Comment by GendingMachine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GendingMachine | Hacker News Reader

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Christ, reading Americans declare that the issue with American healthcare is "too much government" always completely floors me. The system did not work well before the ACA, the system does not work now. The only countries in the world with strong, consistent and equitable healthcare systems have government health systems.

Here in the UK our NHS is a goddamn mess, it's cracking and creaking and bureaucratic, but every American expat i have ever known who now lives in the UK has horror stories about how much worse it is over there. In our monthly social classes (PSHCE) we watched documentaries of poor Americans unable to afford healthcare, and it horrified us all.

You can't run healthcare as a profit seeking enterprise, it just doesn't work, the financial incentives of healthcare providers just fundamentally do not align with their customers. Government run institutions can often fall into a state of bureaucratic atrophy but if this and countless other stories make clear - that's an issue with institutions in general, whether they be government run or not.

This problem will not improve until you get over your ideological commitment to trying to solve every problem with markets. Healthcare must be socialised, anything less is barbarism.

Health insurance is the problem and always has been the problem. Having the government mandate insurance is far worse than a public health system. Currently we have the worst of all of the options (and if an insurance company has bought all of the smaller providers in your area, it’s even worse)!

Healthcare hasn’t been a “market” in decades. It’s completely captured by monopolies which have captured regulation to prevent any alternatives. I do know that the mashup of government mandates for for-profit entities is about as corrupt a system as could be conceived.

> The system did not work well before the ACA

It wasn't nearly as corrupt.

> we watched documentaries of poor Americans unable to afford healthcare, and it horrified us all.

A system so good shouldn't need such propaganda to justify it's existence.

> you get over your ideological commitment

The ideological commitment that are the underpinnings of our system of government and the core of our very constitution? Why don't you just "get over" your ideological commitment to entertaining that absurd royal family?

By what metric are you evaluating corruption here, other than selected news anecdotes that support your ideological intuition.

We watched videos of the horrors of the American healthcare system for the same reason as we watched videos and were otherwise taught about oppressive regimes, international poverty, bigotry and racism both local and international - to learn about global issues, to gain a wider perspective on the world, to be knowledgeable about the many ways in which a society can fail it's most vulnerable. Such as, for instance, letting your poor die and suffer from preventable, curable illnesses.

Oh, and I have no such ideological commitment to the monarchy, I and most people I know would choose to abolish it in a heartbeat. It is here, as it is everywhere, the conservative right clinging onto traditions, ideologies and policies that have long since proven unproductive, disfunctional or outright harmful.

The monarchy may well underpin much of how British law and government works, and that is something we should work to change - just as you in the US should work to change those parts of your founding constitution written almost 300 years ago that no are no longer to the benefit of yourselves and your country.

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