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Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

Huh the government is the ideal party to do that. Because it can set its goals to best serve its constituents instead of making money.

Don't forget there are so many countries with government healthcare and their care is a lot more accessible than the US's. I've lived in many countries and a nationalised healthcare system is one of the things I select for.

Even a poor country like Cuba has one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita. Unfortunately a bit hamstrung by the US's illegal and needless sanctions so they can't get proper equipment but I've been told healthcare is still pretty excellent there.

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it’s that first paragraph which is really the bugaboo. In an ideal world that first paragraph is 100% true. In reality, what you get is the government getting its own people on the inside, raking in tons of contract money and doing very little for that, then squeeze the services on the inside to win political points from their constituents by drumming up hatred for the system in which they work. While they take in "campaign contributions" from private entities who benefit from people falling out of the system or being fed up with it.

so I agree with you in theory, but in practice, there was a whole host of other issues that would need to be dealt with somehow. I don’t know that more bureaucracy is the solution, but I would like to think it can be handled.

Actual competition and monopoly breaking/preventing.

"Free" markets tend to have transparent pricing : US healthcare does not.

"Free" markets tend to have large numbers of independent players that compete with each other : This is disappearing in the US market.

We have the worst of both systems currently. It's not ran by the government to control costs to the end user. And it's ran by a few monopolistic insurance/medical companies to reap as much profit as possible.

You're both right: government-run healthcare works okay, except when it's the US government.

Canadian healthcare is horrible, pretty sure public healthcare in the UK is also very bad. It’s not a given that somehow switching to public healthcare will make the US like Finland, Canada is much more likely.

It's all about the execution - UK NHS public healthcare was once easily the envy of the world (I'm from Australia, not the UK) and then it suffered decades of being white anted by Conservatives.

> then it suffered decades of being white anted by Conservatives

On what planet does this not happen in America?

Of course it happens in the USofA, and more widely in the Americas.

The challenge for citizens is active participation in oversight of management of the commons - rats will sneak into every granary otherwise.

That’s where they got the idea.

Yes, when the government politicians hate public healthcare they can successfully sabotage it. That just means we need to structure it in a way that they can't. The examples given were all successful in their missions in the past before they were actively targeted.

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