GOP Nominee

[Lemur]

I assume he means half the cost per head, and I also assume he wasn't being literal.

Actually, I think he understated the case, although it's hard to make head-to-head comparisons, given that different benefits apply. Still and all, a recent, rough comparison.



I think anyone who has run the numbers can see that the US system involves the most cash for (at best) an average outcome.

[gaelic cowboy]

Doctor numbers are differ though I wonder if it is something to do with being able to charge or something whereas all the other stuff is seen as a cost.

Well that's pretty damning, isn't it?

Especially seeing as you wouldnt say the UK has some fabled mediterranean diet, they drink, smoke eat too much nor do they exercise blah blah and still the life expectancy is two years better with less wonga spent.

[Lemur]

Well that's pretty damning, isn't it?

Short version of my take: Single-payer healthcare has its ups and downs, but it appears to be the cheapest method for covering the population.

A purely market-based system of healthcare may be cheaper, depending on which economic theories you choose to believe, but it has never been tried on a national scale in a developed country. (I would be a lot more confident in the Republicans who advocate a pure market system if they could point to a single real-world example. Empiricism FTW.)

Here in the USA we've managed to take the worst aspects of single-payer and fuse them to the worst aspects of a broken market system, yielding the most expensive healthcare on Earth. Yay us.

The only upside to our system is that if you have a great deal of wealth (in the form of gold-plated insurance or good old cash), some low-percentage diseases and conditions can be treated at a much higher level of competence than in any single-payer system. So if you've got some weird variant of lymphoma, and your pockets are functionally bottomless, you can buy better treatment here.

And that's about it.

[Strike For The South]

Its all a plot by Obama to make us live longer so the terrorists have a better chance to kill us

[Lemur]

Getting back on topic, looks to me like Santorum must have some Fallout and/or Walking Dead fans on staff:

[Lemur]

And although he's not in the running anymore, Herman Cain still makes the best performance art. Die, bunny, die!



-edit-

And fun factoid for the day, this is the first time that self-identified Christian Evangelicals have been a majority of voters in the GOP presidential primary.

Evangelicals have cast a majority of the vote in the Republican presidential primaries so far in the 2012 cycle, the highest percentage recorded in a presidential nominating process in the modern era, according to an analysis of entrance and exit polls conducted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Through March 12, an estimated total of 4.29 million evangelical Christian voters have gone to the polls in the 16 primaries and caucuses for which exit or entrance polls were conducted by news organizations, out of a total of 8.49 million total votes cast. This 50.53% evangelical turnout rate compares to a 44% turnout rate in the 2008.“Conservative people of faith are playing a larger role in shaping the contours and affecting the trajectory of the Republican presidential nomination contest than at any time since they began pouring out of the pews and into the precincts in the late 1970’s,” said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “They are indispensable to any winning strategy for the eventual Republican presidential nominee in both the primaries and the general election. Any candidate who ignores these voters and the values that motivate them does so at their own peril.”

According to the exit polls, Rick Santorum has won a plurality of the evangelical vote with 32.85 percent, compared to 29.74 percent for Mitt Romney, 29.65 percent for Newt Gingrich, and 7.76 percent for Ron Paul.

[gaelic cowboy]

Right I'm confused so over 4million loons are forcing the candidate that is put before 300million people janey macks about an vested interest group.

[Lemur]

All primary voters are a subset of a subset, nothing strange in that. But to have a single party's primary dominated by evangelicals is noteworthy.

Meanwhile, Romney makes another weird statement, this time about how Russia is "our number one geopolitical foe." I have no idea what to make of that. One conservative's take:

Whenever Romney speaks about foreign policy, I never rule out that it could be driven almost entirely by shameless opportunism. He sees an opening to criticize Obama on policies related to Russia, he takes it, and then predictably can’t avoid ridiculous hyperbole. However, it’s not just opportunism. This seems to reflect the bizarre, outdated hostility towards Russia that his earlier policy statements have conveyed. Sometimes the U.S. and Russia have divergent interests, and sometimes these interests may conflict, but that’s true of the U.S. and any other major power. His description of Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” suggests that Romney has a very warped, anachronistic view of the threats to the United States. It’s a good bet that “our number one geopolitical foe” wouldn’t be permitting the resupply of our military in Central Asia through their territory and airspace. For some reason, Romney wants us to think that his Russia policy would be defined by Cold War-era paranoia.