choc,you are spot on. If you want cosmetic dentistry done it's actually cheaper to go south of the border and that includes the cost of the trip.

When i travel, i have asked my customers in other countries what they pay for braces for their kids teeth. Almost everywhere it 1/2 the price of here.

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Nothing sticks to teflon

The savings for dental work in Thailand are actually far greater than what you indicate- closer to 1/5 th the US cost, and the technology and training is the best. My dentists use the German Cerac system for caps and root canals, and were trained in Switzerland and the US. I have not visited the Thai medical tourism hospitals, but have some friends who have, and their reports are fantastic-luxury suits, with choice of three cuisines, and the best of care at rock bottom prices. Google Thailand health tourism.

yeh but thailand is a lonnnnnngggggggg trip and when i fly that long it has to be business class. I'm just too cheap to fly business class when on vacation.

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Nothing sticks to teflon

With that extra tax could change our normal life styles drastically.

Maybe you cant buy new shoes at the end of the month cause of healthcare or w/e your gonna buy. Point is we shouldnt change the system b/c the current one works the poor do get their care for free(covered by the hospitals) its against the law for a hospital to turn somebody down ....i dont get what the fuss is about.

SO this means if the economy isnt spending like it normally is... thats nots good...

if the shelves stay full then the businesses cant expand and produce jobs for the rest of us.

You don't see it as a problem that America spends twice as much per capita as most other industrialized countries for healthcare, and yet the health of its citizens is near the bottom of industrialized countries?

You don't see it as a problem that healthcare bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in America?

You don't see it as a problem that some Americans are overtreated and others are undertreated, which is inefficient and leads to poor health? That American hospitals are more concerned with the bottom line than the outcomes for patients? That insurance companies would rather fight a claim in court until the patient is dead than determine which treatments are effective and should be covered? That America has to pay exorbitant prices for drugs (that its governmentresearch dollars helped create) compared to other countries because Pharma lobbyists convinced Congress to make it illegal for medicare to negotiate for better prices?

Also, every person who stumbles into the emergency room near death is indicative of a failure of healthcare. We have a system that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to temporarily extend the life of that person but will not spend a few hundred dollars in the preventive care that often could prevent such problems to begin with. Our system is inefficient and causes more pain and misery.

I can see why people may differ on what the solution is, but there clearly is a problem.

Then we need to change the law to apply to all businesses equally!

I'm poor, so I shouldn't pay at Wal-Mart.
I'm poor so I shouldn't pay at the gas station.
I'm poor, so I shouldn't pay for utilities.
I'm poor, so I shouldn't pay for a car.
I'm poor, so I shouldn't pay for clothing.

We'll just make sure all of the costs are passed along to others. We'll take away from the rich and give it to the poor. That sounds an awful lot like socialism to me. If you want to preach capitalism, be a capitalist across the board, not just whenever it suits your argument.

Or, we could just realize that unadulterated capitalism isn't always the best answer, spread the costs out equally, and call it fair...

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The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. ~George Bernard Shaw

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

I don't know where you got your economics education, but one thing a little study will tell you is that Americans are going to buy whether they're paying for health care or not. Gas has hit $3.50 a gallon on average. Americans are still spending. In the past, real estate hit ridiculous proportions. Americans still bought. Prices are about 10x now what they were 30 years ago. Americans are still buying. You see, companies and marketers know something that you seem to be missing. They have found something that is relatively constant in economics, and that is the behavior of the American consumer.

Americans are used to a certain standard of living that they will not give up just because they are paying a couple of hundred dollars a year more for their health care. They will still buy the things they were going to buy anyway.

I don't know about you, but I generally don't buy the things I don't need anyway. So I'm not going to be cutting back on anything, since I generally need what I buy. I suspect far more Americans are exactly the same than not. In fact, If I pay for health care up front, it's going to cost me less in the long run, and I'll have MORE money to spend at America's retail hog trough.

But this is all pissing up a rope. None of the current candidates have proposed anything resembling a single-payer, government-run health program despite what your favorite fear-mongering radio-head is telling you. What the candidates are proposing is aimed at lowering costs and giving access to coverage for those that cannot currently afford it. Other than that, your precious system, fucked up and broken as it is, is safe. Doctors aren't going to quit and go do something else. Pharma companies are still going to do R&D and roll out new products and flood the airways with impotency ads. So your McDonald's fiend wanting "liposucktion" will still have to pay for it out of his own pocket, since that's a voluntary procedure. And I suspect it would remain so under any government plan since I know of no insurance plans that currently pay for it.

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The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. ~George Bernard Shaw

I reject your reality and substitute my own.