I know people with serious medical conditions that without govt help wouldn't be able to pay for their own health insurance cuz it would be insane rates.


I can understand not wanting to pay for welfare phones but when it comes to people getting ****ed by genetics, making sure everyone has healthcare seems like a solid idea.

If people want to help those that can't help themselves than government isn't necessary; if people don't want to help eachother than it's tyrannical for government to impose itself.

There is no evidence to indicate privatized healthcare is the most efficient. The only developed country which largely uses somewhat deregulated privatized health care is the US, and it has the largest total healthcare spending per capita, but tends to score pretty low in the developed world on population health and average life expectancy.

Switzerland is the other popular example, but the Swiss model is very different than the US' model. Switzerland relies on non-optional private insurance, which (as is typical of the Swiss) is very heavily regulated.

Half of the US' adult population also fears bankruptcy due to a medical event, so it is safe to say that it doesn't provide Americans with much sense of freedom.

Do you think everyone should be able to choose their govt a la carte? I just want a little roads no cops and like 2 firemen

See , even with facts they believe this garbage .
Maybe sometimes governments are less efficient because they are actually not funded enough ?

If private sectors are so efficient .
How come you need to spend a House value for health care or good education in US ?
Why the private sector and Wall Street had to be bailed out 3-4 times in the last 20 years if they were so efficient ?
why so much debts in the system that literally endanger the entire economic system to collapse ?

Like I said , some keep saying it is about the money but when you show them the data like the US where the health care in the US is the worst and most costly system in the world they still think governments are stealing people even tho it cost less than the private sector .
When the private sectors cost higher it’s because they are profitable .
But if governments cost would be higher they call it larceny.
Go figure , shrug

I guess it’s a classic case of not being able to distinguish between personal wealth and collective wealth .
The Norwegian understood that with their sovereignty funds and look where are they now ....over 1 trillions and paying almost nothing for all there public services.

I think the argument that does somewhat hold water is for people who are generally opposed to taxes or government intervention.

But that's a very far cry from argue that everything would also magically be better. Government does occasionally work.

lol yeah. Ofc it's possible with rarely used services like social security and healthcare. For roads and cops it would be pretty impossible.
Atleast in the US there's some variety to choose from because it's a federation altho it seems like the federal government is too powerful nowadays.

I can't comment about US healthcare but I doubt it's the worst. And to be clear I don't think the US is a libertarian paradise. I see the US as Europe 2.0 with sligthly lower taxes, more violence and more collusion between big business and government.

In some ways ya. But the avg person doesn't interface with the feds all that often really. You generally have to be coloring pretty well outside the lines to get their attention at least in any enforcement kinda context

stop doubting or thinking and do some research cause in the develop countries the US is by FAR the worst in the cost/ratio benefits in health care.
Close to double more expensive without even have the same full availability on top of that lol.
I personally always do some research to see what i wish or buy is actually better than what i have first.

So why dont you tell us which countries you think is the best and at what period ?
Do you really think less the government are present, less corruption in the private sector exist ?
really ?

The best system will always be mixed since competition always bring the best and for that you always needs some kind of minimum based services that the government should provide to keep in check the private sector, and vice versa.
Their is tremendous value in a cohesive and peaceful society for the private sector.

yea, the schools are selling people lemons and the government is complicit. when you offer credit to teenagers for something that no person at that age will know how to value, you're telling them it's worth doing. it's beyond me how anyone can think that the government has no responsibility.

should they be aware that psychology majors get paid less than engineering majors? obviously any reasonable person is based on avg grad statistics, but the statistics (at least the way the schools present them) can be misleading. People are not aware the job prospects for grads without post grad degrees are basically non existent if you aren't well connected or absolute top of the food chain in terms of grades and taking certs on the side. or that worthwhile grad programs are so highly competitive that only a tiny subset of grads will qualify. or that claims of it improving their critical thinking skills is at best poorly substantiated, where the extent to which it's true is likely a consequent of a small number of courses many of which are offered for free online from elite schools.

but even for programs that have clear practical use, the proportionality of people graduating relative to the number of positions being hired for is completely out of whack.

there're roughly 3x as many accounting grads as there are positions open each cohort ( https://www.aicpa.org/content/dam/ai...nds-report.pdf ), which means the large majority grads are going to have a useless piece of paper no matter how you slice it - which is pretty lousy, but in a true market economy the brunt of this misallocation would be felt by all graduates equally.

instead, because of the min wage, the people who get in are seeing their earning power substantially inflated while the majority paid tens of thousands of dollars and several years of their life for a useless piece of paper. it's hard to understate how impactful the min wage is. the starting wage isn't based on how much the company values your labor when theres an excess of people able/willing to do it - the market wage in those cases is how much people are willing to do it for. and people are definitely willing to do it for less.

the min wage in nyc is 15/h (as it is in a few other major metropolitan cities), and so the most marginal hires will be making something around 40-45k/y (their avg work week is in almost all cases more than 50h/week). and while many start higher than that, the premium that exceptional hires garner is based on their value relative to those marginal hires. and the experience premium, likewise, is based on how much you pay someone without experience. and management compensation is then built around what people with experience are making. if people are willing to start for less, and there's no doubt that they are, it's not just those bottom of the barrel applicants who'll see a decline in wages - it reverberates all the way to the top and it would do so proportionally.

so when people who are in these fields start complaining about giving handouts to people who made bad decisions, they really need to be made aware of how much of their earning power is hinged on these welfare policies. it's not unlikely that the top end of many industries are earning twice as much as they otherwise would. hell, in some cases (like let's say acting), an A list actors entire fortune is more or less attributable to the inflexibility of wages to dip below zero. because if people could pay huge sums of money to be cast as a lead actor/actress for a hollywood blockbuster, of course they would - the fame you get from that is worth millions.


of the 'real jobs' though, accountants are far from the most egregious offenders....


One reason (among others) would be that doctors make nearly twice as much in most developed countries.

https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2...port-6011814#2

it's not because there aren't long lineups of people who want to go to med school, and hell - there're tons of people who have medical credentials both domestically and from abroad who can't get a residency position and would be happy to start working for less, but the system (which has been challenged in court on a variety of occasions) has maintained that the anticompetitive nature of the 'match' system is worthwhile in the name of lifting up the work conditions of medical residency hires.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business...edules/516639/

the effect? medical professionals making huge bank, and your insurance premiums skyrocketing. of course that's not the only reason but it's a big part of it. management compensation has it's own unique dynamic that's bloated as a consequent of restrictive labor policies.


the us in some respects is one of the least capitalistic modern economies.

To me that is not an argument.
The role of a government in education should be to give equal opportunities to everyone or at least trying .

Just augmented the income taxes from doctor so they pay more for the education their received prior instead .
At least that way you keep the equal opportunity concept still alive for kids of rom any economics background .
That is what is far more important imo .
I kinda find disgusting using kids futur education ( and indirectly the economic futur of the country right ?) and try to monetize it .

Then why is the American system less efficient than Canada's? And about a dozen other nations?

I'd be the first to tell you how much I can't stand gov't and its incompetence, but in this one instance, gov't run healthcare is actually better than the insane system we have here in the US, which was preceded by an even more insane system if you can believe that

"Taxes is theft" is a nice little catch phrase that gets its point across with ease, but it's really just bullshit. Taxes pay for things, some of those things are stupid, some are awesome. Seems to me most people who fall into that crowd are both rightfully and understandably cynical and annoyed by incompetence in lieu of efficiency and effectiveness, and willfully ignorant of the times when that simply isn't the case, or deliberately obtuse when a sober view can arrive at the conclusion that sometimes things you don't like are actually better than things you do

Well, or one could be honest.

"I don't want to pay these taxes, and accept that more people will die, public health be worse and many go bankrupt or without needed medical attention as a result".

Of course, the reverse is also true

"I agree that we need these things to ensure public health, and I support taking from people's earnings to pay for it and sending them to jail if they refuse".

What annoys me most in politics is the common refusal to admit the cost (be it economical, ethical or otherwise) of things one support. So often it is just portrayed as heaven vs hell. Everything nice and politically desirable is from my view, everything bleak and dystopic is from the view of the other guy. That's not how life works. Political policies have a price.

For context:
There are good arguments for UHC, but fear of something that's unlikely to happen to a US citizen, is not a good argument.

The real issue is people not going to the doctor 'cause they don't want or can't pay the bill.

I think we should at least use the same metric, families in both sides of the equation. A quick google search said there was about 123 million families in the US, if some 530000 of them "turn to bankruptcy" bankrupt each year, that's slightly above 0,4% of total families every year.

That sounds like a lot, actually higher than I would expect it to be.

I bet it is high. Bankruptcy is something people with access to credit use.

Americans are levered to the hilt.

As an example:

These folks going bankrupt is not what you should be concerned about. When you say it's a medical issue that causes bankruptcy, I don't think that entirely correct. Instead of buying that 30K car (or whatever amount they finance, not mention the additional cost of full coverage car insurance), they could have been buying health insurance, and driving a perfectly safe and reliable $5K car.

I'm willing to bet most (way more than half, but lets just say more than half) of these folks had considerable amount of non-housing consumer debt, and the health crises pushed them over the edge.

In the grand scheme of things, them having bad credit for 10 years is not that big of a deal, and we should not be shaping health care policy based on those who fear bankruptcy, or those who go bankrupt.

What's the implications for bankruptcy? No access to credit for 7-10 years. So what?

I wouldn't personally ignore the bankruptcy issue, but I would agree that is likely the bigger problem, both from medical issues going untreated and medical issues being discovered too late.

Well taxation is theft by definition. Wether it's a necessary evil or not is a different discussion. I agree that government provides some useful services but I think if government gradually started shrinking and doing less, the private sector would fill in the blanks. Everyone keeps bringing up the USA. Last time I checked the USA was a crony capitalistic country. Very different than what I would describe as libertarian capitalism.

Again ...
Tell us of a good libertarian capitalism country you like more than the US and you think is the model that should be followed ?
If you can’t find one , maybe it is a utopia that can’t be accomplished you know .....

So u promote less consumption so people can have access to inflated health care , while diminishing consumption ( which in 2021 is the main engine of the economy) will cripple gdp growth in the US ?
One spending is someone else income .
So someone spend less will actually diminish the income of some less ( and actually won’t be able to have health care)..
..how the hell that help everyone ?

How do you think that will change human nature? When teams start putting together monopolies--they're not going to care that you had a different vision about how it was all supposed to work

Actually no, it isn’t. The state has the monopoly of violence and lawmaking, so it defines what theft is. This is the ideal behind all law, for example the state also determines what kind of killings are legal and which are criminal homicides.

You might see it as a form of theft, but this is irrelevant as no state operates on an ideal of full consensus.

No the state doesn't define what words mean. wtf are you taling about. ofc taxation is within the law; it doesn't mean it's not theft. In muslim countries if someone if sentenced to death for being gay it's also not murder right? Because the state has power to define what is murder and whant isn't.