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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious why you like him. I don't really understand the appeal because whenever I listen to him speak it is along the lines of 'we have people starving and oh we have millionaires.' Okay, great so what? Should we not have either? How does one fix the other?

Anyways, I've been asking people who like him to really explain because I don't get it and often just see 'he speaks truth, you are an idiot if you don't get it'. Um okay.

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He favors European style social democracy. His whole point is that there actually exist functioning countries where health care is universal and free, college is accessible to all, gay people have rights, etc etc., and that America could be one of those countries if we wanted to. Btw I learned this by spending five minutes last night reading about him and watching a short interview, so I think your comment gives him the short shrift.

The problem with the U.S. and why universal health care potentially wouldn't work is in terms of scale. The U.S. has over 300M people living in it, over 8x as much as the most populous European country. We also have a history of hating and evading taxes at all costs (Boston Tea Party).

I'm not saying it can't work but the economics gets truly tricky when you're dealing with a country that big.

What does size have to do with it? If anything, size should be beneficial because of economies of scale.

If anything, the EU is larger and more populated than the US, so even in that case it should be easier to implement anything in the US.

"The EU" doesn't have a socialized system - most (all?) of the countries in the EU do have distinct, different, and locally funded socialist programs, but "The EU" doesn't.

If only the US had distinct and different local government... like states?

Only <4x as much as Germany.

I'd argue that at that scale, if you can make a system work for 80 million people, you can probably make it work for 300.

Plus the US has got over 4x the GDP of Germany ($17,418,925 vs. $3,859,547, according to an IMF report from 2014), so it's not like it can't afford it, sufficient funds exist in the system.

P.S. Numbers I provided before are missing a few zeros, as you might've guessed. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

You are in the richest country in the world, and you're telling me that universal healthcare can't work because of scale?

I'm shocked the average person on the street believes these lies.

Universal Heathcare doesn't work in the US right now because some very powerful and rich people will be a lot less powerful and rich, and they don't want that. Open your eyes for a second and realize you are the only developed country without it, and everyone else considers it a basic human right.

Per capita, we aren't the richest country in the world.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/06/24/what-is-the...

That's a ridiculous article. It conveniently avoids overall GDP, by which the US is the richest in the world.

In the first comparison they use GDP per capita, and in the second they use overall reserve currency? Then they use natural resources, but don't factor overall ability to exploit said resources. They're just picking metrics that don't favor the US.

But when we're talking about redistribution to individuals, GDP is a less good metric than GDP per capita.

I agree that it dances around GDP, but I disagree that it is somehow the trump metric that makes everything work. On balance, we have less cash per resident than do countries with higher per capita GDP.

OK then, you're the 10th riches by most PPP measures [1]

So you still outrank the vast majority of Developed countries, but universal healthcare is too difficult?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...

I did not say that universal healthcare was too difficult.

Yes that's true. So the 9 countries who have higher GDP's per capita (PPP, although nominal is similar) have more money to distribute per person.

However, those nine countries have a few million people each, so the US has more money per person than 99% of the world.

I don't think the problem with scaling is as much economic as it is a product of the number of disparate motivations at scale.

The more people you have, the more difficult it becomes to have any sort of general consensus.

> The problem with the U.S. and why universal health care potentially wouldn't work is in terms of scale.

I believe grecy commented on this quite well, but as someone from Canada, I hardly believe this to be true. Sure, you have 318M+ citizens, while Canada only has around 35M+ citizens. However, the United States is more wealthy than Canada, by a similar factor of ten:

US GDP 2014: 17.42 Trillion Canada GDP 2014: 1.79 Trillion

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/country/Canada [2] http://data.worldbank.org/country/United-States

To say it wouldn't work at scale is a gross exaggeration. I would argue that you shouldn't just assume that healthcare wouldn't work. If most of the money wasn't appropriated between Big Business (TM) and the Military Industrial Complex, I'm sure it would hardly be an issue to introduce Canadian-style healthcare at a country-wide scale.

> The problem with the U.S. and why universal health care potentially wouldn't work is in terms of scale. The U.S. has over 300M people living in it, over 8x as much as the most populous European country. We also have a history of hating and evading taxes at all costs (Boston Tea Party).

So, set some very basic standards at the federal level and make the details and implementation a state responsibility. The largest US state is significantly smaller than the largest European country that provides universal healthcare, so that should solve that problem more than completely.

Consider how much healthcare costs Americans now.

Now consider how much cheaper healthcare would be without health insurance companies.

If you get the health service you have now, but without the insurance companies taking their cut, there's no reason it can't be cheaper than what you have now.

I was surprised when I learned that ObamaCare still included insurance companies in the loop, but I see now that it was a concession to get some political support behind universal healthcare, a stepping stone towards the healthcare system that Sanders is promoting.

I don't know of a single country that regrets having a universal public healthcare system. Perhaps there's a good reason that they're so popular, a reason that goes beyond the pure economics of paying for treatment.

When you're ill you want to focus on getting better, you don't want to focus on the financial burden you're placing on your family by being ill. It seems obvious for someone who's had it all their life, but perhaps it's one of those things you have to experience the difference to really understand what you're missing out on (or conversely how lucky you are).

My only experience of the other side was when I ended up getting pneumonia on a trip to NYC. Whilst there were elements of the care that were good, and I had travel insurance which covered most of the initial cost, I can say for certain that dealing with the financial side of the treatment was not something I particularly wanted to think about in my weakened state. It put me off wanting to live there, I feel sorry for those who have to put up with it year in year out.

As the Washington Post pointed out (and common sense concurs), the only way a Scandanavian-style democratic socialist economy can exist is because there is a United States to drive the economy enough so that there's enough productivity that those countries can afford their socialism.

Unfortunately, I can't find the article now, but it surprising to see in the Washington Post.

If the USA adopted these policies, the biggest change would be to drag the top quintile down, while the bottom quintile wouldn't change much. Oh, and the top quintile are the people who create all the jobs, so it's just a vicious cycle.

I believe it's this one. It's tone really throws me off though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/10/...

Not sure if you were looking for someone to tell you why they like him - if not, I apologize for misunderstanding.

His platform - though overly ambitious - contains a bullet list of the exact things I believe are in desperate need of fixing in the nation. For the sake of brevity I'll stick with only 3:

> Rebuild Infrastructure

> Reverse Climate Change

> Health Care as a Right for All

I honestly don't understand how every candidate isn't running with at least the first of that list on their platform. Our infrastructure is barely viable at this point and has been limiting our growth since the start of the software revolution. This is a bigger problem on more local levels but those get their initiatives from the fed and thus it's a place to start.

Reversing climate change (or at least reducing the effect of it) is another I can't believe that every candidate isn't running with. The longer we wait to address the problem with meaningful change the worse of a future we guarantee. The worst outcome of heading down this path is that we were wrong about some specific technology delivering us from the perils at hand - but then (like a broken unit test) we know that won't work and can incorporate that knowledge into further endeavors.

Then there's healthcare. The ACA was an excellent stepping stone - but it has to be that. Something to get us through so we can pull ourselves to the next step. The fact that so many Americans are soon to be required to have another insurance fee is ridiculous. This is the exact type of service that is the reason we pay taxes. I understand that some people view taxes as some illegal manifestation of government power - I just disagree with that entire sentiment. The proper role of taxes seems to be to cover the costs of burdens that we all collectively share. Every person in this nation needs healthcare to some degree. The health insurance market has already shown us that we can create a way to account for varying costs among individuals. That pattern falls into the existing pattern of our tax code pretty easily. Remove the middle man profiting off of our shared burden, replace it with the state, and reduce our burden slightly.

So there's a nutshell of why I like Sanders. His platform appeals to me. It's not some notion of 'starving people and millionaires' - it's that he wants to change the country in a way that I think is 'better'. Like Obama - if he gets only a small amount of his ambition accomplished he will still have created a better place.

>Reversing climate change (or at least reducing the effect of it) is another I can't believe that every candidate isn't running with. The longer we wait to address the problem with meaningful change the worse of a future we guarantee.

Half the continent of North America is already on fire[1].

[1] http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/08/24/everything-is-on-f...

One fixes the other through redistribution. Tax the billionaires, close tax loopholes, etc. Use that money for a fiscal stimulus, and also for public benefit.

>Okay, great so what? Should we not have either?

We should not have starving people. But there is over 20% child poverty in the US.

The only reason we have this, the only excuse for it, is the same market ethos that justifies intense wealth. When we challenge intense wealth, we eliminate poverty. And when we eliminate poverty, every social ill that depends upon it diminishes radically.

This challenge to intense wealth, called leftism, doesn't get rid of millionaires, nor systems of personal property, nor personal liberty. This gets rid of a system of worship of intense wealth and puts an end to accepting the premise that accumulating wealth far beyond what any person or family can actually use is a justifiable thing.

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