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On November 09 2024 00:11 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 10:17 GreenHorizons wrote: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? You had to skip "what would the circumstances be under which I would join a revolutionary socialist organization" to get to the edit about voting. You should have started there. But the “how bad would that have to get for you to agree never to vote for Democrats again?” besides being a bit of a transmutation, is a decades old question that precedes us. You speak to the timeliness as if I haven't been putting that question in one form or another to you and libs/Dems here for years without you all ever having anything resembling an answer. Most people just lob childish insults, or talk about any inane/bad faith thing (even on reasonable topics) they can with the oBlade/JimmyJ types because as we know, they can't help themselves.
You and the person you tried to elect President had the chance to discuss ending the enslavement of your fellow Californians and neither of you mentioned it 1 time afaict. I don't think people appreciate how fucked up that is on so many levels. I don't mean that as a personal indictment of you (I absofuckinglutely do of Harris), but of such deep systemic problems that it probably barely crossed your radar.
It'd be bad enough if it was passing despite Harris NEVER mentioning how she was voting on ending the enslavement of her fellow Californians (let alone pushing for it), but it is failing. That makes it so much more unforgivably bad.
+ Show Spoiler +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).
Let's take back a step and focus on "what would the circumstances be under which I would join a revolutionary socialist organization". I obviously favor Revolutionary Socialism (as developed primarily by Black radicals mostly after WWII) but how about just a socialist org? We could include DSA which still does plenty of voting for Democrats?
I get people are busy, but "democracy" in any meaningful sense of the word isn't just voting every couple years based on a party you have no influence on.
EDIT: That's an open question to anyone concerned about what Trump's presidency will bring BTW.
"what would the circumstances be under which I would join a socialist organization?"
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On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off?
[quote]
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".
Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US?
On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one.
If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better."
On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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.
Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option.
How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix?
On November 09 2024 01:18 GreenHorizons wrote:
Most people just lob childish insults, or talk about any inane/bad faith thing (even on reasonable topics) they can with the oBlade types because as we know, they can't help themselves.
You know this is publicly visible every time you do it?
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 09 2024 00:22 Billyboy wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 22:53 GreenHorizons wrote: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:
[quote]
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.
In the same span Donald Trump has been elected President twice, and this time with both houses and a Supreme Court stacked in his favour.
So how’s that working out?
One may disagree with GH’s positions and that’s fair enough, at the other side of ledger, one can direct something of the same criticism of repetition elsewhere.
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix?
What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option?
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On November 08 2024 21:04 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2024 20:57 Sadist wrote:
Jimmy i dont think you understand the scale of destruction of nuclear wespons at all. Same for global warming.
Its cool that you are happy about a Trump victory but this is head in the sand stuff you are talking about. With global warming its not as if we can just open a window and let heat out.....not to mention the oceans warming being even scarier. Do you have any appreciation for how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of water? Then multiply that on a global scale for the oceans. I do not think the data is correct though.
Since you never answered the question, I'll ask it once again.
Do you not believe the IPCC climate data? If not, why?
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On November 09 2024 00:55 WombaT wrote:
I had some curiosity as to why this was problem specifically if you wouldn’t mind expanding
My rule of thumb is that anything that your body uses to build itself, will incorporate it, even when it's in very small doses and has the potential to cause a significant disruption due to that analogue being slighly off the real thing causing more replication errors or more translation errors. Most obvious thing is cancer. Chances are low, but no thanks. I also wouldn't advise to use chemotherapy. MAYBE as the lastest of last options, but hey, I'm a weird guy that values quality of life over quantity of life.
My predicition for future HIV therapy: it will probably be to make some kind of RNA vector targeting T cells that make an untargetable CD4 receptor. This makes people immune to HIV. Kinda like a vaccine. HIV is then solved.
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On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off?
[quote]
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:
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option?
Evidence? Good arguments? Detailed understanding from someone who knows the ins and outs of US healthcare?
The US does have the best care, the most groundbreaking, and the most research in the world. These are not small advantages to whatever it's doing now. You want to upend everything, fine. Tell me how those benefits are going to be kept, otherwise prove why trading them away is definitely worth it because there's a chance whatever transformation would happen, would lead to a worse system. The post office is worse than Fedex. NASA is worse than SpaceX. I need realism not pipe dreams.
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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?
It still being used to treat HIV is not good enough for you?
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On November 09 2024 01:18 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 00:11 ChristianS wrote:On November 08 2024 10:17 GreenHorizons wrote: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? You had to skip "what would the circumstances be under which I would join a revolutionary socialist organization" to get to the edit about voting. You should have started there. But the “how bad would that have to get for you to agree never to vote for Democrats again?” besides being a bit of a transmutation, is a decades old question that precedes us. You speak to the timeliness as if I haven't been putting that question in one form or another to you and libs/Dems here for years without you all ever having anything resembling an answer. Most people just lob childish insults, or talk about any inane/bad faith thing (even on reasonable topics) they can with the oBlade types because as we know, they can't help themselves. You and the person you tried to elect President had the chance to discuss ending the enslavement of your fellow Californians and neither of you mentioned it 1 time afaict. I don't think people appreciate how fucked up that is on so many levels. I don't mean that as a personal indictment of you (I absofuckinglutely do of Harris), but of such deep systemic problems that it probably barely crossed your radar. It'd be bad enough if it was passing despite Harris NEVER mentioning how she was voting on ending the enslavement of her fellow Californians (let alone pushing for it), but it is failing. That makes it so much more unforgivably bad. + Show Spoiler +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). I want to keep this manageable so the rest can wait. Let's take back a step and focus on "what would the circumstances be under which I would join a revolutionary socialist organization". I obviously favor Revolutionary Socialism (as developed primarily by Black radicals mostly after WWII) but how about just a socialist org? We could include DSA which still does plenty of voting for Democrats? I get people are busy, but "democracy" in any meaningful sense of the word isn't just voting every couple years based on a party you have no influence on.
I mean, I guess the generic answer is “people (including myself) will sign onto a political project if they think it seeks better outcomes than the alternatives and has a reasonable chance of achieving them.” When exactly to focus on ideology (“seeks better outcomes”) and when to focus on efficacy (“has a reasonable chance of achieving them”) is a constant dilemma with no simple solution, and different posters might place their objections to socialist organizations on one or the other (or both), but I’m guessing for most folks around here, they think revolutionary socialists have almost no chance of ever taking power in America (extremely low on the efficacy measure), and if they did, they worry all the quoting Lenin and Stalin and Mao is an indication they would institute some kind of authoritarian regime (presumably low on the ideology measure as well).
But that’s me guessing at what everybody else thinks. For myself I guess I do figure the socialists tend to have somewhat idealistic/naive conceptions about affecting political change (i.e. potentially low on efficacy) but all the hard-nosed cynical Democratic political operatives seem pretty fucking incompetent, too. Feels like nobody knows anything about how to make things happen, and the actual outcomes are decided mostly by chance or circumstance.
On ideology I just don’t feel like I understand what socialists want enough to even say anything conclusively about it. Certainly the realities of Soviet or Maoist rule seem pretty grim, maybe less so than the monarchist or colonialist regimes they were meant to replace but not obviously superior to liberal democracies, either. But also those were/are pretty much entirely undemocratic regimes, and socialist revolutionaries in the US always seem to think their system will be democratic. Which leads me to the question you decided to put off until later: how exactly are you supposed to get widespread support for a program that requires so much challenging self-education, and if you could, why would you need to overthrow liberal democratic governments just to establish a new system that’s apparently still democratic?
Like, why are we even still talking about my vote? I didn’t vote for Biden in the primary and it made no difference. I did vote for Kamala in the general and it made no difference. I’m well aware my vote is insignificant, I mostly only bothered to fill the thing out for some of the propositions that apparently are also gonna fail (fucking hell, this state). You and I seem to be in agreement that meaningful change is only gonna come from non-ballot-related activities, so why do we keep talking about whether I bubble in that first question or not? Why do you even care?
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No, actual funding could be used to find a cure instead of management, with shitty side effects at that.
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On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
If I force you to buy a new luxury sedan when you have a bikeable life and no income, are you better off?
[quote]
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:
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option?
Well, the first thing that pops out is "best".
Best for whom? Under what circumstances? Or is the argument that on every single vector for every single individual it is best, which seems implausible?
If that isn't defined clearly, we can have crazy arguments fighting with imagined shadows of the other persons position.
That aside, assuming a clear definition of best, for me it's the only thing that matters: Results.
And right now, the results look pretty favorable to universal. How could those results look even better? Need more test cases with very homogenous populations for me. US racial demographics are very, very different to other countries listed. If you start getting parts of the US doing universal and other parts doing our current system, and the universal keeps crushing....then it goes from "Yea, universal looks pretty good" to "Universal GOAT status" for me.
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 09 2024 02:01 L_Master wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
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:
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option? Well, the first thing that pops out is "best". Best for whom? Under what circumstances? Or is the argument that on every single vector for every single individual it is best, which seems implausible? If that isn't defined clearly, we can have crazy arguments fighting with imagined shadows of the other persons position. That aside, assuming a clear definition of best, for me it's the only thing that matters: Results. And right now, the results look pretty favorable to universal. How could those results look even better? Need more test cases with very homogenous populations for me. US racial demographics are very, very different to other countries listed. If you start getting parts of the US doing universal and other parts doing our current system, and the universal keeps crushing....then it goes from "Yea, universal looks pretty good" to "Universal GOAT status" for me.
Why do populations have to be homogenous?
Certain ethnic groups do have slightly different medical needs, but those aren’t giant hurdles
You can make very simple, IMO correct arguments that certain political systems work best, or less well depending on how politically and culturally homogenous a nation is.
I think it’s a much harder sell with healthcare
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Northern Ireland24332 Posts
On November 09 2024 01:45 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
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:
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option? Evidence? Good arguments? Detailed understanding from someone who knows the ins and outs of US healthcare? The US does have the best care, the most groundbreaking, and the most research in the world. These are not small advantages to whatever it's doing now. You want to upend everything, fine. Tell me how those benefits are going to be kept, otherwise prove why trading them away is definitely worth it because there's a chance whatever transformation would happen, would lead to a worse system. The post office is worse than Fedex. NASA is worse than SpaceX. I need realism not pipe dreams.
So the realism that something that costs borderline twice as much as most comparable nations, with worse returns for that money per capita is the better system?
Keeping up cutting edge RND is a reasonable concern. But it’s not like there’s not considerable money still to be made both domestically and internationally if you change the US’ delivery system
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On November 09 2024 02:06 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 02:01 L_Master wrote:On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
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.
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option? Well, the first thing that pops out is "best". Best for whom? Under what circumstances? Or is the argument that on every single vector for every single individual it is best, which seems implausible? If that isn't defined clearly, we can have crazy arguments fighting with imagined shadows of the other persons position. That aside, assuming a clear definition of best, for me it's the only thing that matters: Results. And right now, the results look pretty favorable to universal. How could those results look even better? Need more test cases with very homogenous populations for me. US racial demographics are very, very different to other countries listed. If you start getting parts of the US doing universal and other parts doing our current system, and the universal keeps crushing....then it goes from "Yea, universal looks pretty good" to "Universal GOAT status" for me. Why do populations have to be homogenous? Certain ethnic groups do have slightly different medical needs, but those aren’t giant hurdles You can make very simple, IMO correct arguments that certain political systems work best, or less well depending on how politically and culturally homogenous a nation is. I think it’s a much harder sell with healthcare
It's just the classic "black people are ruining our country" argument that he's trying to mask as being rational and somewhat politically correct.
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On November 09 2024 01:51 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 09 2024 00:11 ChristianS wrote:On November 08 2024 10:17 GreenHorizons wrote: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? You had to skip "what would the circumstances be under which I would join a revolutionary socialist organization" to get to the edit about voting. You should have started there. But the “how bad would that have to get for you to agree never to vote for Democrats again?” besides being a bit of a transmutation, is a decades old question that precedes us. You speak to the timeliness as if I haven't been putting that question in one form or another to you and libs/Dems here for years without you all ever having anything resembling an answer. Most people just lob childish insults, or talk about any inane/bad faith thing (even on reasonable topics) they can with the oBlade types because as we know, they can't help themselves. You and the person you tried to elect President had the chance to discuss ending the enslavement of your fellow Californians and neither of you mentioned it 1 time afaict. I don't think people appreciate how fucked up that is on so many levels. I don't mean that as a personal indictment of you (I absofuckinglutely do of Harris), but of such deep systemic problems that it probably barely crossed your radar. It'd be bad enough if it was passing despite Harris NEVER mentioning how she was voting on ending the enslavement of her fellow Californians (let alone pushing for it), but it is failing. That makes it so much more unforgivably bad. + Show Spoiler +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). I want to keep this manageable so the rest can wait. Let's take back a step and focus on "what would the circumstances be under which I would join a revolutionary socialist organization". I obviously favor Revolutionary Socialism (as developed primarily by Black radicals mostly after WWII) but how about just a socialist org? We could include DSA which still does plenty of voting for Democrats? I get people are busy, but "democracy" in any meaningful sense of the word isn't just voting every couple years based on a party you have no influence on. + Show Spoiler +I mean, I guess the generic answer is “people (including myself) will sign onto a political project if they think it seeks better outcomes than the alternatives and has a reasonable chance of achieving them.” When exactly to focus on ideology (“seeks better outcomes”) and when to focus on efficacy (“has a reasonable chance of achieving them”) is a constant dilemma with no simple solution, and different posters might place their objections to socialist organizations on one or the other (or both), but I’m guessing for most folks around here, they think revolutionary socialists have almost no chance of ever taking power in America (extremely low on the efficacy measure), and if they did, they worry all the quoting Lenin and Stalin and Mao is an indication they would institute some kind of authoritarian regime (presumably low on the ideology measure as well).
But that’s me guessing at what everybody else thinks. For myself I guess I do figure the socialists tend to have somewhat idealistic/naive conceptions about affecting political change (i.e. potentially low on efficacy) but all the hard-nosed cynical Democratic political operatives seem pretty fucking incompetent, too. Feels like nobody knows anything about how to make things happen, and the actual outcomes are decided mostly by chance or circumstance. This is what Democrats robbing their supporters of the actual history of change does smh. Most of what we take for granted today (weekends, overtime, not being locked inside burning buildings, etc) that was achieved (mostly in the first half of the 20th century and before) was won by socialist guided organized labor engaging in organized mass civil disobedience.
Democrats are functionally the people that shepherded people away from the functioning socialist approach to change and toward the lib/Dem one you recognize is shit now.
On ideology I just don’t feel like I understand what socialists want enough to even say anything conclusively about it. + Show Spoiler +Certainly the realities of Soviet or Maoist rule seem pretty grim, maybe less so than the monarchist or colonialist regimes they were meant to replace but not obviously superior to liberal democracies, either. But also those were/are pretty much entirely undemocratic regimes, and socialist revolutionaries in the US always seem to think their system will be democratic. Which leads me to the question you decided to put off until later: how exactly are you supposed to get widespread support for a program that requires so much challenging self-education, and if you could, why would you need to overthrow liberal democratic governments just to establish a new system that’s apparently still democratic? Like, why are we even still talking about my vote? + Show Spoiler +I didn’t vote for Biden in the primary and it made no difference. I did vote for Kamala in the general and it made no difference. I’m well aware my vote is insignificant, I mostly only bothered to fill the thing out for some of the propositions that apparently are also gonna fail (fucking hell, this state). You and I seem to be in agreement that meaningful change is only gonna come from non-ballot-related activities, so why do we keep talking about whether I bubble in that first question or not? Why do you even care? 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. ...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.
Which ties into the issue with you and other libs/Dems not having a line for when you'd have to stop supporting Democrats/join a socialist org/find or create an alternative to Dems* since clearly even genocide doesn't cross it.
On November 08 2024 10:02 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +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. ... 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 the 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. You voting for someone that couldn't even mention that there was an opportunity to stop enslaving her fellow Californians from her home state when the whole country was looking at her, is emblematic of how problematic that is.
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On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix?
Of course good is not completely easy to define when talking about a healthcare system. I will get back to that.
For now, let us first establish some ground ideas:
1) The US healthcare system is a lot more expensive than that of other countries. I think this has been sufficiently established. It is more expensive per capita, PPP, per GDP, whatever metric you use.
2) The US is not fundamentally unique compared to other countries that fundamentally requires that. While this may not have been completely established, without it we really cannot have a discussion. If the US is truly incomparable to all other countries, this whole thing is pointless.
So, the US system is more expensive. However, sometimes good things cost money. Cheapness is clearly not the one important factor of a healthcare system. To judge the system, quality should also matter. One can do different approaches here, either trying to go for "the best", or trying to go for a budget option that is the most cost efficient.
But what is that quality we judge? I would say quality can only be measured in results. And unless your healthcare system exists to subsidize the ultrarich, that means results for the masses. Average or median, choose whichever you want. Of course, a healthcare system does a lot of things, so it isn't easy to judge quality based on one simple criterium. One could talk about stuff like infant mortality, cancer survival rates, amount of avoidable deaths, healthcare availability, unmet needs, or just how healthy people feel. Luckily, we do have all of those, and more. I once again recommend looking at the OECD health at a glance statistic i linked above, because it studies those, too.
For the US system to be "worth it", it would require exceptional results to justify its exceptional costs. It doesn't have those, in any category. The US is consistently in the middle of the pack or worse, with the exception of how healthy people feel, where it actually scores quite well (but still not exceptionally well).
The US does have a huge additional risk factor due to obesity, but it is actually better than average with regards to some other risks, like smoking.
So the US system is a lot more expensive than other systems, and does not excel in results. To me, this means that the other systems are better. If you paid nearly twice as much as everyone else for the same results, you should probably look at what other people are doing differently.
From data to discussion, a bit more subjective from here on out:
This leave the argument that you are subsidizing the research for the rest of the world. Possible. I don't think this is overly likely, though. And even if you do, why? You have just decided to go completely egocentric on every issues, and yet here you are the humanitarian who is willing to take sacrifices for the greater good? That does not sound plausible.
However, what is plausible is that the US system is like this for the one thing it actually does very well: Health results for the ultra rich, who can afford to pay for that high-end care that was developed. That is something that the US system seems to be very good at (but i cannot really find data on this). So, your health system is not subsidizing the rest of the world. It is subsidizing Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
How do you get from here to a universal healthcare system? I don't know. The US population doesn't seem to really want that for some reason. So the first step is giving information to people. Show them how bad their system is, and how much better it could be. Before talking about methods, you need to talk about the will. If the US population universally wanted a universal healthcare system, they could manage to get one.
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On November 09 2024 02:11 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 01:45 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote: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:
[quote]
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.
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option? Evidence? Good arguments? Detailed understanding from someone who knows the ins and outs of US healthcare? The US does have the best care, the most groundbreaking, and the most research in the world. These are not small advantages to whatever it's doing now. You want to upend everything, fine. Tell me how those benefits are going to be kept, otherwise prove why trading them away is definitely worth it because there's a chance whatever transformation would happen, would lead to a worse system. The post office is worse than Fedex. NASA is worse than SpaceX. I need realism not pipe dreams. So the realism that something that costs borderline twice as much as most comparable nations, with worse returns for that money per capita is the better system?
Your post is a bag of sarcastic assumptions. I know the sarcastic part was intentional but the assumptions - you guys really don't know how broad the strokes you are painting with are, when you talk as though you can just copy paste something and flip a country's system and that's that.
The charts provided thus far in our little multilogue are rough averages of per capita spending.
If you buy 10 hamburgers for $1 each and I buy 15 hamburgers for $1 each, I have spent more than you. That doesn't mean my hamburgers are more expensive. I have gotten more. The hamburgers I bought could also be cutting edge, delicious patented hamburgers that were advertised on television, while yours are generic trash. I could also make $150 a day whereas you could make $100 a day. The list is endless. I have personally shown like 8 differences among the "comparable" nations.
Americans could spend on average more on healthcare because it takes more spending objectively to treat Americans than Netherlanders. They could also spend more just because they live in a place where they have access to the best private healthcare in the world that they can use to their heart's desire.
You have no idea what that distribution looks like. You have no idea what actually results it's getting - what kind of weight it is pulling - and how that compares to other countries.
I would not go to a country like Japan or Korea or the Czech Republic and tell them public healthcare is a pinko communist scam, because they have demonstrably set up something that is working for now. Canada and the UK have not. But I wouldn't advise invading the UK to reintroduce capitalism to their healthcare, either. They each have their own problems and need to be exhaustively fixed for the faults that they have in their own way rather than simply switchflipped to some ideological ideal system. Believe me, I wish it were possible, but an extraordinary change needs a huge framework. Don't see "oh of course just single payer" as being viable when the US public option is literally bankrupting the country at the moment.
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Oblade you can check for what procedures cost in other countries.
MRIs for example. How about heart surgery? Everyone knows the US system is corrupt. Its nothing to do with Americans being more expensive to treat, we pay more and get less.
Health insurance sucks, what we need is Health Care. Its not insurance if you have a chronic condition.
Medicare is not bankrupting the country either. We need to fix it and let Medicare negotiate prices if a drug maker wants to enter the US market.
Also we already take care of the most expensive people anyway. Triple the tax for medicare and id still come out way ahead compared to insurance. Also we could finally divorce health insurance from employment which should be a crime.
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On November 09 2024 02:29 Luolis wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 02:06 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 02:01 L_Master wrote:On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 00:44 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 00:26 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 00:10 WombaT wrote:
[quote]
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:
[quote]
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:
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option? Well, the first thing that pops out is "best". Best for whom? Under what circumstances? Or is the argument that on every single vector for every single individual it is best, which seems implausible? If that isn't defined clearly, we can have crazy arguments fighting with imagined shadows of the other persons position. That aside, assuming a clear definition of best, for me it's the only thing that matters: Results. And right now, the results look pretty favorable to universal. How could those results look even better? Need more test cases with very homogenous populations for me. US racial demographics are very, very different to other countries listed. If you start getting parts of the US doing universal and other parts doing our current system, and the universal keeps crushing....then it goes from "Yea, universal looks pretty good" to "Universal GOAT status" for me. Why do populations have to be homogenous? Certain ethnic groups do have slightly different medical needs, but those aren’t giant hurdles You can make very simple, IMO correct arguments that certain political systems work best, or less well depending on how politically and culturally homogenous a nation is. I think it’s a much harder sell with healthcare It's just the classic "black people are ruining our country" argument that he's trying to mask as being rational and somewhat politically correct.
Except the country isn't "being ruined". And you're right, men like Thomas Sowell are just total human pieces of garbage and we should just deport all of them.
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On November 09 2024 02:52 L_Master wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2024 02:29 Luolis wrote:On November 09 2024 02:06 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 02:01 L_Master wrote:On November 09 2024 01:32 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2024 01:29 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 01:09 oBlade wrote:On November 09 2024 00:44 Simberto wrote:On November 09 2024 00:26 oBlade wrote:
[quote]
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.
[quote]
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". Then how could you know the Netherlands would not be more expensive and worse outcomes if implemented in the US? On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
Meanwhile, there are zero countries which do private/non-universal healthcare which do better than the US. You couldn't even name one. If you define "better" a certain way, there will be no countries that do healthcare better than the US. If you define "better" another way, there will be private and public countries that do it better. If I then name one of them and you change the definition of "better" after the fact it will have been a waste. Explain what you mean by "better" because you showed a graph of cost which means India must have the best most affordable healthcare in the world. What are we valuing, with what weights, when we say one of these is "better." On November 09 2024 01:17 Simberto wrote:
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. Sure I'm open to moving to a universal healthcare system if it's the best option. How would that shift occur and what problems unique to the US that cause its bar on that graph to be 50% higher than Switzerland's would it specifically fix? What would convince you a universal healthcare system is the best option? Well, the first thing that pops out is "best". Best for whom? Under what circumstances? Or is the argument that on every single vector for every single individual it is best, which seems implausible? If that isn't defined clearly, we can have crazy arguments fighting with imagined shadows of the other persons position. That aside, assuming a clear definition of best, for me it's the only thing that matters: Results. And right now, the results look pretty favorable to universal. How could those results look even better? Need more test cases with very homogenous populations for me. US racial demographics are very, very different to other countries listed. If you start getting parts of the US doing universal and other parts doing our current system, and the universal keeps crushing....then it goes from "Yea, universal looks pretty good" to "Universal GOAT status" for me. Why do populations have to be homogenous? Certain ethnic groups do have slightly different medical needs, but those aren’t giant hurdles You can make very simple, IMO correct arguments that certain political systems work best, or less well depending on how politically and culturally homogenous a nation is. I think it’s a much harder sell with healthcare It's just the classic "black people are ruining our country" argument that he's trying to mask as being rational and somewhat politically correct. Except the country isn't "being ruined". And you're right, men like Thomas Sowell are just total human pieces of garbage and we should just deport all of them. eyeroll.jpeg
In your own words, tell me what homogenity has anything to do with the efficiency of different healthcare systems.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.ibb.co/ssH4F1R/HAAG-1.webp)
![[image loading]](https://i.ibb.co/h9kCmMJ/HAAG-2.webp)
