I’m an Aussie, retired as is my wife from careers in senior management. We’re on our annual pilgrimage to Boston to visit our elder son & his family. I think this is our 7th trip over.

We love America and Americans, especially New England. We are, however, continually bemused by elements of American life. Why are Americans not rioting in the streets over the continuing tax breaks to the very wealthy, for example? How can millions of Americans have no health cover at all? Why is it that those who criticise the obscenely costly and unproductive wars in Iraq & Afghanistan can be regarded as unpatriotic?

The lobbying industry is in itself a source of disbelief for us. It would seem to us that in many ways the US government is as corrupt as the Afghan government.

In Australia, with its states and territories, we have a universal health care system. For example, we moved in retirement from the state of New South Wales to the state of Victoria. The only thing that changed was our address.

The over-arching scheme is called Medicare. It is funded by a levy on all wage & salary earners. Since my wife & I are now qualified for the age pension, we get Medicare benefits for free. As pensioners we also qualify for eg free blood tests, free x-rays, reductions on other services eg physio. Our local doctor gives us every 2nd consultation free, charging it to Medicare. The alternate consultation costs us only $26.

We do, however, maintain private health insurance in order to get dental benefits and to ensure that we can schedule procedures such as my knee joint replacement earlier this year at short notice. Without private health insurance we would go onto a waiting list that might take 2-3 years to come good, although the operation would be free. We would not have surgeon of choice. Our private health fund pays full hospital costs, private room in our case, and meets about 80% of the costs of an operation.

The ‘arguments’ about ‘creeping socialism’ in health care over here are to us a joke. Australia is basically a free enterprise economy but no one regards universal health care as ‘socialist’. We suspect that those who espouse the ‘socialist’ theme over here wouldn’t recognise socialism if they fell over it in the street.

I am amazed at your account of trying to transfer under the same conditions as you had maintained for many years. In Oz you would only have had to notify your change of address.

Best wishes.

John Boase

What is amazing about the PR of the nuke machine right now is that they have dominated an issue that is not rightly theirs.

The nuke PR machine has claimed that nukes are low in emissions. In many cases they claim no emissions for nukes. The nuclear cycle is 20-steps long (see my article on this at http://www.SafeEnergyAnalyst.org). 18 of those steps produce CO2.

And with uranium ore content plummeting, CO2 from mining and milling is skyrocketing. As they mine the best ore, the remaining ore gets lower and lower as a % of uranium. By about 2040, nukes will surpass natural gas for CO2 output.

Actually when you count the waste management of the legally required million years, the CO2 already exceeds coal. But not even counting that inconvenient fact, nukes are on their way to being one of the biggest CO2 producers. See stormsmith.nl for a great study on this, one of many.
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