On Jul 10, 7:46 am, Bret Cahill aol.com> wrote:

Most people want some sort of health care. Health care can be managed
in three different ways;

1. Every body pays for all their own Health care without taxation.

2. Every body pays some and some of the care comes from taxation.

3. Every body gets health care from taxes only.

Number 2 seems to be the solution currently. In the midst of scarce
resources and expensive technology we face a dilemma. Isn't Moore
bringing attention to this dilemma? I have not seen the documentary.

The standard of living refers to the quality and quantity of goods and
services available to people and the way these services and goods are
distributed within a population. It is generally measured by standards
such as income inequality, poverty rate, real (i.e. inflation
adjusted) income per person. Other measures such as access and quality
of health care, educational standards and social rights are often used
too. Examples are access to certain goods (such as number of
refrigerators per 1000 people), or measures of health such as life
expectancy. It is the ease by which people living in a country are
able to satisfy their wants.

The idea of a 'standard' may be contrasted with the quality of life,
which takes into account not only the material standard of living, but
also other more subjective factors that contribute to human life, such
as leisure, safety, cultural resources, social life, mental health,
environmental quality issues etc. More complex means of measuring well-
being must be employed to make such judgements, and these are very
often political, thus controversial. Even among two nations or
societies that have similar material standards of living, quality of
life factors may in fact make one of these places more attractive to a
given individual or group.

However, there can be problems even with just using numerical averages
to compare material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance,
a Pareto index. Standards of living are perhaps inherently subjective.
As an example, countries with a very small, very rich upper class and
a very large, very poor lower class may have a high mean level of
income, even though the majority of people have a low "standard of
living". This mirrors the problem of poverty measurement, which also
tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of
income can disguise the actual Standard of living.

There are many factors being considered before measuring standard of
living. Some factors are gross domestic product, the per capita
income, population, infrastructural development, stability (political
and social), and many other indicators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living