The case for Social Democracy.

Ah yes that for profit healthcare system which denies care if one does not have the money to get care. Which leaves upwards of 45,000 a year dying because they can't get access to basic care. Which lobby's congress every year for political favors. Fixing issues in politics is not about just you. It's about finding the best way to save and improve people's lives. Universal healthcare would do just that. 45,000 people are not dying a year if universal healthcare is instituted. Medical bankruptcy, which is one of the top bankruptcy's in the US, would no longer exist. A complete private system would not solve any of these problems. You are not becoming a slave to the government and dependent on them in universal healthcare system. This is another right wing fallacy talking point. You pay in taxes what you get in healthcare. Just like every other modern nation. To say that we would not see the technological advancements that we do see today if we had a social democracy is another fallacy. One part of social democracy for instance is free college education. A more educated workforce benefits society in so many ways. Increasing productivity, innovation and invention.

In Trump's presidency alone. He raised the military budget by around 100 billion dollars annually. Free college in the US would cost 65 billion dollars. So don't also say that we can't pay for free college, because what we just increased in the military, is more than enough to pay for free college.

 

Juan Chavez called from Venezuela

 

That industry became decidedly mixed in the 60s with the advent of the Medicare/Medicaid boondoggle. Arguendo that the claims above are true (they aren't) then at least half of those problems are to be blamed on government. You want more of that incompetence and waste in healthcare? Fine. I don't.

"Free college" already exists for the most part, for people willing to work while they attend a public or local college. My small city has a particularly good junior college, for example, that students can live at home and work while attending, come out way AHEAD once they have their degree. Moreover, a huge portion of students and parents defrauded into the 4 year college debt trap by gov-edu lies would be far better off in far less expensive trade schools. I can find numerous unemployed grievance and social sciences victims of this hoax in my community working in restaurants and retail, yet not enough people who can fix a car, plumb or fix an HVAC system.

 

The above claims that I stated are true. Secondly we live in the one of least regulatory burden country when it comes to healthcare. There has been no place on earth where pure private healthcare has worked. Nowhere. Single-payer on the other hand has many examples of success. Please explain to me how Medicare/Medicaid caused this so called problem? Your free college point makes no sense. If all kids are guaranteed an opportunity to college this will allow everyone a right to education which will educate more people and increase producitivity and labor force participation. Govt education lies? Another right wing think tank fallacy. We all know facts have a liberal bias.

 

What a bunch of crapola.

 

Lol. Truth hurts don't it.

 

Worked great in the U.S. pre government meddling, so that particular lie narrative is toast.

It makes perfect sense, which is why you jabber on around it instead of directly addressing it. To restate, college, local public college, all over the U.S., is essentially "free" right now for those willing to work and live at home while attending. Moreover, if there is to be any government based student financial aid, it is solely the prerogative of state governments, not federal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_Scholarship

Runs entirely on lottery earnings.

We all know the grafty, incompetent, dishonest Complex would LOVE to get its hands on another gigantic pool of money to corrupt with pork and set asides for cronies. That's the real impetus behind all the "free college" nonsense.

Any private sector company that lied to consumers to the extent gov-edu lies would be shut down by regulators and sued out of existence under numerous consumer protection laws. That college degrees increase workforce participation is a LIE. That undifferentiated degrees in anything from anywhere guarantee a higher income is a LIE. That the world needs more social workers, women's studies majors, grievance studies majors, communications majors, film majors, liberal arts and social science majors generally is a LIE. That trade training is somehow -less than- a college education is a LIE, as many tradesman I know who make far more money than I do as an attorney will gladly attest.

The U.S. needs far more tradesmen and skilled laborers and far less white collar fungible customer service reps, junk degrees that cost half a million directly and in opportunity costs, laboring under massive debt, constantly and irrevocably replaced overseas by equally unskilled labor

Curiously, you haven't posted any.

 

You tell me how it worked better before government meddling. You can't because people were dying on the streets. Virtually half of seniors 65 and older didn't have insurance and those that couldn't afford it, avoided it all together.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/jan/20/was-early-1960s-golden-age-health-care/

As for the broader picture of pre-1965 health care in America, Rosemary Stevens, a historian and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that "in the early 1960s, the choices for uninsured elderly patients needing hospital service were to spend their savings, rely on funding from their children, seek welfare (and the social stigma this carried), hope for charity from the hospitals or avoid care altogether."

To double-check this assertion, we turned to a study by the Social Security Administration known as the Survey of the Aged.

The survey was taken in 1963, and its findings were published in 1964 -- the "early '60s" Paul is talking about. One downside of the data is that it only looks at Americans 65 and older. So it doesn't give a full picture of how the health care system functioned in the early 1960s. However, as we’ll discuss later, senior citizens are a key to analyzing the state of American health care, since their health needs were, and remain, more acute than the overall population's.

Overall, the study found that "the complex task of paying for necessary health services and providing adequate insurance for non-budgetable expenses remains beyond the economic capabilities of most aged persons."

In all, slightly more than half of Americans 65 and older had health insurance at the end of 1962. That works out to 64 percent of couples, 49 percent of un-married women and 37 percent of un-married men.

"And what they had was terrible insurance -- it didn’t do much to cover them," said
Dorothy Pechman Rice, a retired professor at the University of California at San Francisco who served as director of the National Center for Health Statistics from 1976 to 1982.

You make no sense. 'For those willing to work and live at home right now can afford college.' This is a BS point. College is expensive, and the middle class and poor cannot afford it, because they can't afford it, is the reason they don't go. It's not because they don't work, it's because it's too expensive, and no this is not because of the government either.

 

... and yet another lie narrative in print for all to see. Tell us all more about people in the U.S. ever "dying in the streets" due to not getting health care. Didn't happen. The only truths are: People get old. People die. Them's the breaks.

And speaking of partisan "think tank" bunk. To restate, the U.S. healthcare system was better pre Medicare and other government meddling in it. Without such, we certainly wouldn't have the crisis in healthcare we have today. Anything government touches turns to ****, sometimes quickly, sometimes over time, but always ****. This is why in the U.S. we have prospered on a world historical scale as a limited government model, the Constitutional Republic.

But do cite to more Complex propaganda in favor of greater Complex power grabs. That's truly convincing.

1. A reasonable college education via local state sources remains completely affordable, especially when earned part time while working and living at home with parents. Especially if augmented by merit based school or state financial aid as linked (and of course utterly ignored). What's not affordable is the 4-8 year fantasy of extended childhood that gov-edu sells as "elite" or superior when that's just another gov-edu LIE.

2. You utterly ignore my accurate claims about trade school and the need for more of that and less singer-songwriters and baristas with super expensive junk degrees in hand.

3. And outrageous postsecondary educational expense is not due to government? Take a look at spiraling costs since government got illegitimately involved in student loan guarantees then get back to us with more hokum. As in healthcare, government is THE main factor in spiraling costs of educational product.

 

Lmao you completely ignored the facts on pre-1965 healthcare without medicare and medicaid and how half of seniors were uninsured lol. Want some more facts? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193636/

More than 70 percent of the population had some form of hospital insurance by 1965 (though less than one-half of the elderly population did), 67 percent had surgical insurance, and there was a growing market for major medical insurance (Health Insurance Institute, 1980). But few were insured for primary or out-of-hospital care. Of the members of the general population who reported they had “pains in the heart,” 25 percent did not see a physician (Andersen and Anderson, 1967).

The elderly were particularly hard hit. The classic example of the proposed Medicare beneficiary was the elderly school-teacher, blameless after a career of work. “I am one of your old retired teachers that has been forgotten,” went one story in congressional hearings in 1959:

I am 80 years old and for 10 years I have been living on a bare nothing, two meals a day, one egg, a soup, because I want to be independent.

I am of Scotch ancestry, my father fought in the Civil War to the end of the war, therefore, I have it in my blood to be independent and my dignity would not let me go down and be on welfare.

And I worked so hard that I have pernicious anemia, $9.95 for a little bottle of liquid for shots, wholesale, I couldn't pay for it (Subcommittee on Problems of the Aged and Aging of the Committee of Labor and Public Welfare, 1959; Corning, 1969).

You completely ignore the negative externalities that come with capitalism in healthcare and education. If you don't have the money, you will not get care, if you don't get care you can die. If you don't have a college degree these days, you will not get a job. Simple. I am not against trade schools, but going to a trade school is not going to get you a degree. A degree is a virtually a necessity in order to get in the good paying job market.

 

More facts.

Yet, as sociologist Michael Harrington (1962) demonstrated eloquently in his own best-seller in 1962, the highest mass standard of living in the world was definitely not shared by all. There was “another America”: 40 to 50 million citizens who were poor, who lacked adequate medical care, and who were “socially invisible” to the majority of the population. Within this poverty-stricken group were more than 8 million of the 18 million Americans who were 65 years of age and over, suffering from a “downward spiral” of sickness and isolation. And although there were half a million Americans in nursing homes, less than 60 percent of the homes were considered acceptable (Harrington, 1962). Medicare was formed in a society with idealistic expectations of wealth for all—at least for all of those who “deserved” it—yet increasingly isolated its minorities and its poor.

 

And you are ignoring the VASTLY reduced costs before the government got involved. Not surprised.

None of the above is true, other than the fact that one day we all die. A degree is only a necessity to get onto the "elite" white collar career track. My fulltime degree cost all of $30,000, all expenses included, at an elite college in the 80s. Today, after decades of benign inflation climate, and after decades of student loan-fueled and other edu-scam BLOAT, that 30k covers only about 2/3 of one year's tuition. The private sector didn't do that, government did. But sure, let's add MORE government boondoggle into healthcare and education, that's the ticket.

Personally, I don't want people who couldn't and can't cut it in the competitive private sector determining my life or the lives of other SUPERIOR people in the private sector with a history of SUPERIOR results. If you want more of that incompetence, waste, graft and corruption, it's your funeral.

 

Your social capital is worthless if it's at odds with itself (ie, divided). Your resources cannot be pragmatically employed (as in the Nordic lands) when a significant sector is absorbing them without any return (which has not happened in Scandinavia .. at least until they started importing large numbers of people who remain on welfare). And homogeneity is actually VERY important to the success of such policies. Look into it.

PS: I speak as a citizen of a Social Democracy.

 

Yes, because EVERYONE WAS ON THE SAME PAGE, and EVERYONE PULLED THEIR WEIGHT. That's what happens when you have a unified culture. You can all agree on a better way, and be confident that everyone is going to do their bit to see it happen.

 

Nice job completely ignoring the facts. The costs were still so expensive that virtually half of seniors were uninsured. What part of this do you not get. In the private system of healthcare and education, you get more negative externalities. The government did not make college tuition expensive. Once again we have one of the most private education systems. Even if your theory that if we moved to an even more private education system would be better and low costing, students would still not be able to go because many will still not be able to afford it. In countries with free college tuition everyone is guaranteed education and don't have to pay anything. Just the increase in the military budget alone in Trump's presidency would pay for free college and then some. Anyway agree to disagree.

 

Show me some facts. Would like to see. We in the US have more than enough resources and people to pull this off. Explain to me how homogenouity is important to the success of these policies. Population size is also another right wing fallacy. A larger population means more people to be provided but also means there are more people capable of funding these benefits which balances everything out.

 

Doesn’t hurt me. There is no such thing as democratic socialism.

 

No country in Europe is Democratic Socialist. No one on the left was calling these countries some socialist, marxist-leninist paradise. They are social democracies, capitalist but with strong social safety nets and access to universal healthcare and education.

 

Kudos for admitting these countries are capitalist but there is no such thing as social democracy.....these countries have much smaller populations than the US and hardly comparable.

 

The "social does not stand for "socialism". You have no idea what you're talking about. What you're saying is that "social democracy" is just another term for "democratic socialism". Wrong. They are entirely different. In our modern world, "democracy" is used to identify a system in which the public votes for representatives in a capitalist economic system. A "social" democracy adds to socially "sensitive" or "beneficial" things to that system, like social programs that "soften" the harsh effects of capitalism, and regulating policies like "robust" taxation and price controls, retirement programs, state-funded education through college, state-owned banking systems, welfare, etc.

"Democratic socialism" seeks to CHANGE the economy to a socialist one, unlike social democracy. It begins with electing advocates and proponents to political office as necessary so they can (hopefully) make changes that move the economy toward socialism and gradually, eventually end private ownership of business and private profits from such business ownership.

 

Thanks but again that population point is another right wing myth. Yes because the US has more people, more people are to be provided, but there are more people capable of funding these social programs so it all balances out.

 

Thank you !

 

I'm 100% for free university education. BUT, only for vocational courses which lead directly to well paid jobs for life. No Humanities or Arts should ever be publicly funded, as these are essentially recreational courses (they do not lead directly to well paid jobs for life), and therefore a luxury. And of course, eligibility for free university education must be 100% academic, and exactly the same criteria for all. It must be equitable in that sense, with no concessions made for skin colour, sporting ability, or any other such discriminatory nonsense.

 

Homogeneity is essential because it means everyone is on the same page, and expects to do their bit. America has nothing like the level of cohesion (of culture and cultural expectations of the self) needed to pull it off.

Your head count is only useful when at least 90% of them are motivated to work together (towards a common end). If you have any more than a total of about 10% of able bodied adults not fully participating in the building of nation via the work of their hands, you will end up with half a nation working to support the other half, and increasing the divisions which lead to that in the first place.

 

This is a farce and you know it. Anyway Americans are left wing on the issues. If these policies are implemented there will certainly be unified culture of protecting these social programs, as everyone will see a benefit.