What A Sustainable Health Care System In The U.S. Might Look Like

The difference is that your auto insurance company can cancel your policy if you have demonstrated your inability to be a responsible driver. Medicaid or Medicare cannot do the same.

 

For good reason

Bottom line and as I have said more than once - if the government is responsible for your health care costs they suddenly develop an intense interest in reducing those costs. Why do you think Australia was the first country in the world to mandate seat belts? We have also mandated reversing cameras to cut down on child deaths, pool fences because at the time we had the highest level of pool drownings in the world. Chinese well off parents import baby formulae from us because we Kate one of the highest standard in the world. We have public health ads and public health campaigns etc

 

I know, you went full fascist during COVID, as well.

You will learn what all learn in time...unsustainable things don't last.

 

But you believe that a "sustainable health care system" requires allowing Medicaid and Medicare to boot people based on their lifestyle choices?

 

No. I believe the only sustainable system is one which spends its resources on keeping people healthy instead of indirectly encouraging people to maintain incredibly poor health habits.

Imagine how people might drive if they knew that the government would be picking up the tab for any and all at-fault accidents [even if they were drunker than hell or high as a kite]. This is how the health care system is designed. It doesn't work.

Unless you make people responsible for their life choices, an alarming percentage of people will continue to act like irresponsible eight year old's. Look at any town in America and you can see tens of thousands of ticking time bombs walking down the streets.

 

You’re right that it’s not socialism.
You’re wrong that socialism is "government taking over the means of production”. It’s not. That was a mistake made by early attempts at creating socialism.
Our society is as far from “communism” as an iceberg is from the desert. Communism is stateless, classless, moneyless society resulting from the maturing of socialism after a few hundred years.

You might want to watch this 29-minute video. It will offer you an understanding of what I said and more.

 

No, it won't help anyone understand anything, because Wolff is a socialist know-nothing. One proof of that is in your sig line:

“Moving to a cooperatively organized enterprise is one of the best ways to really do something about unequal distribution of wealth.” - Richard D. Wolff

That is just stupid, ahistorical, illogical, anti-economic garbage because moving to a cooperatively organized enterprise does nothing whatever to address the real problem and source of the excessively unequal distribution of wealth: PRIVILEGE. Has the Mondragon cooperative in Spain -- effectively the world's only example of a large-scale, successful, cooperatively organized enterprise -- done anything about the unequal distribution of wealth in Spain? Of course not. Because the problem is not private ownership of producer goods or the employer-employee relationship. It is private ownership of land, and the debt-money system that empowers private commercial banksters to issue and charge interest on the nation's money supply, and the IP monopolies that make products cost an order of magnitude more to buy than to produce. Marx was just flat wrong, and the sooner his stupid, anti-economic garbage is consigned to the trash heap of intellectual history, the better.

 

Thank you. I'm always willing to learn someone else's perspective.

I think that it's also important that what we're seeing in the world today, in the States and elsewhere, are new, mutated forms of the old political templates. Today, what I think we're seeing emerge are "Neo-Socialism" (a kind of 'Socialism-lite'), and, "Neo-Capitalism" (which is being practiced in China and Russia).

 

No. First, lets get some definitions straight. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production: producer goods (which classical economics called, "capital") and natural resources ("land"). Socialism is collective ownership thereof.

Along with most of the other states of the XSSR, Russia switched from socialism to capitalism in the early 1990s by privatizing both land and capital, with results that, in Dr. Strangelove's delicious phrase, "must be all too obvious at this moment": it became a fascist oligarchy, like pretty much every capitalist country that does not have a functioning, democratically accountable political system.

But China is not capitalist because when it abandoned socialism starting with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, it instead took the path to geoism (private ownership of producer goods, public ownership of natural resources) roughly on the Hong Kong model. China's implementation of its geoist reforms has been very imperfect, with a strong legacy of socialist corruption combined with Western banksters' insistence that it adopt the debt money system to enable massive bankster parasitism. But the results speak for themselves: China's geoist -- NOT CAPITALIST -- reform has achieved the greatest economic miracle in the history of the world.

The contrasting results of these two systems replacing socialism could not be more stark, and were actually foreshadowed in an open letter to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, signed by dozens of eminent Western economists including four (count 'em, four) Nobel laureates, which strongly urged Gorbachev to retain land, specifically, in public ownership when moving to a market economy:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Open_letter_to_Mikhail_Gorbachev_(1990)

But the crooked Yeltsin faction of aspiring greedy, privileged parasites -- abetted by Harvard-based Western neoclassical economic advisors like Jeffery Sachs, and under pressure from Western (especially Wall Street) banksters -- demanded full privatization of natural resources, and the warning from the honest and competent economists was ignored. If you have not read this letter, you cannot claim to be informed on economic topics. If you do not agree with it, you cannot claim to be interested in genuine solutions to refractory economic problems.

 

Socialism has followed a path of development. It is not and never has taken, a path of wandering and weaving through blind experiments and/or mutations. That video will explain this to you.

 

In actual implementation, it has been little else but blind -- and ridiculous -- experiments and mutations. China's socialist Great Leap Forward was a blind experiment that killed tens of millions of people. Par for the socialist course.

That video, like everything else from Marxists like Richard Wolff, is anti-economic trash.

 

The actual health care industry is aimed to maximize profits, isn't it? Therefore this industry has no reason to offer regular check-ups. A hospital will earn more with a fully developed cancer than with small. The workers normally aren't well off and they will have to spend a great part of their income to visit a doctor - deductibles, copays, OOP and so on.

Check-ups must (must(!!) be free of charge and the access has to be easy.

Imagine all developed countries have been able to organize a socialized health care system and the normal or poor people feel as responsible as the well-off for their health - because health is needed to work to pay the bills - i's that easy!

 

Nonsense. The US government is responsible for the majority of health care costs, and its ONLY interest is in robbing working people of their wages and shoveling the money -- trillions of dollars -- into the pockets of the medico-rentier complex. Why else would its Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans' care programs pay greedy, evil drug companies two to three orders of magnitude more for drugs than their cost of production?

 

The worst health habit is being dependent on drugs that are under patents. There's a reason greedy, evil US drug companies spend more on marketing than they do on research and manufacturing combined.

How many of them are addicted to opiates because it was ASTRONOMICALLY PROFITABLE for greedy, evil drug patent monopolists to get them addicted?

You need to shake hands with the fact that the pharmaceutical industry and its drug patent monopoly stealing system have MURDERED millions of Americans FOR MONEY.

 

You're right. Nobody shoulf be billed having check-ups.

It works. All over the world. For Americans call it freedom they think it's correct to bill women giving birth or bill >1.000$.

You don't choose a life. You live one.

 

Ain't that the truth. The US government grants rich, greedy, evil corporations enforced monopoly privileges that increase the cost of health care by an order of magnitude, then tells its citizens, "Pay for your own health care in the free market."

 

Health care costs will raise always more than the normal inflation, that's the way it's designed. And this will arise pretty ugly problems in the near future. Health care is getting the privilieg of millionaires. It's a pity that only millionaires have the chance of getting president, so this problem will be unsolved as long as possible, whether it's a blue or red president.

 

The US "healthcare system" (whatever that is) works quite well. In the last ten years I have had triple bypass heart surgery (and implantation of a pacemaker) and my wife spent two years with her doctors fighting and defeating cancer. Our employment insurance handled it all quite well. We're doing fine and prospering.

And we're just mainstream folks.

 

Well, in devloped countries bypasses are routine, even in such socialist countries like Denmark or Germany. And thank God your wife was able to see a doctor soon enough to detect the cancer early enough, an privilege the normal MCD-employee doesnt have.

What would impress me: How much money did you have to pay out of pocket, for your and your wife's treatment?

 

There were a few charges, but essentially insignificant. The total charge for my bypass was almost $500,000, but my employer insurance handled it. Both my wife and I knew early on that good medical coverage from any employer would be essential in our lives, so we worked hard to qualify to get jobs which met those requirements.

 

You consider Denmark and Germany as socialist countries?

 

Just an anecdote: When I was stationed in Germany in the US Army, my wife worked on the economy. We received "Kindergeld" each month because we had our young son with us. I always thought it odd that we would get a monthly stipend for an American child that wasn't, an never would be German. I thought the whole idea of "Kindergeld" was to encourage Germans to have children. (Germans consider population as a natural resource and encourage its increase.) But what the heck... we ate out a few times a month on it and enjoyed it.

 

No. In Denmark each employee gets at least 22$/hour, in Switzerland 23$ (in 2020, since then wages did rise minimum 5%, they get 30 days paid vacation plus the sick days they need (paid of course). That must be socialist I am told regularly.

And a socialized healthcare system that covers even people living on minimum wage 100% without OOPs, decutible, and co-pays must be communism in it's highest perfection.

 

OK an interesting anecdote, and I have a few from when I was stationed in Germany while in the Army. Probably shouldn't mention them however.

 

Do you consider Denmark and Germany socialist countries? I don't think they are covered "100% without OOPs, decutible, and co-pays" in those countries.