"I'll try ̶s̶p̶i̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ printing more money, that's a good trick!"
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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It's also an obvious sign of how bad inflation has risen in the last few years.
It's all so tiresome.
Whether or not it's a good idea, wouldn't Medicare for All also save people money that they now use to buy private health insurance?
Sure only to have it plus more taxed from you.
Government is always inefficient. Medicare for all would cost substantially more per capita in taxes than private insurance. Despite that, I have conflicting thoughts about universal guaranteed healthcare.
Someone who isn't an ideologue, I like that.
Yes, government is rather inefficient. But for some reason, countries with 'universal healthcare' spend less on health care than the US with better health outcomes. This has two reasons: the obesity epidemic in the US, and the fact that some health care is delayed or denied for us. But may universal health care not cut out a lot of bureaucracy and form-filling?
Honestly, I don't know. I don't want to support one position or other simply because either my country or 'tribe' supports it, so I just decide to do the wisest thing of all: shut up.
I think the price of healthcare in the US is messed up in a similar convoluted way as university tuition. In both cases, something the state did ruined things. Considering that, perhaps further state encroachment would have counterproductive results.
But is there any place where it actually works fine then? Everywhere else the state does more, not less.
State healthcare generally sucks in all countries, although in different ways. Whatever the USA's health insurance details are, it has made healthcare prices skyrocket with time. Other countries may not have made those decisions, but they may have less capacity, longer waiting lines, or less modern implements.
The key is how things are done. In the USA, student loans you can't bankruptcy out of and federal funding have made it so Universities increase tuitions beyond the value of the education offered. Health insurance stuff have increased healthcare prices so that a sore throat drop that costs pennies is billed for $10. Tax law is maddening in its complexity.
The USA's decision-making is polluted with lobbying and special interests. If the USA can't meddle in an industry without worsening things, perhaps sweeping overarching federal programs are a terrible idea. The state simply won't be able to not make a clusterfuck of it.
But that is true everywhere. It's not as if in Europe, decisions are made based on what's best for the people. The very idea is laughable to me.
Lobbying is illegal in some countries.
Outcomes have a lot to do with inputs. It does not follow that simply switching the US over to single payer would result in any sort of good. You'd also have to get rid of all the profiteering and corruption, and I just don't see any reason turning more over to government would do that.
It's kind of like defense spending. Other countries spend immensely less on defense, even per capita, with similar "outcomes" (they still have a country). But the government is already in charge of defense spending. And yet they're constantly trying to turn things over to the private sector, use "commercial off the shelf" etc. There is no reason to think creating a single payer Defense Spending Agency would be anything but a boondoggle.
The US doesn't have private health care -- the government is immensely involved, and we don't have public health care, either. We were supposed to have universal healthcare care of Obama, but I'm sure the same people who always whined about it will claim we don't. You can't trust the government to take care of you, and you can't trust our corporatocracy, either. Bad healthcare is just a symptom of the rot, not due to any lack of planning.
The problem is that Medicare for All would be far more expensive as a replacement for private insurance. Private insurance actually has incentives to compete and keep costs down. Government does not. Government has incentives to mandate additional coverage to pander to interest groups, like covering birth control, abortions, gender reassignment surgery, etc.
Conceptually, it could be cheaper if the government was willing to assfuck the medical industry and cram down prices, but we have decades of proof from the Medicare system itself that the government is totally unwilling to do that. So the end result would be higher, not lower prices, similar to how Obamacare forced everyone to take all kinds of coverage for shit they didn't want or need.
The government has made it so hard, I assume on purpose, to be an insurer that there really aren't that many players. The states I'm intimately familiar with have only a few choices. And if you want to try something different, well, you can't. You want to have catastrophic only coverage and pay for your own shit? Too bad, illegal.
Speaking as a European, the government has plenty of incentives to keep costs down. By denying us care.
That said, I'm rather risk-averse so I would not want the American system, since I wouldn't know what the hell would happen. I can see the problems with both systems. Which is worse, I honestly don't know.
It seems to me that this is more of a problem in the US than it is in Sweden, where such crap is more restricted for some weird reason.
I've given up trying to understand what is better or not.
If you asked me if people should get dental care, I'd say yes. But I always pick plans that do not include it, since it is cheaper for me to pay it out of pocket.
That only comes later when your government runs into a budgetary crisis and is forced to ration care to balance the books.
The US Congress tripled the US national debt in the last 10 years They give absolutely 0 fucks about responsible spending and are going to bankrupt the United States and cause another global financial crisis in doing so, it's just a question of when. Fiscal conservatism is a joke because everyone in Congress is just a pig at the trough, and I don't blame them. If Republicans were fiscally conservative and didn't lead the charge with tax cuts, all they'd be doing is saving up money for the Democrats to spend when it was their turn.
If you look at data, competitive private systems are always FAR better than socialist systems. It's literally the point of the whole capitalist vs socialist/communist struggle of the past 100 years.
The reason US health insurance sucks is not because it's private, it's because it isn't private enough. It is HIGHLY regulated and restricted and non-competitive compared to a truly free market system. Hospitals also play a lot of games which would normally be illegal under anti-trust laws and yet they get a free pass because politicians will not touch hospitals.
Euros are super left wing in most areas, but there are pockets of social conservatism. Same with how France told Metoo to fuck off.
It seems that you can just spend as much as you want when you hold the reserve currency. There are always enough chumps who are fine with funding it by holding dollars.
That is what Democrats claim Clinton (and the GOP Congress) did for George W. Bush and his wars.
Absolutely. But I'd rather not base judgments on ideology, but based on empiricism. Is this also applicable to health care? The counterargument is alwys "the US spends twice as much but has worse health outcomes". And yes, I know that this is at least in part due to obesity.
This makes sense, but is there any place on earth that does do its health care in a way that has your approval? If there is none, isn't it more of a thought experiment? People can always think of a world that is superior to the one they inhabit.
We're mostly left-wing on economic issues. Even the most socially liberal places in Europe are not quite as bad as a Portland. Thank God for small blessings.
Your credit limit is higher, but not infinite. As the US national debt goes up, the interest rates that the government must pay also go up. This creates an exponential rise in the cost of the debt which eventually starts to crowd out the budget. Service on the national debt is projected to be $580 billion this year, up from $375 billion in 2019. Any shocks to the system could cause that number to spike, creating a downward spiral as the US credit dries up and interest rates force austerity and tax hikes.
Clinton wanted to spend. It wasn't up to him. Gingrich and the R Congress are the reason the budget was balanced in the 90s. Presidents don't control the budget.
Of course you are right that the Democrats portrayed themselves as victims as a rationalization for blowing out the spending on paying off their supporters and buying votes. All the "inflation reduction act" did was dump hundreds of billions in subsidies on "green new deal" environmentalist bullshit.
Both parties want to max out the federal credit card to deny the other party the ability to "spend" more, only the Rs do it with tax cuts, which isn't spending at all, it's simply taxing less. Both parties give 0 fucks about the national debt because the voters give 0 fucks because the voters are stupid and don't care or understand the danger. So we are going to charge full speed into fiscal crisis so all the idiots can learn the hard way. By the time the danger becomes clear, it will be too late to avoid it.
The main problem is that the US health care system isn't a free market system. It's a cartel set up between the insurers and hospitals to fuck over everyone else. Hospitals get special legal benefits so they can avoid competition. Insurers get the same. Both collude to make being uninsured too dangerous because the hospitals charge assfuck inflated prices to uninsureds.
Laws which force hospitals to publish and honor all their prices are a big step in the right direction. Consumers in the US have absolutely no way to comparison shop for health care, and both the hospitals and the insurers want to keep it that way because it benefits them both.
The answer, as always, is deregulation, taking health care policy away from states to form a singular national market instead of 50 state markets, elimination of probably 90% of health care insurance regulation so the free market can actually function, and forcing hospitals to compete with one another by forcing them to publish prices and giving consumers the right to pick cheaper hospitals and save money.
The reason for all this collusion is to keep doctors, nurses, and health administration staff rich. The reason health care is so expensive in the US is to pay all these grossly overpaid people disgustingly high amounts of money.
Nobody has the balls to create a free market in any rich country because the plebians demand gibs, so socialist health care is the norm. Of all such systems, Japan is the least bad because the government pays 70% and tells you to fuck off for the remaining 30%, so at least in that situation, there is still an incentive by the consumer to price shop and get the best value for the best price.
The fact that despite this, the dollar is now dominating the euro is quite depressing to me - and depressing to my purchasing power. You can literally print as much as you want and still you're beating us. If Japan can survive with 200%+ national debt, I think the US can with its reserve currency boondoggle (not advocatng for it).
They shut down the government and they lost. So clearly, they came to some sort of understanding. You can't pin the blame or the credit on one party or the other. Most likely, it's just because it's less easy to agree on more spending when there is actually some opposition.
It's incredible to me. They just paste labels on laws that have nothing to do with them. Patriot Act, and now this. And then they have to gall to say that their "INflation Reduction Act" was the most significant action against climate change in history. And no one calls them out.
I'm sure you'll view this as a Eurofag bashing America again, but in all honesty, your media is even worse than ours. I'd say about 3 times as bad. Here they at least pretend to do some critical scrutiny of the powers that be.
But both parties don't give a damn about what "voters" think. As everywhere. So there must be some other reason.
This seems like something that no reasonable person, left or right, can oppose.
It sure as hell wasn't the answer to banking. Or Big Tech.
But most consumers are insured. So why would they care about the cost? When I am picking health care plans, I can pick between plans that allow me to get treatment in all hospitals, or just most. I'm always willing to pay a bit more to get all hospitals, even though there are several hospitals in the city where I live that are covered anyway. You never know...
I have heard about that numerus clausus that the AMA pushes. Supposedly to safeguard quality. Of course, then they pick doctors based on race, so it's not really about quality, is it?
Not letting people die is not really a 'gibs', is it? I wouldn't want to live somewhere if people who earned less were simply left to die because a grocery store employee is considered less valuable than a VP of Diversity of Inclusion.
Now if we empirically examine the health care system in Japan, is it better than Europe and America in practice as well as on paper for you?
This is because as much as the Democrats assfucked our economy, the Euros did worse, because at least we have the Republicans to resist and rein things in somewhat. If it wasn't for Joe Manchin holding them back, Biden would have spent 4 trillion on 1 bill instead of under 1 trillion.
The Euros also locked down harder and tanked their economies because they didn't have red state governors like Ron DeSantis telling Joe Biden to fuck off.
Japan is a special and unique case because it is an ethnostate with a strong collectivist culture. The result of that is that the Japanese private citizens sacrifice by lending their money to the Japanese government at NEGATIVE interest rates in order to sustain Japan's otherwise unsustainable welfare state. Americans and Euros would never do that. The Japanese people buy government bonds like it's a form of charity.
No, the Republicans did not "lose", they got a balanced budget. They just had to compromise on some things and didn't get everything they wanted, which is how politics works. Clinton and the Democrats wanted more spending and more taxes. The Republicans wanted less of both, so you can't give the Democrats any credit. They were the problem and the Republicans were the solution.
It sickens me when Democrats try to take credit for fiscal responsibility. That's like a rapist trying to take credit for not raping you because the police [republicans] arrived in time to stop him.
Patriot Act is exactly the name you'd expect for Authright legislation, though.
The right wing media calls them out, but as far as the liberal media? Of course not, they're all Democrat operatives.
Bashing the libtard media in the US is not bashing America. Your comments obviously do not apply to things like Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, or other conservative outlets like Tucker Carlson.
The Democrats see voters as sheep to be manipulated. The Republicans see the Democrats as communists they need to protect the common people against by red pilling them on Democrat insanity. I think the Republicans in the present year care far more about what the voters want, which is why we are getting a red wave.
But in the past have there been times where the republican party got corrupted by special interests? Such as on China and illegal immigration? Yes. When the republicans gain too much power for too long, as they did in the GWB years, they got fat and corrupt and wasted a lot of money. That's why the voters turned against them and put Obama for 8 years.
I agree. I think the government should ban all the deceptive tactics businesses use to conceal and manipulate their pricing information. When I try to book plane tickets and hotels, I constantly have to deal with hidden fee bullshit. Google flights and Google hotels tries to include fees, but hotels routinely, for example, charge "resort fees" that are not optional and are very expensive at $50/night or more. Airlines like Spirit Airlines are absolute assholes about trying to upcharge you with hidden fees and lying about things like tax charges. It's infuriating and makes it 10x harder to get the best deal when these fucks can lie to you.
It would be child's play to simply ban these tactics and pass a law that says "you're not allowed to charge any extra fees and must give a single, all-inclusive price in all your advertisement, period."
Also bear in mind that the government easily could have stopped spam calls by passing a regulation that bans phone number spoofing, and yet it's taken years for them to slowly get around to it.
This is one area [consumer protection] where the EU sometimes pulls ahead, mostly because they have no loyalty to US companies who are the primary culprits of a lot of these practices.
The 1 time regulation is required is when capitalism cannot function because you're dealing with a natural monopoly or cartel. Big Tech is natural monopolies. Banking is a big different. While there are only a handful of big banks and they sometimes act like a cartel, there are also a lot of smaller banks and credit unions, so it's pretty easy for you to not do business with big banks if you don't want to. That isn't an option with Big Tech.
It matters. Even if only 5% of consumers are actually engaging in price discrimination, these people [like me, I'm uninsured by choice] are the trailblazers and trend-setters who drive the change in the system. It's like how most of the stock market is passive investment in index funds, but the small minority of active investors end up controlling all the market prices.
The answer is that (1) some medical providers and clinics would start to compete on price, then (2) insurers would notice that clinics were profitably and sustainably giving these services at a fraction of the price, and would demand that the providers in their network slash prices to gain competitive advantage so they could lower insurance premiums and gain market share [capitalism], (3) consumers buying insurance would see the cost of the insurance plans drop, or if the insurance was "free", they'd see the coverage scope and limits improve.
It's like how the "Southwest effect" means that whenever 1 company is willing to buck the cartel and offer lower prices, ALL the companies have to slash prices so as not to lose all market share. So when Southwest Airlines began to serve a particular airport, ALL airlines operating in that airport were forced to slash prices, because if they didn't, Southwest would take over. That's capitalism.
Humans are fundamentally shitty and selfish. Capitalism is so amazing because it keeps them honest and forces them to invest their energy into providing the best product at the best price instead of into how to exploit people.
That's a straw man. In the US, hospitals are not allowed to deny life saving care to anybody, insured or not. Nobody ever gets left to die in the streets, and life saving care represents an insignificant fraction of the total care for people. The vast majority of life saving care resources are spent on super old people, to buy them just a short amount of additional time. Socialist governments kill these old people to save resources by using waiting lists to ration their care and ensure they die while waiting. The truth is that it simply is not a wise investment of resources to spend $1 million to buy some 85 year old 6 months more of life.
The stats in this study suggest Japan > US > EU in outcomes. I think Japan has somewhat of an advantage having a much healthier population, though.
Probably, but it would be a major gov expenditure, which is what this graph is depicting.