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On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system?
The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons.
1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world.
2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback.
3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from.
4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details.
On November 08 2024 23:52 Sadist wrote:
Medicare is kneecapped by not being allowed to negotiate drug prices. Not to mention it doesnt even cover everyone, you could lower prices even more if everyone in the US is covered.
If we want to pay different locals different rates to account for cost of living thats fine too. All of these problems are solvable. Instead you want survival of the fittest. Please use your critical thinking hat. How fo you think prices are handled today?
The insurance companies and the hospitals are in a negotiating battle. The number of customers each group have gives them leverage over the other in negotiating. Its absolute bullshit regular people are caught in the middle of this.
We have a public option now. It's called Medicare. It siphons money from the rest of the government because it can't sustain itself under its own premiums. That means, whether a Medicare recipient or not, you are paying for Medicare recipients if you pay taxes.
If you nationalize the entire system to THAT, the same thing will happen, just now instead of John paying for his private insurance and taxes that cover his neighbor's Medicare, and his neighbor Jim paying for Medicare as well as taxes that cover his own Medicare, you will have John and Jim both paying their Medicare as well as paying more taxes to cover each other's Medicare because they have to make up the difference for Jim too.
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Oblade get real. Republicans are a huge part of the problem here. They want people "to have skin in the game" IE should i really go to the doctor for my broken leg or not. Republicans want them to shop around for the best deal, nevermind the fact that if you have a fucking emergency you just go to the nearest hospital.
Please kick rocks. You dont know what the fuck you are talking about with regards to healthcare.
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On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details.
Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about?
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On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details.
Wow that sounds pretty bad.
Probably should try a few different things and see if can be improved 
edit: On topic - The Guardian is reporting 4 million people could lose health insurance if Trump doesn't renew a government subsidy, which he probably won't.
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Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way.
On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about?
What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect.
However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems.
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details.
1) Being so unhealthy can explain total outlay to a certain degree. It doesn’t explain why a comparable procedure or drug treatment can exceed that in another nation, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Also, being unhealthy can have certain benefits on the public purse. End of life dementia care is a hugely growing expense, and actually more so in healthy countries. I’m not saying this necessarily balances out, but it does somewhat mitigate things. Counter-intuitively smokers actually save the NHS money over here, by a combination of gigantic sales tax, and frequently dying earlier before their healthcare costs skyrocket.
3) The left can underestimate the power of inventive enabling genuine innovations here. Fair enough. Equally there are huge pharmaceutical companies the world over, and healthcare systems the world over that purchase US products. Still plenty of money to be made. A little less perhaps, those incentives still exist.
4) It’s not crony capitalism, it’s just capitalism. And it hasn’t entered this state anytime recently, it’s been the case for decades.
It’s just not a good fit for what benefits market capitalism can bring in in all sorts of other sectors. You don’t have to be a big socialist like me to think it’s not, even many a fan of the power of the free market elsewhere will concede it’s not a great place to marketise.
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On November 08 2024 10:17 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 10:11 ChristianS wrote:On November 08 2024 10:02 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 08 2024 08:52 KwarK wrote:On November 08 2024 06:45 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 08 2024 05:33 WombaT wrote:
If the Democrats framed Trump as a shitbag who’d shortly fuck off, let’s figure out some messaging to counter him, that’s one thing. Kinda my position
But they want to simultaneously frame him as a Fascist threat to democracy, while also doing nothing to block his ascent to power What is terrifying to me is that libs/Dems are just going to retcon the "Trump is a fascist that will destroy democracy" thing, as we see happening now. Then insist no matter how authoritarian Trump gets, that he's not actually a fascist dictator, because then electoralism wouldn't be worth shit and they are lesser evil absolutists. They'll be the one's explaining " actually this bipartisan mass deportation bill is a win because we got some more weapons for Israel and Ukraine!" Then " Oh, turns out there's no where that will take the ~10,000,000+ people we Democrats and Republicans rounded up, guess we'll have to make these camps a bit more permanent" Then " Oh you know who could do the work? These people illegals we rounded up! It's okay if they don't want to, we can legally force them" and so on....That's just one of the lib/Dem to fascism examples but there's more. Before anyone tells me "oh Democrats wouldn't let Trump enslave undocumented immigrants, put them in work camps, and violently punish those that refuse". Genocidal Democrats are already building the cop cities across the country that could fill/staff the prison camps while actively voting against ending slavery in California in 2024 (Harris NEVER mentioning this being on her ballot is actually unbelievable to me). FOH. This is all happening right in front of our faces and libs/Dems are just like "man this hot tub is nice, smells a bit like spices though...". I don't anticipate defending or apologizing for anything Trump does, though it's possible he might be tricked into something good. I'm still pissed at him for shit from 2016. Though one thing I will say for him is that he's never hidden what he is. Even back then he was openly stating that he'll accept the results of the election if he wins and refuse to accept them if he loses. The scorpion never claimed he was anything other than a scorpion. I have more venom and contempt for those who decided that they didn't have enough scorpions in their lives. You'll notice in that post I don't anticipate you defending or apologizing for anything Trump does either. What I'm describing is a bipartisan mass deportation aka ethnic cleansing effort that would be rationalized by you and other lib/Dems, much like you all just did with your/Harris/Biden's support of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. To ChristianS point when GENOCIDE doesn't pass for "consequences bad enough it’s worth abandoning that first principle (the one about the president being whoever won the election)." it begs the question of what is? So far you guys have given me nothing, so I have to believe Trump and Democrats enslaving 10,000,000 immigrants wouldn't be it either. If the question is “what would the circumstances be under which I would take up arms against my government?” I hope you’ll appreciate that I don’t take the question lightly and don’t necessarily have a comprehensive answer for you right this moment, but I’m certainly pondering what exactly the answer might be. I’m not sure if that’s the question you’re asking, though. "Take up arms" is a bit dramatic, I'm at "what would the circumstances be under which I would join a revolutionary socialist organization" (or "I would read like 50% of a book by a socialist", edit: or just "I would stop voting for Democrats") and have been for YEARS waiting on you guys to have an answer to where you draw the line if not genocide for just that much.
I’m imagining various scenarios about Trump carrying out some or all of the atrocities he promised to commit, and your question is “how bad would that have to get for you to agree never to vote for Democrats again?” Do you get how it doesn’t seem like a responsive question? If I promised that right this moment, it wouldn’t change the path a bit because I’m just one CA voter, and if voters en masse made the same promise, surely it would just embolden Republicans to commit atrocities without fear of electoral consequence. The obvious conclusion is that no amount of promising not to vote for Democrats is capable of stopping Republicans from committing atrocities, no?
Maybe it would be helpful to pivot a bit to a related subject: a word socialists often like to use is “revisionism.” As I understand it, it dates back to a late 19th century German socialist named Eduard Bernstein, and the concept is “we don’t need a revolution, we’ll just form political parties, win votes, and enact legislation to bring about socialism.” Socialists don’t exactly use the term as a compliment; indeed, it’s the punchline to the joke about socialists that Drone posted a while back:
+ Show Spoiler [Drone’s joke] +There's also this joke, which comes in various ways - just copy pasting the first one I found: Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "The proletariat love you. Do you believe in the proletariat?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a communist or a socialist?" He said, "A communist." I said, "Me, too! Marxist-Leninist or anarchist?" He said, "Marxist-Leninist." I said, "Me, too! What kind of thought?" He said, "Trotskyist." I said, "Me, too! Intersectional Trotskyist or Classical Trotskyist?" He said, "Intersectional Trotskyist." I said, "Me, too! Socialist Action (United States), Socialist Alternative (United States), or Socialist Equality Party (United States)?"
He said, "Socialist Action (United States)." I said, "Me, too! Socialist Resurgence splinter group, or Socialist Action mainline?" He said, "Socialist Resurgence splinter group." I said, "Me, too!"
"Socialist Resurgence committee of 2019, or Socialist Resurgence committee of 2021?" He said, "Socialist Resurgence committee of 2021." I said, "Die, bourgeois revisionist!" And I pushed him over.
Lenin spends no small amount of time in What is to be Done tearing into Bernstein and Revisionism, and yet for all his sarcasm and scorn, I have trouble enumerating what exactly would be his explanation of why socialism cannot be enacted by electoral campaigns in a liberal democracy. He’s not a vanguardist, he doesn’t think the proles are too dumb to get it and you need a small cadre of radicals to stage a coup and give them their dictatorship against their will. So if you’re going to have to convince the masses of your program, why would it be an unacceptable route to elect representatives who pass bills and amendments?
To be clear, I’m not asking this because I think the conclusion is wrong. Now especially, but even after 2020 I didn’t have a ton of faith in our democratic process as an effective engine for change or political decision-making. Kwark et al. are going on about how dumb it is that voters would blame Biden for inflation and such when it’s trivial to analyze why inflation happened and whether Biden did a good job combating it; but the fact remains, voters overwhelmingly make decisions on the basis of those kinds of factors. Where can you go with that besides questioning the premise of government based on elections decided by this electorate?
If a fairly simple analysis like “why does inflation happen?” is way beyond what we can expect of the average voter, I certainly don’t think you can expect a majority of them to undergo the kind of revolutionary socialist self-education you’re begging everyone in the thread to find time for. But… then what? Are we back to vanguardism? Lenin eventually got somewhere with this stuff, but I’m not particularly thrilled to follow the path of early 20th century Russia (neither how they got to revolution, nor where they when after it).
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On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems.
You said the US is an outlier not only compared to countries with public healthcare, but also compared to countries with private healthcare. I was asking you which these countries are that you compare the US to, because i cannot come up with any. Are they roughly comparable in any way, or are they weird countries no one has heard of before?
You are now naming Switzerland. A quick look at the system makes it look similar to the German healthcare system in some ways.
From Wikipedia:
Switzerland has universal health care,[3] regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
Insurers are required to offer this basic insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They operate as non-profits with this basic mandatory insurance but as for-profit on supplemental plans.[3]
The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person's income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.
While this is technically private healthcare, it is also a universal healthcare system, and definitively not a free market healthcare system.
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On November 08 2024 23:55 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 22:51 Uldridge wrote:
Just glancing over its side effects it seems like a dogshit drug to take. Let's say we disagree on how we interpret this, MP. Anything that even remotely looks closely like a ribonucleotide or ribonucleoside you should nope out of imo. I listen to experts, not random people on the internet. They're credible, we're not.
And which expert did you listen to that just told you this information?
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On November 08 2024 22:53 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 15:37 KwarK wrote:On November 08 2024 15:31 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 08 2024 14:04 KwarK wrote:On November 08 2024 13:04 Salazarz wrote:On November 08 2024 11:46 Razyda wrote:On November 08 2024 10:57 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 08 2024 10:40 Falling wrote:On November 08 2024 08:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 08 2024 07:19 Falling wrote:
[quote]
Well, while you are building up your narrative of what is going on TL, make sure to not include my posts as part of the pattern of Lib/Dems as I am neither a liberal nor a democrat, nor am I walking back from my position on Trump as I do not believe I ever called Trump a fascist or Hitlerian or anything like it, but you can fact check me on that if you want. I do still think he is demonstrably too corrupt and too unconcerned about the separation of powers in federalism/ the branches of government to ever vote for. I do think it's silly to find Trump an unacceptable person to vote for but a reasonably acceptable person to give control of the most lethal military in the world after he said he would be a day 1 dictator. It may avoid charges of hypocrisy, but strikes me as pretty irresponsible EDIT: Especially after the Supreme Court already gave him immunity to do practically anything he wants legally The dictator on day one rhetoric is yet another reason why I am a never-Trumper (from afar as I can't vote, for obvious reasons.) It's disqualifying even if it was just a metaphor or however it might sanewashed by Trump loyalists. I don't see any way to be consistent and call oneself a believer in limited government who is conserving the constitution, not as a principled conservative, not even as a pragmatic one. However, until and unless he becomes a dictator on day one, I think it is premature to treat him as a dictator though the electorate did indeed give him control to the most lethal military in the world. But it was not me who is giving him anything. I think it is premature because generally speaking I think the most effective way to remove a dictator is to shoot or otherwise kill them though I guess you could forcibly remove him instead. I'm not prepared to do any of that Minority Report style. Are you? If you actually believe he attempted an insurrection, then taking care of him might have been the first thing Biden should have done as president and let the immunity thing come to the court that way (if the CIA/FBI/NSA/ST6/whatev somehow was traced back to him). Then, once Biden knew he would be immune from prosecution for pursuing justice for treason, that was another pivotal chance passed. Now, he knows this treasonous insurrectionist (set aside the fascism for the moment if one wishes) is going to get what he was after during his treasonous insurrection attempt, and he's got a chance to stop that from happening. If I believed Trump was a treasonous insurrectionist (let alone also a fascist with the whole project 2025 crew in tow) as a never-Trump conservative (dunno if that's a close enough descriptor for you) I would support Biden enacting patriotic justice based on that alone. I just quote this post, but GH to put last few pages of your posts in context of your usual stance: Liberals will descend to fascism - now you advocating for Democrats to become a fascist to stop Trump. Lesser evilism = bad, but Democrats becoming fascist is better than Trump becoming president, therefore in this case lesser evilism good. Sort of makes sense - you can then claim "told you Democrats will become fascists". You come across much more dictatorial than Trump ever did (bolded parts). You are not afraid that Trump can become dictator, you are angry that you wont (or whatever Secretary you happened to be infatuated with). Arresting a guy for leading a coup is not fascism, it's just following the laws. Plenty of randos in the crowd that stormed the capitol got criminal charges. The way I see it, there's a huge disconnect in messaging and actions of the Dems. Either Trump is all the things they say he is, and then them not dealing with him is a massive failure to uphold the law and security of the country; or he is not, in fact, all the things they say he is and they're just trying to push people into voting for them because 'big bad orange will get ya' otherwise. It's the first. They trusted in institutions that couldn't be relied upon. Sooo the same thing they are doing by handing Trump/Project 2025 control of the most lethal military in the world? That' should work out well /s We can ignore all the warnings people got that this would happen, and just go with "fool me once, shame on you, fool me 542 times..." Also, to be fair, the institution of the Supreme Court did give Democrats the power to hold him accountable. Unfortunately, Democrats are even less reliable than Trump's Supreme Court. Dunno why you keep holding this stuff against me as if I'm running the Democrats. Not running, just supporting them. They ostensibly derive their power from you and voters like you. From a liberal democratic pov, you and people like you need to extract better than that from them. Alternatively, you and voters like yourself need to extract them and replace them with people that will do better than make the same mistake for the 543rd time of trusting institutions and norms to control Trump/Project 2025's openly fascist ambitions. I'd prefer you and voters like yourself just join revolutionary socialist orgs and go from there, but if you all insist on keeping your lib-Dem politics, the WORLD needs you to demand better from your leaders RIGHT NOW, EN MASSE, in every venue possible.
Perhaps they derive their power from people like you who chase away possible supporters of their cause so that you can stay on your soap box and feel superior.
How long have you been posting like this? A decade? How many people have joined you so far? Might be time for a new approach. Or maybe your goal is to win internet arguments and you don't actually care, but man is the repetition and never getting past the doom part getting tired.
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems.
en.m.wikipedia.org
If we were to wipe our brains of various political positions, biased and moral positions, and just look at those first 2 graphs. Let’s go full Men in Black on it.
What would one’s conclusion be?
I’m not a big source monkey, I couldn’t be arsed as I’m not sure how much sources actually change minds. I’m usually on my phone as well which makes multitasking more annoying
But from when I was last actually looking around, from memory the US’s per capita state healthcare was about the same as the UK’s. The UK with an entirely public healthcare system with no cost of use, with a subsidiary, growing private sector. If you factor in the private sector the US jumps to about double the spend of the UK
Nothing wrong with spending more cash if you’ve got it, are outcomes better? Well they’re actually worse by many metrics. Not all.
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On November 08 2024 23:55 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 22:51 Uldridge wrote:
Just glancing over its side effects it seems like a dogshit drug to take. Let's say we disagree on how we interpret this, MP. Anything that even remotely looks closely like a ribonucleotide or ribonucleoside you should nope out of imo. I listen to experts, not random people on the internet. They're credible, we're not.
This is probably the canonical example of why most political discourse goes nowhere.
The worldview of someone who makes that statement is radically different from the worldview of someone who makes a statement like:
“Competent lay people, especially those in professions that force them to continually disprove and challenge their own hypothesis, are capable of reading, thinking about, understanding, and coming to conclusions and data sets, mechanisms, in processes in various fields”
The set of beliefs that’s goes into both are different at almost every level. Different perceptions of individuals, of societal structure, of oppressive versus not. Etc.
At every level, it’s different personalities traits and perspective.
Neither will ever share the same viewpoint. And the only solution I can imagine is to run the experiment if you will. See how those societies end up if you structure them according to the preferences of both types. Does one outperform? Do both perform in certain areas, that create different communities that people can select into by preference?
Yet another reason I’m rather convinced of the federalist point, and that empires don’t work unless populations are homogenous. Different personalities want to live in different ways. Pushing most decisions down to small federations, much smaller than states, allows people to govern in a way that suites there preferences, with just enough central government for key coordination and dispute resolution.
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On November 09 2024 00:10 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. 1) Being so unhealthy can explain total outlay to a certain degree. It doesn’t explain why a comparable procedure or drug treatment can exceed that in another nation, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Also, being unhealthy can have certain benefits on the public purse. End of life dementia care is a hugely growing expense, and actually more so in healthy countries. I’m not saying this necessarily balances out, but it does somewhat mitigate things. Counter-intuitively smokers actually save the NHS money over here, by a combination of gigantic sales tax, and frequently dying earlier before their healthcare costs skyrocket. 3) The left can underestimate the power of inventive enabling genuine innovations here. Fair enough. Equally there are huge pharmaceutical companies the world over, and healthcare systems the world over that purchase US products. Still plenty of money to be made. A little less perhaps, those incentives still exist. 4) It’s not crony capitalism, it’s just capitalism. And it hasn’t entered this state anytime recently, it’s been the case for decades. It’s just not a good fit for what benefits market capitalism can bring in in all sorts of other sectors. You don’t have to be a big socialist like me to think it’s not, even many a fan of the power of the free market elsewhere will concede it’s not a great place to marketise.
Textbooks can cost 3 to 5 times more in the US than other countries. Do we need to adopt a single payer textbook system? Or should we at some point expect it's realistic for something to cost more in a richer country than in a poorer country and the only actual relevant comparison is how things cost in that country compared to itself.
On November 09 2024 00:18 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems. You said the US is an outlier not only compared to countries with public healthcare, but also compared to countries with private healthcare. I was asking you which these countries are that you compare the US to, because i cannot come up with any. Are they roughly comparable in any way, or are they weird countries no one has heard of before? You are now naming Switzerland. A quick look at the system makes it look similar to the German healthcare system in some ways. From Wikipedia: Show nested quote +Switzerland has universal health care,[3] regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
Insurers are required to offer this basic insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They operate as non-profits with this basic mandatory insurance but as for-profit on supplemental plans.[3]
The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person's income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.
While this is technically private healthcare, it is also a universal healthcare system, and definitively not a free market healthcare system.
My assumption is very simple. Every country has either public or private healthcare, or a mixture of both. The US spends the most. Therefore the US spends more than every other country with private healthcare.
I didn't say Switzerland was private, I just said it was the utopia of public systems. It's there unedited in the post you quoted. Why is your beautiful universal healthcare system spending more than every single country on the planet except one, which it spends almost as much as? Must be something wrong with the entire premise of the system, better upend the whole thing.
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On November 09 2024 00:26 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:10 WombaT wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. 1) Being so unhealthy can explain total outlay to a certain degree. It doesn’t explain why a comparable procedure or drug treatment can exceed that in another nation, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Also, being unhealthy can have certain benefits on the public purse. End of life dementia care is a hugely growing expense, and actually more so in healthy countries. I’m not saying this necessarily balances out, but it does somewhat mitigate things. Counter-intuitively smokers actually save the NHS money over here, by a combination of gigantic sales tax, and frequently dying earlier before their healthcare costs skyrocket. 3) The left can underestimate the power of inventive enabling genuine innovations here. Fair enough. Equally there are huge pharmaceutical companies the world over, and healthcare systems the world over that purchase US products. Still plenty of money to be made. A little less perhaps, those incentives still exist. 4) It’s not crony capitalism, it’s just capitalism. And it hasn’t entered this state anytime recently, it’s been the case for decades. It’s just not a good fit for what benefits market capitalism can bring in in all sorts of other sectors. You don’t have to be a big socialist like me to think it’s not, even many a fan of the power of the free market elsewhere will concede it’s not a great place to marketise. Textbooks can cost 3 to 5 times more in the US than other countries. Do we need to adopt a single payer textbook system? Or should we at some point expect it's realistic for something to cost more in a richer country than in a poorer country and the only actual relevant comparison is how things cost in that country compared to itself. Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:18 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems. You said the US is an outlier not only compared to countries with public healthcare, but also compared to countries with private healthcare. I was asking you which these countries are that you compare the US to, because i cannot come up with any. Are they roughly comparable in any way, or are they weird countries no one has heard of before? You are now naming Switzerland. A quick look at the system makes it look similar to the German healthcare system in some ways. From Wikipedia: Switzerland has universal health care,[3] regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
Insurers are required to offer this basic insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They operate as non-profits with this basic mandatory insurance but as for-profit on supplemental plans.[3]
The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person's income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.
While this is technically private healthcare, it is also a universal healthcare system, and definitively not a free market healthcare system. My assumption is very simple. Every country has either public or private healthcare, or a mixture of both. The US spends the most. Therefore the US spends more than every other country with private healthcare. I didn't say Switzerland was private, I just said it was the utopia of public systems. It's there unedited in the post you quoted. Why is your beautiful universal healthcare system spending more than every single country on the planet except one, which it spends almost as much as? Must be something wrong with the entire premise of the system, better upend the whole thing.
Oh, i assumed that "utopia of public systems" was meant as sarcasm. Sorry for that. But if you really meant it seriously, look at the data i post later in this post.
So you cannot name a single country with private healthcare (or more specifically, with a non-universal healthcare system of some sort) that does better than the US. You just assume that they must exist?
Meanwhile, i can name a lot of countries with universal healthcare systems in all variants who are cheaper and have better results than the US.
I will link the thing i always link in this discussion, the OECD Health at a glance study, specifically the part 7 about health expenditure, but you can also look at the other parts about health results.
Some choice graphs:
The funny thing is that the US still spends more public money on their shitty broken system than other countries spend on a full universal healthcare system.
As you can see, while switzerland may be at position 2 in health costs per capita, it is still at about 2/3 of the costs of the US, and pretty much right in the pack of other universal healthcare countries.
I simply cannot see how you can reach any conclusion but that universal healthcare is both cheaper and better than what the US has from this data.
Edit: Apparently i haven't quite figured out how to post images here currently, i will keep on trying.
Edit 2: Ah, now it works.
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On November 09 2024 00:25 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems. en.m.wikipedia.orgIf we were to wipe our brains of various political positions, biased and moral positions, and just look at those first 2 graphs. Let’s go full Men in Black on it. What would one’s conclusion be? I’m not a big source monkey, I couldn’t be arsed as I’m not sure how much sources actually change minds. I’m usually on my phone as well which makes multitasking more annoying But from when I was last actually looking around, from memory the US’s per capita state healthcare was about the same as the UK’s. The UK with an entirely public healthcare system with no cost of use, with a subsidiary, growing private sector. If you factor in the private sector the US jumps to about double the spend of the UK Nothing wrong with spending more cash if you’ve got it, are outcomes better? Well they’re actually worse by many metrics. Not all.
Things that immediately come to mind:
1) USA population is extremely diverse, the other countries substantially more homogenous
2) All the countries on there are high conscientiousness
3) We see a divergence from all the other countries starting around 1980 give or take, which lines up fairly well with this:
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/XEIYPuf.png)
4) Interesting we don't see China, Japan, etc., but Korea is included. If those other counties aren't in the same territory of longevity that would be surprising.
5) USA is significantly more disagreeable and risk taking than the other countries, especially for males could have some effect
6) How effective is spending on longevity and where does the money go? How much of the spending is driving by lots of R&D on drugs and other things that increase QoL with disease burden, but don't increase longevity
7) USA diet is noticeably worse than other countries
I simply cannot see how you can reach any conclusion but that universal healthcare is both cheaper and better than what the US has from this data.
Yea, that's a readily believable conclusion, but I don't see how that's the only conclusion. The stuff above raises at least half a dozen possibilities, and it's entirely believable to me that your conclusion is true to some degree along with contributors from others.
Another place where smaller federations would kick ass. Let areas that want to go to a universal option do so, especially with similar demographics, and compare the results.
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 09 2024 00:18 Uldridge wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 23:55 Magic Powers wrote:On November 08 2024 22:51 Uldridge wrote:
Just glancing over its side effects it seems like a dogshit drug to take. Let's say we disagree on how we interpret this, MP. Anything that even remotely looks closely like a ribonucleotide or ribonucleoside you should nope out of imo. I listen to experts, not random people on the internet. They're credible, we're not. And which expert did you listen to that just told you this information?
‘Anything that even remotely looks closely like a ribonucleotide or ribonucleoside you should nope out of imo.‘
I had some curiosity as to why this was problem specifically if you wouldn’t mind expanding
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On November 09 2024 00:26 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:10 WombaT wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. 1) Being so unhealthy can explain total outlay to a certain degree. It doesn’t explain why a comparable procedure or drug treatment can exceed that in another nation, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Also, being unhealthy can have certain benefits on the public purse. End of life dementia care is a hugely growing expense, and actually more so in healthy countries. I’m not saying this necessarily balances out, but it does somewhat mitigate things. Counter-intuitively smokers actually save the NHS money over here, by a combination of gigantic sales tax, and frequently dying earlier before their healthcare costs skyrocket. 3) The left can underestimate the power of inventive enabling genuine innovations here. Fair enough. Equally there are huge pharmaceutical companies the world over, and healthcare systems the world over that purchase US products. Still plenty of money to be made. A little less perhaps, those incentives still exist. 4) It’s not crony capitalism, it’s just capitalism. And it hasn’t entered this state anytime recently, it’s been the case for decades. It’s just not a good fit for what benefits market capitalism can bring in in all sorts of other sectors. You don’t have to be a big socialist like me to think it’s not, even many a fan of the power of the free market elsewhere will concede it’s not a great place to marketise. Textbooks can cost 3 to 5 times more in the US than other countries. Do we need to adopt a single payer textbook system? Or should we at some point expect it's realistic for something to cost more in a richer country than in a poorer country and the only actual relevant comparison is how things cost in that country compared to itself. Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:18 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems. You said the US is an outlier not only compared to countries with public healthcare, but also compared to countries with private healthcare. I was asking you which these countries are that you compare the US to, because i cannot come up with any. Are they roughly comparable in any way, or are they weird countries no one has heard of before? You are now naming Switzerland. A quick look at the system makes it look similar to the German healthcare system in some ways. From Wikipedia: Switzerland has universal health care,[3] regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
Insurers are required to offer this basic insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They operate as non-profits with this basic mandatory insurance but as for-profit on supplemental plans.[3]
The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person's income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.
While this is technically private healthcare, it is also a universal healthcare system, and definitively not a free market healthcare system. My assumption is very simple. Every country has either public or private healthcare, or a mixture of both. The US spends the most. Therefore the US spends more than every other country with private healthcare. I didn't say Switzerland was private, I just said it was the utopia of public systems. It's there unedited in the post you quoted. Why is your beautiful universal healthcare system spending more than every single country on the planet except one, which it spends almost as much as? Must be something wrong with the entire premise of the system, better upend the whole thing.
Where are you finding that Switzerland spends almost as much as the US? Both Wikipedia and this https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/&ved=2ahUKEwj_3OqDjM2JAxX_UqQEHX66F18QFnoECBEQAQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw16ogEdSd93MwAZ7HEKXAfL have it at slightly over half, and very similar to Germany. Also, Switzerland's mandatory private insurance sounds very similar to what the Netherlands has, a weird public-private mix, nothing like a full public system like the NHS.
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 09 2024 00:47 L_Master wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:25 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems. en.m.wikipedia.orgIf we were to wipe our brains of various political positions, biased and moral positions, and just look at those first 2 graphs. Let’s go full Men in Black on it. What would one’s conclusion be? I’m not a big source monkey, I couldn’t be arsed as I’m not sure how much sources actually change minds. I’m usually on my phone as well which makes multitasking more annoying But from when I was last actually looking around, from memory the US’s per capita state healthcare was about the same as the UK’s. The UK with an entirely public healthcare system with no cost of use, with a subsidiary, growing private sector. If you factor in the private sector the US jumps to about double the spend of the UK Nothing wrong with spending more cash if you’ve got it, are outcomes better? Well they’re actually worse by many metrics. Not all. Things that immediately come to mind: 1) USA population is extremely diverse, the other countries substantially more homogenous 2) All the countries on there are high conscientiousness 3) We see a divergence from all the other countries starting around 1980 give or take, which lines up fairly well with this: 4) Interesting we don't see China, Japan, etc., but Korea is included. If those other counties aren't in the same territory of longevity that would be surprising. 5) USA is significantly more disagreeable and risk taking than the other countries, especially for males could have some effect 6) How effective is spending on longevity and where does the money go? How much of the spending is driving by lots of R&D on drugs and other things that increase QoL with disease burden, but don't increase longevity 7) USA diet is noticeably worse than other countries Show nested quote +I simply cannot see how you can reach any conclusion but that universal healthcare is both cheaper and better than what the US has from this data. Yea, that's a readily believable conclusion, but I don't see how that's the only conclusion. The stuff above raises at least half a dozen possibilities, and it's entirely believable to me that your conclusion is true to some degree along with contributors from others. Another place where smaller federations would kick ass. Let areas that want to go to a universal option do so, especially with similar demographics, and compare the results.
Outside of racial demographics the US is in many ways actually less diverse than some of the nations we’re comparing it to.
These numbers don’t account for RnD, it’s purely administration and delivery costs.
We can already compare, it’s a ton of quite culturally similar countries with similar levels of wealth and their systems versus the US’. It’s not always a straight 1:1 as there are other factors, but the US system really doesn’t stand up much to that kind of scrutiny.
I mean the UK and Japan are both rather different countries, culturally and politically. The average Japanese diet is considerably healthier for one. Their healthcare systems aren’t 100% the same either. They’re still much closer in an expenditure and outcomes calculus than the UK and the US. Countries that otherwise are more culturally similar, speak the same language, and indeed are much more ethnically diverse than Japan
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On November 09 2024 00:44 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:26 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 00:10 WombaT wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. 1) Being so unhealthy can explain total outlay to a certain degree. It doesn’t explain why a comparable procedure or drug treatment can exceed that in another nation, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Also, being unhealthy can have certain benefits on the public purse. End of life dementia care is a hugely growing expense, and actually more so in healthy countries. I’m not saying this necessarily balances out, but it does somewhat mitigate things. Counter-intuitively smokers actually save the NHS money over here, by a combination of gigantic sales tax, and frequently dying earlier before their healthcare costs skyrocket. 3) The left can underestimate the power of inventive enabling genuine innovations here. Fair enough. Equally there are huge pharmaceutical companies the world over, and healthcare systems the world over that purchase US products. Still plenty of money to be made. A little less perhaps, those incentives still exist. 4) It’s not crony capitalism, it’s just capitalism. And it hasn’t entered this state anytime recently, it’s been the case for decades. It’s just not a good fit for what benefits market capitalism can bring in in all sorts of other sectors. You don’t have to be a big socialist like me to think it’s not, even many a fan of the power of the free market elsewhere will concede it’s not a great place to marketise. Textbooks can cost 3 to 5 times more in the US than other countries. Do we need to adopt a single payer textbook system? Or should we at some point expect it's realistic for something to cost more in a richer country than in a poorer country and the only actual relevant comparison is how things cost in that country compared to itself. On November 09 2024 00:18 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems. You said the US is an outlier not only compared to countries with public healthcare, but also compared to countries with private healthcare. I was asking you which these countries are that you compare the US to, because i cannot come up with any. Are they roughly comparable in any way, or are they weird countries no one has heard of before? You are now naming Switzerland. A quick look at the system makes it look similar to the German healthcare system in some ways. From Wikipedia: Switzerland has universal health care,[3] regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
Insurers are required to offer this basic insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They operate as non-profits with this basic mandatory insurance but as for-profit on supplemental plans.[3]
The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person's income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.
While this is technically private healthcare, it is also a universal healthcare system, and definitively not a free market healthcare system. My assumption is very simple. Every country has either public or private healthcare, or a mixture of both. The US spends the most. Therefore the US spends more than every other country with private healthcare. I didn't say Switzerland was private, I just said it was the utopia of public systems. It's there unedited in the post you quoted. Why is your beautiful universal healthcare system spending more than every single country on the planet except one, which it spends almost as much as? Must be something wrong with the entire premise of the system, better upend the whole thing. Oh, i assumed that "utopia of public systems" was meant as sarcasm. Sorry for that. But if you really meant it seriously, look at the data i post later in this post. So you cannot name a single country with private healthcare (or more specifically, with a non-universal healthcare system of some sort) that does better than the US. You just assume that they must exist? Meanwhile, i can name a lot of countries with universal healthcare systems in all variants who are cheaper and have better results than the US. I will link the thing i always link in this discussion, the OECD Health at a glance study, specifically the part 7 about health expenditure, but you can also look at the other parts about health results. Some choice graphs: The funny thing is that the US still spends more public money on their shitty broken system than other countries spend on a full universal healthcare system. As you can see, while switzerland may be at position 2 in health costs per capita, it is still at about 2/3 of the costs of the US, and pretty much right in the pack of other universal healthcare countries. I simply cannot see how you can reach any conclusion but that universal healthcare is both cheaper and better than what the US has from this data. Edit: Apparently i haven't quite figured out how to post images here currently, i will keep on trying. Edit 2: Ah, now it works.
I am not making the claim that one or the other system is "better." There is no purely private system, including the US, because every country has a government, making it at least that much public. Therefore I preemptively didn't answer on the assumption that any country I name, you will simply go "no that's not private in the right way" and put a goalpost somewhere else.
The significance of your graph is limited. No other country delivers half of the world's medical research and advances. No other country is as wildly unhealthy, right? China is perhaps similarly unhealthy? If you go by obesity, and the other relevant similarity is pure size (of the nation I mean, not obesity-wise). Is China's system better? The spending is below average. Is India's best? They're equally massive but spend the least. There's Indonesia down there also.
Like you post a graph saying the US spends more, which everybody knows, but you're not comparing it to the US. For all you know the excess could all be Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. Looks to me like the dark blue part is the main factor. That wouldn't be an issue with the privateness of the system.
Wikipedia has WHO's 2020 data from those 2 countries as almost neck and neck. Different data, probably different methods, can't trust any of them.
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On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:44 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 00:26 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 00:10 WombaT wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. 1) Being so unhealthy can explain total outlay to a certain degree. It doesn’t explain why a comparable procedure or drug treatment can exceed that in another nation, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Also, being unhealthy can have certain benefits on the public purse. End of life dementia care is a hugely growing expense, and actually more so in healthy countries. I’m not saying this necessarily balances out, but it does somewhat mitigate things. Counter-intuitively smokers actually save the NHS money over here, by a combination of gigantic sales tax, and frequently dying earlier before their healthcare costs skyrocket. 3) The left can underestimate the power of inventive enabling genuine innovations here. Fair enough. Equally there are huge pharmaceutical companies the world over, and healthcare systems the world over that purchase US products. Still plenty of money to be made. A little less perhaps, those incentives still exist. 4) It’s not crony capitalism, it’s just capitalism. And it hasn’t entered this state anytime recently, it’s been the case for decades. It’s just not a good fit for what benefits market capitalism can bring in in all sorts of other sectors. You don’t have to be a big socialist like me to think it’s not, even many a fan of the power of the free market elsewhere will concede it’s not a great place to marketise. Textbooks can cost 3 to 5 times more in the US than other countries. Do we need to adopt a single payer textbook system? Or should we at some point expect it's realistic for something to cost more in a richer country than in a poorer country and the only actual relevant comparison is how things cost in that country compared to itself. On November 09 2024 00:18 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 00:07 oBlade wrote:Randomly going "Fuck Republicans" in the middle of a discussion of healthcare systems has not had the effect of giving me the suspicion that my understanding of the issue is flawed in any way. On November 09 2024 00:00 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:56 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:44 Simberto wrote:On November 08 2024 23:40 oBlade wrote:On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
Oblade if I sell you insurance for 1k a year and it covers nothing, do you really have insurance? If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off? On November 08 2024 23:27 Sadist wrote:
If you are worried about cost do you support single payer where the entire US population can negotiate as a single block to drive down cost?
No, because the costs of running a hospital in Oklahoma are different than those of running one in Manhattan, and Medicare, the largest government customer of healthcare, is a waste funnel of taxpayer money to the medical sector, and single payer would therefore just result in Medicarization of the entire industry, which is, again, worse. So how come that every other country has way lower healthcare costs than the US, with at least similar or better health results? How come that the US is an incredibly strong outlier compared to any country with a single payer or other public healthcare system? The US is not only an outlier compared to countries with public healthcare, it's an outlier to countries with private healthcare, which it is not the only one of, it's an outlier to every other country, including itself 50 years ago when it had a fine private system. There are a few main reasons. 1) It's one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. 2) It is the richest country already, so any cost increase suffers runaway feedback. 3) Its economy essentially subsidizes most of the advances that the rest of the world benefit from. 4) It has entered a state of crony capture of the insurance and health sectors. This doesn't mean capitalism is the devil, it just means the devil is in the details. Which other country with (exclusively) private healthcare are you talking about? What do you mean? There is no country period that spends more. If your question "other country with exclusively private healthcare" means the US has "exclusively" private healthcare, that's also incorrect. However, looking it up I learned that according to the WHO's calculations at least, Switzerland is very close to the per capita spending of the US at #2 and they're the utopia of public systems. You said the US is an outlier not only compared to countries with public healthcare, but also compared to countries with private healthcare. I was asking you which these countries are that you compare the US to, because i cannot come up with any. Are they roughly comparable in any way, or are they weird countries no one has heard of before? You are now naming Switzerland. A quick look at the system makes it look similar to the German healthcare system in some ways. From Wikipedia: Switzerland has universal health care,[3] regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
Insurers are required to offer this basic insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They operate as non-profits with this basic mandatory insurance but as for-profit on supplemental plans.[3]
The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person's income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.
While this is technically private healthcare, it is also a universal healthcare system, and definitively not a free market healthcare system. My assumption is very simple. Every country has either public or private healthcare, or a mixture of both. The US spends the most. Therefore the US spends more than every other country with private healthcare. I didn't say Switzerland was private, I just said it was the utopia of public systems. It's there unedited in the post you quoted. Why is your beautiful universal healthcare system spending more than every single country on the planet except one, which it spends almost as much as? Must be something wrong with the entire premise of the system, better upend the whole thing. Oh, i assumed that "utopia of public systems" was meant as sarcasm. Sorry for that. But if you really meant it seriously, look at the data i post later in this post. So you cannot name a single country with private healthcare (or more specifically, with a non-universal healthcare system of some sort) that does better than the US. You just assume that they must exist? Meanwhile, i can name a lot of countries with universal healthcare systems in all variants who are cheaper and have better results than the US. I will link the thing i always link in this discussion, the OECD Health at a glance study, specifically the part 7 about health expenditure, but you can also look at the other parts about health results. Some choice graphs: The funny thing is that the US still spends more public money on their shitty broken system than other countries spend on a full universal healthcare system. As you can see, while switzerland may be at position 2 in health costs per capita, it is still at about 2/3 of the costs of the US, and pretty much right in the pack of other universal healthcare countries. I simply cannot see how you can reach any conclusion but that universal healthcare is both cheaper and better than what the US has from this data. Edit: Apparently i haven't quite figured out how to post images here currently, i will keep on trying. Edit 2: Ah, now it works. I am not making the claim that one or the other system is "better." There is no purely private system, including the US, because every country has a government, making it at least that much public. Therefore I preemptively didn't answer on the assumption that any country I name, you will simply go "no that's not private in the right way" and put a goalpost somewhere else. The significance of your graph is limited. No other country delivers half of the world's medical research and advances. No other country is as wildly unhealthy, right? China is perhaps similarly unhealthy? If you go by obesity, and the other relevant similarity is pure size (of the nation I mean, not obesity-wise). Is China's system better? The spending is below average. Is India's best? They're equally massive but spend the least. There's Indonesia down there also. Like you post a graph saying the US spends more, which everybody knows, but you're not comparing it to the US. For all you know the excess could all be Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. Looks to me like the dark blue part is the main factor. That wouldn't be an issue with the privateness of the system.
If every other country does a thing better than you, why not learn from them and steal one of their systems? If Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are so bad, just steal what Switzerland is doing. Or Japan. Or the Netherlands. Or Denmark. Or whatever. There are dozens of systems out there which deliver radically better than the US system, and they all have one thing in common: They are universal healthcare systems.
I don't really care about the details within the US system, because i don't explicitly know what Medicaid, Medicare or the VA do exactly. What i do know is that as a whole, the US system is just bad, (except for the superrich of course, it provides quality care for those who don't care about the price). My assumption here was that "Medicare for all" basically means "We want universal healthcare in the US in some way".
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one.
But instead of seeing that and recognizing that you should really, really just move to a universal healthcare system, you are so blinded by ideology that you think that you really should do more private stuff instead, because that has been working so well so far. And trying to deflect to other reasons is just another weird push for US exceptionalism. The US is not so unique that it cannot compare with and learn from other countries.
Also, if you think that bad diet is a problem, maybe that is something you should take a look at. I would recommend regulations for the food industry here.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.ibb.co/ssH4F1R/HAAG-1.webp)
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