly being starved of infrastructure due to the costs and profits of doing business there.

As the money dries up, they close down various facillities and then shift the load to other centralised facillities, causing even more load on the system. And since demand isn't realistically driven down due to good transport and other access, facillities get more and more overloaded. Which causes them to eventually shut down, repeating the cycle again.

Its a simplistic explaination, since measures to increase efficiency and reduce costs are put in place and etc, but it doesn't change.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Yes, but Canada has it's population much more tightly packed. It's largest provinces are Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, collectively holding almost 2/3rds of it's population, and the largest cities/metros (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, respectfully) of each province all holding one half of that provinces population.

Suburban and exurban sprawl being the blight, once again. American's fantasize they are safe and personally solely responsible for their apparent prosperity (increasingly a subsidized by a society-wide regime of irresponsible credit). The American cultural economic state is about maintaining the delusion of personal self-reliance and prosperity through consumerism and sprawl. The American fantasizes that their highly subsidized and unsustainable style of habitation is self-reliant and a reflection of the American Dream in a direct line developing from the psychology of the independent, self-reliant homesteads. The fact that all the premises of this cultural concept are culturally and ethically bankrupt is dismissed. Its really all about the myth of economic self-reliance, damned be the fact that the government built the infrastructure down to the preferential-to-the-US economic regime and the interstate highway system. People who are "outside" that true "middle America" are the enemy and seek to dismantle it: urban poor, urban visible minorities, other non sequiter scapegoats like gays, etc.