Stupid News strikes again! (Details F4)

The horse that was injured in a recent race (the one they thought could pull off the triple crown or whatever) was back in the news as the jockey visited it again for the first time since the accident. THIS IS NOT NEWS!

-The jockey visit is an irrelevent milestone, even IF you cared about the "story"
-The injury itself was not a real story. They are hoping to save the horse (for breeding), and all signs are that its life is not even in danger. This is a followup to a fluff piece
-Human racecar drivers DIE on the track every year. Often in big spectacular flaming wrecks. Multiple of them every year. THEY rarely make the national news (at least in Canada), and they are HUMAN.
-BECAUSE the above happens every year, it is STILL not a story. (No, I am not advocating that the national news start covering every racecar driver death. PLEASE DO NOT START WASTING TIME ON IT ON THE NATIONAL NEWS!)
-About 11,000 people in the US are killed in automobile rollover-accidents every year.
-About 11,000 people in the US are also killed in gun violence every year.
-If those barely warrant a 30 second treatment in conjunction with a relevent concurrent topic, then AN ANIMAL INJURY IS NOT NATIONAL NEWS.

And I have decided that they have crossed the line into moronic with auction stories too. Yes, a record high auction price for a painting may almost have qualified as news (considering the amount of news time wasted on it and that need for *some* stupid fluff pieces). And yes, it beats the crap out of "most expensive food" stories where some Japanese diamond company found that they could get international coverage again and again by making different desserts covered in diamonds. "15 million dollar brownie" whatever. But reporting every record auction sale got stupid really fast. If it ever was news, it isn't anymore.

More interestingly, I walked through the "radio zone" today (the part of the house where my parents' radio is more audible than my perpetually-on television) and they were doing their own fluff piece on some "town band" down in one of the states that starts with 'M'. You can tell how much I cared about the story, but that's the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for you. Anyhow, the band mentioned that they are funded from different sources, and they get some donations from a bank, and a hospital...

See that got my attention; hospitals in Canada don't make donations. In Canada we hold charity drives to give money TO local hospitals. Really rich people donate like an MRI machine or something. In elections, health care is a really weird topic in Canada... when they poll people on "what is the most important issue this election", a chunky percentage of people always rate health care as #1. But here's the thing; ALL the political parties are pro-healthcare. They're all in favor of reforming and improving the public system and cutting wait times, and while in reality they still have different plans for it, there's usually no way for any one party to differentiate themselves on the subject, and so the #1 issue actually becomes a non-issue.

...Unless one party gets successfully labeled by their opponents as trying to privatize/Americanize the health system. If you haven't guessed, that's a nasty label around here. We complain about our healthcare all the time; about wait times, and what things aren't covered. But, some (unconfirmed) 'facts' about the US medical system:

-spends twice as much as the Canadian system (in the context I heard it in, the news implied to be per capita, because otherwise that spending would be so low per capita as to hurt their argument) -45 million Americans have no health insurance at all -the amount the US government spends on administration for the various private insurance plans is (supposedly) enough to INSURE that 45 million people -Americans are 19% more likely to "go without" prescribed medications because they can't afford them.

Much of this came from Harvard Medical School who researched the two systems, and in their view, the Canadian one not only had better accessibility, but was actually more efficient. Their recommendation: Canada, you have things to improve, but WHATEVER you do, don't look to the US system for health care ideas.

Of course one of our problems right now is doctors. We train great doctors. I'm pretty sure we even train ENOUGH doctors, plus many foreign doctors immigrate into our country. Problem is, of those Canadian-born doctors, many of them get their education and then move to the States, because doctors in Canada are overworked and doctors in the US make big big money. That "rich doctor" stereotype - doesn't apply in Canada. We're not communists or something; doctors still do pretty well, but they have to work their ASSES off, and if they end up in an underserved area, its even harder on them. But we have all those foreign-trained immigrant doctors to fill the void, right? They'd love to work for Canadian doctors' pay, compared to their own homelands... but they are driving taxis instead. Why? Because the same skills that got them into the country aren't recognized by the boards responsible for accreditation. They'd have to take multiple years of university here for the piece of paper before they could get a job in their own field, even if they practiced medicine in another modern medical system for 10 years.