throwawy3589

As I stated in another post, their health care is subsidized massively by the US acting as a profit center to fund drug and medical technology development.

The US produces a disproportionate amount of new drugs, other countries mostly create cheaper and easier to make follow on drugs. Get rid of the profit motive and new drug creation grinds to a halt.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7fa1b6167f99405f82524d...

No, but having to provide health care to citizens in rural areas is expensive. Many elderly citizens wouldn't be able to travel to large cities to get the health care their taxes paid for. This is an issue that's largely non-existent in europe.

around 80% of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the US boarder. Canada's density is skewed by northern land with nobody living there.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2c86ad127d43c7e1f9a62d...

Idealists like you are why 100 million+ died due to communism in the 20th century.

We've gone from borderline stone-age medical treatment where basic surgery was impossible and simple infections untreatable to where we are today in less than a century. Is everything perfect right now? No, but it's improving steadily and I think with the current advances affordable health care will be possible within the next 10-20 years without government mandating it.

The funding for universal health care would have to come from somewhere, probably higher taxes. So instead of being invested, the money would be stuffed into an inefficient system. There's also the matter of scale, US system would be far larger than any individual Euro country and thus more expensive due to bureaucracy. Also the issue of the US having much lower population density and how to handle that, ie are rural people going to have to drive 5 hours to get the health care their taxes pay for?

Also worth noting that the US is essentially the profit center for the entire world's pharma industry. If that was eliminated investment would be reduced globally, not just the US. US citizens are currently subsidizing European countries public healthcare.

https://www.ibtimes.com/how-us-subsidizes-cheap-drugs-europe...

This is why I don't support universal health care. Health care is expensive because of basic supply and demand, everybody needs health care and doctors and drugs are expensive to train/develop. Government regulation can't just magically make a few million nurses and doctors appear, can't make cancer drugs develop themselves. It will only kill investment and innovation in the medical field.

Investing trillions in universal health care would just be wasted money on a shitty system, like trying to make horses faster rather than inventing the car and plane. The solution to affordable healthcare will be a combination of AI for diagnosis and surgery plus cloning and stem cells for organ transplants.

People need to be patient and put things in perspective, 100 years ago the richest person on earth could die from an infected scratch because we didn't have antibiotics. We've come very far in a short period of time.

People throwing up emotional drivel while doing nothing to refute a point is one the least appealing aspects of hacker news

Please explain to me how humans are immune to natural selection and then go claim your nobel prize for revolutionizing human understanding of genetics.

What I find even stranger is pro-science progressives essentially denying evolution to support their blank slate social policies. We can see that environment can have significant effects on animals in just a few decades, why would humans be immune? Progressives have ironically taken on a near religious ideology that humans are somehow different from other animals and immune to natural selection.

>Having worked outside the software world, I absolutely do not believe that software people are any smarter, on average, than anyone else

The average CS major has an IQ of around 125[1], meaning the average software engineer is somewhere around the top 5% of the population in terms of intelligence. The average IQ at the top tech companies is probably a standard deviation higher than that. Despite this, the consensus is that the majority of software developers are pretty terrible at what they do.

If you've ever tried to help people learn to code you would realize a good chunk of the population doesn't have what it takes to do anything beyond basic programming. If it was easy more people would do it and salaries would drop.

1. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

>There are people who don't realize the F-35 program is used as a front to funnel money to skunkworks projects

The fact you even know the F-35 exists should tell you it's a meme plane we're bullying our allies into buying to fund our own R&D. Devilish