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soruon Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

> The US does spend a lot more, and doesn't cover everyone.

The US does spend a lot more, _because_ it doesn't cover everybody.

The use-value of private health care in the the US is:

- delta (getting treated, slow painful death and/or bankruptcy)

whereas most places it is more like:

- delta (private room in fancy building, non-private room in an oldish building)

If you were a salesman, and you sold the first product for less than 5x the price of the second, you would deserve to be sacked on the spot. How could a profit-seeking economic system be so inefficient that it would fail to extract a large portion of that value from the customer?

> he US needs to focus on lowering costs

Why would a profit-seeking system seek to lower costs when high costs led to higher prices that still get paid? Any CEO suggesting such a thing would be sacked by the board the same day.

Do the math; costs are about 3x what they should be, but 85% of the market still pays them. 3 * 0.85 > 1 * 1.0.

soruon Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

Like the real life experience of those private Russian mercenaries who went up against the US military in Syria?

Some things governments simply do better; health care is one of them. Denying that fact in the face of the mountain of supporting evidence is nothing but dogma.

soruon A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet

Has everyone given up on string theory, or is there still hope another few hundred genius-years will bring progress?

soruon Is Uncle Bob serious?

This is kind of precisely backwards. A survey is like a test; it asks 'will this work'?

A good civil engineer will do that as early as possible, rather than produce pages of engineering drawings blindly. A good civil engineer will calculate the stresses and load factors on a bridge as soon as possible, rather than assume things will work. A good architect will hand a sketch of a building to a client as early as possible, and ask 'do you like it'?

All of those are tests, and the engineering processes in those domains are put in place to ensure that that testing happens as early as possible, before mistakes are too costly to undo.