This is my unedited response to a discussion thread I'd started about healthcare. In the below commentary and reply I try to explain WHY Universal Health is both the right thing to do, and why it'll be very complicated to pull off without deeper changes in our socioeconomic system and politics....
"Healthcare in those countries isn't free. It's just supported by the tax base. And we all are already paying essentially for Medicare we can't use yet through the payroll tax.
People are weird. They get all patriotic about overseas oil wars, but don't trust the government when it comes to taking care of domestic issues. People need to make up their mind. It isn't about trust. Trusting ANY politician is stupid, even and especially the ones you blindly agree with.
The problem with government isn't it size or its reach, it is the purpose that it should serve. Greed for the military industrial complex, the energy sector, or even the technology sector (Afghanistan sits on upwards of trillions of dollars worth of rare Earth metals) isn't a viable alternative (even though all of these create economic opportunity) to making sure our citizens have clean drinking water and infrastructure that isn't crumbling.
One can argue that Universal Healthcare is a bad idea, and if we do nothing else to the healthcare system or the underlying economy it probably would be. This is the reason why Obamacare, though extending access to healthcare, has done absolutely nothing to reign in costs. One of the compromises in ObamaCare (to get Republicans to vote for it...and they did) was to disallow the government from having any say so in the price of medical procedures and equipment, a power all other Western systems have.
Just look at a hospital bill sometime in the United States and ask yourself while you're paying $4 on average for that tiny plastic cup they bring you pills in, when I can sell you a pack of 250 for less than $2, and still make a profit. :-P
The problem with revamping Health Care in the United States is twofold. In the 1970s the United States was at the forefront of fundamentally changing nutrition in the Western world, all from adopting a now demonstrably flawed study known as The Seven Countries Study, led by the epidemiologist Ansel Keyes. This was a first ambitious attempt at doing what we refer to today as lineal regression analysis of a multitude of studies, and this was done before the era of computers being widely available. It is only in the last decade or so, that this study has been revisited in any sense, and shown to be fundamentally flawed precisely because there weren't computers available to check the rather glaring mistakes of the study's author. It was too ambitious and far-reaching, and too unwieldy for anyone to check his work. And no one did. and this study became published right around the same time our countries USDA had adopted policies (during the Nixon era) that dovetailed almost to a perfect storm level with the conclusions reached in the study.
This is what led to the adoption of the low-fat diet, and to the nearly one thousand percent increase in sugar added to processed foods. The two countries that ran with this in a big way are the United States, and ironically Saudi Arabia. which is why those two countries top the world's charts in type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
So our diet is killing us. That's the first shoe.
The second shoe is economic. All of the countries that adopted universal healthcare systems did so between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. This was an era when Keynesian economic theory dominated all Western democratic socioeconomics. The United States decided to not deliberately go the universal Health Care route, as the Western world was getting the jitters from the economic growth in the third world due to the beginning pressures of globalization. So the United States led the charge at turning Keynesian economics on its ear, and adopting what we refer to now as supply-side economics, or trickle down economics as it is more well-known. And it was precisely at this point, when we let free markets decide the nature of healthcare, that we started this never-ending upwards spiral of inflation when it comes to healthcare. The same can be said about our higher education systems because this also aligned with the same time period when government started playing less of a role in higher education.
The inflation in these two fundamental systems of our society has actually been driven by the fact that we have let free markets have free reign. And free markets are kind of a mythology baked in to supply side theory.
Most other Western Powers did not back off of either universal Health Care, or publicly-funded higher education. And because of that political inertia, you find that most western nations have vastly superior and less expensive health care and education as a general rule.
Now that is not to say that the United States still does not dominate in the fields of advanced medicine, or advanced and prestigious higher education. Because we still do. Barely...
But the inflationary pressures that we allowed to occur unabated is also the reason why Healthcare is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and why postdoc education at a prestigious University like MIT can cost upwards of a half a million dollars.
I got accepted to MIT in 1985, but couldn't afford it then. But even then a postdoc education was a quarter of what it is today.
Today only the wealthy can afford good health, and the benefits of higher education properly. Regardless of what your intrinsic health actually is, and regardless of what sort of intellectual talents you may possess.
The part of the conversation that seems lost on many people is this weird concept that Democratic socialism is some weird anomaly that only occurs in countries that conservatives like to make fun of.
The United States actually invented Democratic socialism.
Read that again to yourself. Slowly.
GPS, The Interstate Highway System, two thirds of ALL of the recreational lakes in the U.S., etc.....the list just goes on and on of all the PUBLIC WORKS you and I rely on every single day that form the (now crumbling) foundation of Democratic Socialism that makes your life possible. To deny this is plain hypocrisy.
And it was through that invention that we saw the gilded age in the latter part of the nineteenth century go away. It was again through a change in the social contract that we saw a country lift itself out of the Great Depression, which set the United States up to become the superpower it is today.
So for nearly a century the United States was the template and the role model for Democratic socialism for the rest of the western world. And it's really only since the late 1970s that this hasn't been the case.
There's a lot to unravel in order to give our citizens non bankrupting healthcare."
