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Comment by err4nt | Hacker News Reader

There isn't really such thing as free healthcare as long as staff need education and training, doctors have to be paid, hospitals need to be administrated, and treatments have material costs, etc. If it's being paid for by the taxpayer, it's not coming at no cost to them, they're paying for it in a pretty direct way.

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I wonder if it would cost as much as the F35 program. I'd rather pay for a junkie's health care than a token national alliance tech project jet that no one needs.

Estimates for the cost of the F35 program vary widely, but a decent guess is 1-1.5 trillion over 50 years or 20 to 30 billion a year.

The US currently spends ~3.5 trillion per year on health care.

So yes, taxpayer funded health care would cost as much as the F35 program. In fact, quite a bit more. Perhaps 150x more per year.

Yes, but we're already paying that and we're spending more than everyone else. [1] Universal healthcare isn't just morally justified, it's also financially justified. The only justifications for our insane system are regulatory capture or sadism.

1. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

You seem to be assuming that introducing universal healthcare in the US would bring down costs. I've never seen any evidence whatsoever to support that claim.

You could look at every other country that did it for the evidence you seek, provided you aren't limiting to the pool of evidence "in the US".

Changing the country changes too many variables at once. The US also spends a whole lot more on infrastructure than virtually everyone else in the world, and there's no obvious reason why. Just assuming that universal healthcare would solve all of our cost problems is comically optimistic.

There is.

Sri Sathya Sai Super Specialty Hospital

>The Sri Sathya Sai Institutes of Higher Medical Sciences also popularly known as Super Specialty Hospitals are tertiary health care hospitals established by Sri Sathya Sai Baba to provide patient care facilities to all irrespective of caste, class, creed, gender, religion or nationality totally free of charge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Sathya_Sai_Super_Specialit...

It's staffed and paid for by devotees of Sri Sathya Sai Baba.

Everybody knows this. There’s no need to repeat this every time someone says “free health care” any more than there’s a need to repeat “the sky is blue.”

Don't nitpick. "Free" as in "sick people get healthcare without paying anything that healthy people don't".

People don't really care about it being free they just don't want to be responsible for paying for it themselves.

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