[Onyx1]

Small class sizes are positively correlated with increased student achievement.

I'd like to see proof. I took a class with 70+ students and it doesn't effect learning at all. If so, how? Look at UCSD. 200+ students yet the students learn. Btw, less teachers = better teachers getting hired. I believe though that the teacher has not much significance at middle/high school level and beyond. We need to give kids solutions manuals to math books. They help a ton. Every person I know that has them say it helps. Look at college requirements. There's online classes and now instructors can handle more than 6 classes. One of the best universities offer online MBA programs, or half online/campus, and even a Pharm.D online.

[HM2Viking]

I provided the direct reference to the article. (It is available online...) The research shows that for American children increased class sizes adversely affect performance and learning.

There are differences between adult learners and child learners in both learning styles and abilities.

[ksilty]

Originally Posted by newyorknursey

No cap of 2800 was suggested; medicaid for all is the SOLUTION, not the problem. And MEDICAID patients are taxpayers. You need to invest in reading time. Much thanks!!!!!

I work as a case manager with Medicaid patients in North Carolina and I can't identify a single adult recipient in my case load works and pays taxes. Children's Health Plan is another matter, where recipients are often children of the "working poor", but once again, the recipient does not work. In my state, if you earn enough to actually pay taxes, you earn too much to qualify for MA.

[ksilty]

[quote=.Additionally, millions more are people who can afford health insurance, but exercise the great American past-time of CHOICE, and opt out, possibly saving that money for an HSA (those people technically are not insured, but still have money available for health care), or use that money to purchase a more expensive home, etc. Suddenly they are alleged victims when they have to sell the home to pay for health care, when the truth is that their home was really their insurance policy, a policy they were living in instead of buying from a broker.

[/quote]

I wrote a research paper on the uninsured in my graduate program, and this is true. I agree that there are a lot of uninsured in this country, but when I polled many for my paper the reason for being uninsured reflected a need to spend premium money on other things. Healthcare should be a priority, not a luxury. I know too many of my children's friends who simply ignore the need for insurance because it is more important to have a new car or a bigger house. Stupid move if you are gambling on staying healthy.

[HM2Viking]

It would be far easier to make health care a priority if we mandated funding participation through a combined income/VAT based premium system and junked the current employment based premium system.

[azhiker96]

We should model on the Canadian system? I thought Cuba was the gold standard! LOL

Now matter who pays the bill, our costs will continue to rise as long as we continue to allow lawyers to feed on it. We need to eliminate percentage contingency fees and let lawyers get paid like everyone else, either by the hour or the job. It's ridiculous to allow them to siphon off huge amounts of awards that they argued were owed to their client.

[Annisme]

The Canadian government posts their statistics for such things as wait times for care on the government website. They have specific links for wait times and even had a multi-year research project they funded ($2.5 million) to try to find out how to cut the wait times. The result of that study was...they didn't know.
http://www.healthservices.gov.bc.ca/...t/cardiac.html

[herring_RN]

In the provided link it seems that wait times are long unless the patient needs the surgery ASAP.
I would guess half wait less than the median wait time because those are included in the hals done without delay due to medical necessity.

...Cardiac Surgery

Half of all heart or cardiac surgery in B.C. is done on an emergency basis and without delay. According to the Median Wait Time, all the people who have had their surgery in the past three months, half waited less than the median wait time....

http://www.healthservices.gov.bc.ca/...t/cardiac.html

[HM2Viking]

I don't think that the US should get hung up on wait times in Canada as we go forward with reform. I think we need to see what works in other countries and then adopt what we can use. We actually should look to France for cues on system design.

[azhiker96]

Originally Posted by HM2Viking

I don't think that the US should get hung up on wait times in Canada as we go forward with reform. I think we need to see what works in other countries and then adopt what we can use. We actually should look to France for cues on system design.

I absolutely agree with this! We do need to see what works and what we can tolerate in a healthcare model. I found this http://www.fraserinstitute.org/comme...spx?pubID=4971
article. What really interested me was this section,

Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, and Switzerland provide what many Canadians might see as the impossible dream. In each of these nations, individuals are guaranteed access to health insurance regardless of their ability to pay. And each of those individuals, regardless of their income or wealth, has access to the health care they need without waiting lists. Equally importantly, the cost of these health care systems is, on an age-adjusted basis, similar to or less than Canada’s, so Canadians need not dig deeper into their pockets to achieve this sort of access.
In these nations, patients are free to choose for themselves whether their care provider will be a public or private hospital, all under the terms of the public insurance contract. They must, however, share in the cost of the care they consume, which encourages them to make more informed decisions about when and where it is best to access the health care system. Patients in these nations are also free to purchase the care they desire privately if they wish to do so.
While patients in these seven nations bear more personal financial responsibility for the care they consume, they also enjoy more freedom in determining who will pay for and who will deliver the care they need. The result is that patients enjoy access to care without waiting lists.