Conservative Facebook friend advice please

[Green_Lantern]

I was discussing govt. funded health care with a friend on Facebook:


Me: I didn't say govt. run healthcare but govt. funded. It works in Germany.

Him: No it doesn't. It sure as hell didn't help my mother in law who died at the mercy of the German Goverment Run Healthcare. try again.

Me: How did she die at the mercy of German healthcare....I think you are full of shit.

Him:My wife has dual citizenship she is both German and American. Her mother was German before she died. The Government forced her to delay getting treated after her having issues breathing and COUGHING UP BLOOD. She had LUNG CANCER, you ASS. Matt, fuck you buddy. I think you fucking suck. This is done.


Am I the asshole or does his story sound bogus?

[sadbear]

1. Sounds bogus.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

[Wait Wut]

2. You should have left off the "I think you are full of shit."

No one likes to be called a liar. He may have been telling his version of the truth, which is not a lie. I'm sure that if the MIL really did die in Germany that there were some details he had left out.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. Sounds bogus. Most lung cancer that causes one to cough up

blood is way past the point of getting treated. It's fatal.

By the way, if Germany's cancer care is so poor, why did both Ronald Reagan and Farrah Fawcet seek treatment in Germany?

http://www.treatmentingermany.com/treatments/cancer-treatment/

Cancer treatment in Germany


The German health care system has the reputation of being one of the best in the world. There is an extensive network of hospitals and doctors covering even the remotest areas of Germany. Waiting lists for treatments are rare and medical facilities are equipped with the latest technology. Germany ranks fourth out of 29 European countries in the Euro Health Consumer Index, the annual ranking of national European healthcare systems.

[FLyellowdog]

4. Conservative Facebook Friend

is a myth, I've decided. Until I began using FB I never knew how so many of my "friends" were uneducated and bigotted. It's so sad.

As for the story, no way to know if it's bogus. Probably just offer condolences and move on. Either agree to disagree or drop political issues altogether.

Focus your energies on getting Obama reelected. I know I am.

[get the red out]

5. Unfriend

Sound's like he's an asshole.

[Indydem]

6. Lung cancer can evade being symptomatic.

Until it is too late.

My dad's cancer manifested itself in a noticeable way at stage 4 when it had already spread.

They may feel she did not receive timely treatment, or sufficient treatment. That does not make them full of shit or their story bogus. It makes them a hurt family.

You made it worse by being insulting.

[progressivebydesign]

12. A friend's mother just died of lung cancer this week, after being asymptomatic until 4 weeks ago.

then she just passed on within a month.

[patrice]

19. My sister did that. ONE month. She was 54 years old. nt

[maryellen99]

14. That happened to my MIL too

The only thing that was wrong was that she had bronchitis. The week after Thanksgiving 2009 her lung collapsed and that's when she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer that had metastasized. She died 6 weeks later.

[patrice]

18. That's why it's called "the sneaky cancer". My first husband had stopped smoking 20 years prior

to a slight dry cough that lasted only about a week, so we didn't do anything about it. Then several months later, a back ache that lasted several weeks and we could get NO response our of our very good corporate health care, not even an x-ray, let alone an MRI until he managed to get an office nurse to get one for him somehow, anyway . . . .

It is my opinion that the success rate on lung cancer treatment is so low that, if you just look at the numbers, it is possible to decide to either outright deny or AVOID certain responses to possible cases of lung-cancer, in order to get these patients out of the systems as soon as possible and it may be possible, by delaying the diagnoses, to earn much higher rates of profits in much shorter periods of time and, thus, process more such patients than you'd be able to carry if they were diagnosed more accurately earlier in the disease cycle.

[Lex]

7. Romney was just praising Israel's healthcare system

Send him this link: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election-2012/mitt-romney-praises-israel-government-run-health-care-system-keeping-costs-article-1.1127417

[RedStateLiberal]

8. You're wasting your time.

They will literally say anything to try to prove that they are right. No amount of logic or facts will even make a dent with most conservatives.

I'm sure there's a lot more to the story about his wife's mother. Lung cancer has a low survival rate. It is usually incurable.

My wife died of cancer right here in America under the treatment of one of the best cancer hospitals in the nation. Eventually they told her there was no use trying to treat her any longer and put her on hospice. I don't blame our private healthcare system for her death (even when arguing for full government-run healthcare) because that would be unfair and ridiculous.

[arbusto_baboso]

9. Like many Americans, your "friend" seems to think everything is cureable.

In fact, Americans just don't deal well with death, I've found.

Doctors can cure some things, but they can only treat others. And there's never been a cure yet for mortality, no matter what panicky, screeching family members may believe.

Okay, I worked at a hospital for awhile, so I may have a somewhat jaded view of things, but still...

[progressivebydesign]

10. If any "friend" tells me to fuck off, we're not friends anymore.

Seriously. Why even have a "friend" like that? I never understood that.

As far as his claim... suppose he hasn't noticed how many more people die in America because privately-run insurance makes decisions on your care based on how much money you have, whether or not they can cancel on you, etc. If someone is to that point as he describes, she's terminally ill and would die either way, no doubt. Sounds like they just like to blame people.

Seriously. Unfriend that person. Life is too short for that shit.

[laundry_queen]

11. I'm reading between the lines here...

but it's likely that she already was terminal and she may have had to wait for some treatment (I know there are radiology delays here in Canada, but that's just due to a shortage of specialists in that area, and it's unclear that delays lead to higher mortality) but doubtful it would have made a difference at that point. Coughing up blood and have issues breathing is usually signs of later stages of lung cancer. Your friend probably thinks that her delay made the difference between life and death, because he likely doesn't know anything about medicine, and because he's a repug, he blames it on the government. Ask him what would happen in the US if his MIL was the working poor and had NO insurance. Ask him how long he figures her treatment would have been delayed for THEN.

[SoCalDem]

13. unfriend/ignore/delete

or whatever they use at FB

[Marrah_G]

15. My suggestion is to unfriend him and walk away

He sounds unhinged and frankly why be friends with someone who would speak to you like that.

[patrice]

16. ANY form of over-simplification is suspect. & We CAN learn from the mistakes of other countries.

You might want to consider posing the issue as:

- No health care system is going to be perfect; it's not the nature of health care in itself, because if it were possible for health care to be perfect it would also be un-necessary. So imperfection IS an unfortunate given.

- So if you want to count German/whoever 's failures relative to American failures, that would be a good starting point.

- There are sources that say we Americans pay the most and get nearly the worse results in health care, compared to all other rich nations on Earth, i.e. despite what happened to his mother, from an aggregate perspective USA is a worse system.

- Even if you try to factor out whatever it is that is different in the American system, i.e. the for profit motive, and then compare to Germany, so that you're comparing like to like, you'd probably find either a higher rate of dysfunction in American systems, because not-for-profit care does not happen in isolation, it IS affected by the presence of for-profit-care, or you'd at least find an equal rate of failure between the two countries, which raises the question as to why for-profit is tolerated in the USA, or a lower rate of failure in not-for-profit USA, which if so, he has a case about the German system and his mother, but the question still remains about why we should tolerate for-profit health care if we're getting lower failure rates in our not-for-profit care system (Medicare).

[coalition_unwilling]

17. Your 'friend' is probably a liar. Was this a real 'friend' or one of these faux FB 'friends'?

[Green_Lantern]

21. I knew him as a kid

And reconnected 20 years later.

[melm00se]

20. it all depends upon how close of

a friend this person really is.

If he is really close just let it wash off you like water off a duck.
if he isn't that close (facebook acquaintance only), ignore or defriend.

I don't discuss politics with people that I know it will blow up.

[Motown_Johnny]

22. Ask his wife for the real story.

[just1voice]

23. Facebook is a gossip site, go ahead and gossip away with small minds

If the shoe fits.