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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

What makes sense is to socialise medicine, and then have the body responsible for running that:

1. Run public health awareness campaigns to make sure that people (especially children / young people) are aware of the health risks. You can do similar things around healthy eating.

2. Treat drug usage and addiction as medical rather than criminal issue (so the police might confiscate your weed if they catch you with it, but they won't charge you with anything).

Both of these minimise healthcare costs without actually banning anything.

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Socialized medicine by definition increases healthcare costs because it divorces the person creating the cost from bearing the results. This applies in basically every socialist system not just socialized medicine.

It’s also worth mentioning that public health awareness campaigns frequently stretch the science in the quest to moralize more effectively. Case in point: saturated fats, pretending everyone is equally vulnerable to AIDS, etc

> Socialized medicine by definition increases healthcare costs because it divorces the person creating the cost from bearing the results

Then why are healthcare costs in the UK (socialised) and Europe (typically private, but highly regulated with a social option) dramatically lower than US (private) healthcare costs despite similar levels of care? Unless you have evidence that it increases costs, I would suggest that you viewpoint is just ideology, and you may wish to consider revising it.

> It’s also worth mentioning that public health awareness campaigns frequently stretch the science in the quest to moralize more effectively

They also often do a lot of good despite this. There is a very successful public health campaign promoting the eating of 5 fruits and vegetables a day. It's not quite accurate. The science suggested we should be eating 9. But it's lead to people eating a lot more fruit and veg than they would otherwise have done, which is a good thing all round.

> Then why are healthcare costs in the UK (socialised) and Europe (typically private, but highly regulated with a social option) dramatically lower than US (private) healthcare costs despite similar levels of care?

They don’t have similar levels of care, that’s why. Wait times are longer and the care is overall of lower quality.

It’s also hard to compare countries directly. In the USA we have a big “underclass” of very unhealthy people (that falls along both socioeconomic and racial lines), which the countries you’re pointing out largely don’t.

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