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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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