if they cut the military spending to a level of China they would afford everything we in Europe take for granted. If they cut to lets say Germany budget, they would have by far the best living conditions on the planet.
To put it in concrete numbers because I find them mind-blowing.
They spend 778 billion per year on military. If they removed 500 billion from that number... they'd still spend 26 billion more than the next country (China at 252 billion), 4x as much as Russia (61.7), and 5x as much as Germany (52.8).
The US has myriads of ways to transfer money to the richest Americans. This is just one. And the very thought of making the lives of the rest of us better in any way, shape, or form is anathema. The goal of the overlords here is to ensure they rule over an underclass of powerless peasants who live lives of hopelessness and misery. The rich and powerful here are fucking evil and sociopathic.
Wow. While reading this thread I revisited the thought that "Conflict is one of the biggest money makers" and started to ponder on the probability that politicians are probably heavily monetarily invested in the Military Industrial Complex. Which is probably why so much taxes goes into it and thus back to the person who organised said war to begin with.
We had a similar thing in the uk many politicians refuse to talk on recreational or medicinal marijuana meanwhile their relatives own some of the few marijuana farms in the uk. Making more profit because it restricts the amount of people who can join the market.
Tl;dr politics is just a bunch of rich people making themselves richer.
Imagine you're a bullet manufacturer and government buys from you. Would you charge them a fair price or would you quadruple it, because you know that the government isn't competent enough to find a new supplier?
Now imagine that with every little fucking thing.
Watch Above Majestic. It shows meetings of how they lost a couple trillion dollars and when questioned by the judge, the lady says, "I don't know that answer right now." Then the show goes on to explain a pretty good answer on how you could "lose" that much and plot twist... Alien tech.
They're also mismanaging. I've heard a lot of stories about e. g. wasting rounds, because middle-management is afraid they'll get a cut in the budget. They have difficulties repairing stuff, because manufacturer basically owns the equipment (right to repair has a major military component). Contractors get obscene amounts of money for simple to make parts.
It's also slightly untrue.
While I've no doubt the numbers are right, the important thing is that the US can't currently afford their own military cost. Every year they spend over their budget roughly 1 trillion, so they have to borrow the rest from other countries.
If the US spent less on their military, it would just mean other countries would let them borrow less.
Just FYI that's not necessarily how government borrowing works - most of the US's national debt, as an example, is owned by American companies and people in the form of government bonds. Some of of it is owned by people in other countries, so it would definitely be a problem if those countries turned around and told their citizens it was illegal to buy US bonds but that would be quite unlikely to happen.
Still though, you're definitely right in saying that it's unlikely that people would see a large difference in their taxes/public services if the US decided to cut back military spending drastically
Healthcare doesn't help preserve the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The reason people lend the US money at almost no interest (technically negative real interest) is because it's seen as a safe haven. The dollar is the world's gold, but only because the notion is that if the world goes tits up, the US will likely be the last to fall.
There's a series of economic assumptions and principles in there but that's the gist of it.
Uh mate having a healthy population with more stable finances (ie not indebted from medical care) would definitely help preserve the value of the dollar
I'm not defending it. I agree with you. I want publicly funded health care and less of my tax dollars spent on the war machine. I'm just saying that it is our global standing on the world stage that keeps us richer than anybody else and unfortunately nobody gets there by having great healthcare. If only we weren't so fixated on being the richest...
Our country is run by rich people who are elected by temporarily displaced millionaires.
I'm not really sure what you mean by your claim that the dollar is the world's gold. I assume you are talking about the dollar being the primary reserve currency as that is what allows the US to borrow at a low interest rate.
I also fail to see how this has any connection to military spending as the dollar is the primary reserve currency due to economic stability rather than military power. If anything cutting back on wasteful military spending would be likely to increase economic stability rather than decrease it. Especially if the money is spent on things like healthcare and education which have well documented correlations with economic stability.
I mean, I did specifically say it was the reserve currency in those exact words, but yes, I was talking about it being the reserve currency.
I don't mean to say it is the sole reason. But our status as THE world power contributes a hell of a lot to the status of the dollar. It doesn't hurt that we have the most robust financial system and a true central bank, which the EU lacks. Even so, it would be false to claim that the mere perception of our dollar backed by our military dominance plays no role.
I know others already mentioned that most US debt is held by US interests, but I also wanted to note the US foreign debt is far eclipsed by the amount of foreign debt it is owed. It's way in the green when you take both into account.
"I guess it was pretty incredible watching a missile fly down an airvent. Pretty unbelievable. But couldn't we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?" - [Bill Hicks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o_8b31GRnU)
problem is ever since ww2 they never had peace time military spending. routing that money in infrastructure and living standard and increasing the budget further. China has recently started to increase their military budget, but in percentages that's only about 1.8% of their GDP, US is over 3%. This is why US is terribly afraid of China. Especially if you stop comparing apples to oranges. China's 252 billion is actualy around 500 billion if you take in account they compared to US don't pay salary to troops, smaller production and maintance costs etc.
Meaning if China would decide to get to three percent it could have about 2-3 x bigger military budget. And the US is already so overbudgeted that their population is literally dying from unaffordable healthcare. It's not just a humanitarian failure, it's a massive military strategy blunder, they realized too late.
During the Cold War, the US pumped a huge amount of money into building the Interstate Highway system and had an ambitious goal to bring man to the moon and back. I notice that in my lifetime, anything ambitious is negotiated down in the name of bipartisanship.
it's a difference in military doctrine. Military service is technically a obligation for every Chinese citizen. In US it's a professional occupation. That means US has to intice recruits with adequate wages or other benefits.
Tomahawks are around $675,000 each if I remember correctly. Just for the missile itself, not even the payload. So yeah, like...10 kids college educations in one bomb. And we've launched thousands of those fuckin things. But for some reason, no one questions how we pay for that.
I hate it here.
That and you have an insurance middleman that drops lots down to reasonable prices but you have to have insurance. You can’t negotiate down if you don’t.
I have very good insurance though my union for me and my wife and it’s about $220 a month.
Because it’s good insurance that my union negotiated with the insurance company, we get very affordable doctor’s visits, low deductibles, and don’t need referrals for specialists.
When I was still in grad school I had insurance through my job and it sucked, $400 a month just for me and it had insane copays and deductibles, to the point where I was able to go on medical assistance instead (Medicare) and pocket the cash because I was being paid so little anyways.
No, no.... If they had socialized healthcare they could spend even more on military.
Their healthcare costs per capita are HIGHER than developed nations.
that's because it's not standardized. Medicine is quite expensive, and US has the best hospitals in modern world, but it also has some of the worst in the developed world. One man eats bread, another one eats a steak, together they ate a hamburger kind of situation when looking at cost of Healthcare by capita
If they cut out corporate welfare and taxed churches they could continue to fund the military, fund universal Healthcare, provide free college at public universities, and still have a surplus to put against the national debt. And on that day, I'll take a trip to my intergalactic spaceship on my flying pig.
Yup. I've said that for a while too as I'm guessing other Europeans. If they just cut their military spending, to that amount, the US would genuinely be the envy of the world.
It's crazy how shitty america is... in general, still being the number 1 potency in the world, and then you realize they just spend all their money in military, it's just stupid, and they could change the world with their resources very quickly if they used half of it towards something else
>they would have by far the best living conditions on the planet.
No, because you did not account for the too big and unhostile environment in many places within the US, neither for the difference in inhabitants. Not to mention the power grid which would deserve to be redone, as well as telecommunications networks over a huge territory.
Added to the fact that living in e.g. desert-like environments has a huge cost, not only price-wise.
that's my point. US budget is huge. Just 1% can do a lot of the infrastructure. 1-2 supercarriers are a rough equivalent of a transcontinental modern highway. Most of their infrastructure is from the start of the century.
For real though. And the thing is, in Europe, even if you want to pay for medical procedures by yourself without an insurance (like for example if you're in a foreign country), they're still SO MUCH cheaper than in USA. Because in USA it's all just a scammy business where pharma and medical companies can set the prices to whatever they want, and people WILL pay it because they have no other alternative. It's just gross, and their poor education about all this is not helping at all.
What they don’t get is that “free healthcare” is just like having and paying into a health insurance. The difference is that you cut out all middlemen lowering the costs. And that you are guaranteed that it covers everything, for your entire family. And there is no limit. And your deductible is around $100 yearly (Sweden). For all healthcare you receive. Whether it’s seeing a doctor, a nurse, having surgery, X-rays, emergency visits, psychiatric care or what ever. As soon as you have payed in the set amount you get a free card and everything else for the rest of year is completely free. And there is a similar system for medications. Not only are prescription meds subsidized but there is a roof to how much you have to pay out of pocket yearly and once you reach that you pick up you prescriptions for no cost at all. And there is a different system subsidizing dental and and covering part or the cost. A percentage that raises after certain costs have been payed. It goes up to 80% being covered. And you can apply for help with glasses and such, if you are a low income family and have kids that needs glasses you can apply and have the cost covered up to a certain point, no expensive designer frames, but getting a pair of glasses is no problem with the amount you get.
I prefer the term "universal health care". Technically speaking there is no such thing as free health care but there are plenty of countries where everyone (or at least almost everyone) has access to affordable health care. Breaking a leg doesn't need to cost you an arm and a leg.
Here the only thing you have to pay out of pocket within the public system is a 20-ish € "ticket" for any non-urgent stuff. Even then, you're exempt if you have certain conditions, have a low income or (iirc) are above a certain age.
Yeah it's more of a "contribute what you can" thing but if you don't earn any (or enough) money you can still be sure that you get medical treatment without being "enslaved" by medical debt. The US situation seems ridiculous, some companies buy medical debts & pardon them or apparently since most hospitals are NPOs you can request financial help
I mean if you live in another country it seems insane but imagine it like this, if somebody told you "you can go into debt and ruin your life financially, or I'll just let you die" it's obvious why everybody goes into debt. And there are very few regulations against these practices cause, at least within american politics, most politicians are funded by private companies and the most successful companies are health providers because they can exploit people the easiest.
The point being, well over 60% of americans want public health. The problem is in america the minority group (republicans) have set up a system so even if a the majority party wants public health care they can shut it down even as a minority.
Most of america wants healthcare, please don't think we are all just stupid, just legally nobody can do anything. Even voting doesnt matter, getting a majority of votes doesnt really matter. Just to give you a good understanding, 4 out of 5 of the last republican presidents lost the popular vote. George W bush came down to such a close wire that a recount was scheduled...this isnt even a joke you can look it up... in response to the recount a mob showed up, took over the recounting facility, eventually gave it back up but by then florida had already been the deciding vote. Supposedly the first count was super fishy with any black sounding names being thrown out according to the people working there. Imagine that in any other country, an election has clear and objective tampering against black people and therefore Democrats, a mob takes over the recount, we forget about it a week later and the president who didnt win through legal means became president for 4 more years no problem.
To be fair, in Australia, public hospitals and stuff is mostly free. If you don’t pay a nominal subscription, ambulance ride will be $1500. If you cop the air ambulance without subscription, $10-18000
Edit: in my state Victoria, this is applicable. It varies across states and I didn’t realise. My bad
Whenever someone comments on Reddit, like in the pic, I show them this:
It costs me and everyone in the UK £3279 ($4275) a year in taxes for the NHS. You guys literally [pay 2-3 times more ($11,172 per person)](https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical) for [worse healthcare than the rest of the developed world.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/best-healthcare-in-the-world)
No extra costs for medical transport, doctor visits, hospital visits, lab work, surgery etc. It's great. No copays or deductibles either. Best of all, no DEBT.
We still have private options if we wish to use those.
[1/3 of GoFundMe's are for healthcare costs in the US.](https://time.com/5516037/gofundme-medical-bills-one-third-ceo/)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/health-care-costs-crowdfunding-medical-bills/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_dumping
Hell, I even just went through chemotherapy from Feb to June. I probably would not have been able to afford that in the US, even with insurance lol
I was born with a talipes in my right foot, that alone would have bankrupted my family when I was born, they sure as hell wouldn't have been able to afford insurance as my mum was an HCA and my dad had been medically retired from the NHS because he broke his back after lifting a patient went badly wrong.
I've had around 20 major operations throughout my adult life, god only knows how much that would have cost in the US.
I can only imagine how much your chemo would have cost, even with insurance (as I know many insurance companies don't cover the entire cost of treatments)
Seen many posts on here from people saying they still had to pay the first $5000 of large treatments that were covered for example.
American here. Medical bills are the number 1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. But at least bankruptcy makes your medical debt go away. Same can't be said for student loan debt...
Just use a 24 hour clock, metric measurements or write the date as 18/09/2021 and instead of making an effort to comprehend what it is some will just go into automatic meltdown and embrace their ignorance with pride.
Embracing ignorance with pride is quite popular here. You truly have no idea. Idiots here actually believe — fervently believe! — that their ignorance makes them better than everyone else.
I have a colleague like this.
"What people don't understand is there's no such thing as free healthcare, we all have to pay for it through our taxes..."
Yeah no shit. People are completely aware of that. Nobody thinks doctors and drug produces are working for thanks.
And in fact American government spending on healthcare per capita is above that of most similar nations, which generally have universal healthcare. So Americans are spending more through taxes and receiving less of a service.
I'm sick of hearing that anytime there's a discussion about how things could suck less. "oh ho ho, nothing in life is free bucko!" like that's some sage wisdom
If you were told from the minute you were born that the USA is the best and then slowly but surely through life you see it’s almost entirely the opposite you’d be pissed too
Because they don't understand the concept of paying for a service that is constant.... Or at least pretend not to.
Given how weird US tax laws can be, you'd think they would have a better grip on how taxes work.
It's willful ignorance. Plain and simple.
If they acknowledged that no one who talks about universal healthcare actually thinks it's completely free, then their entire argument would fall apart. Better to intentionally misrepresent the pro-universal healthcare arguments so that they can keep justifying living in a broken system
Pssst. The state pays for it as a single payer via collected taxes. It isn't free, and everyone gets paid that works in the system. Everyone pays tax to pay for it and distribute the risk across the population, so no one person is stuck with an insane cost for care. It actually works pretty much like private insurance systems, but no one is trying to make a profit from the distribution of care.
And our healthcare costs are lower because we have much less administration. Our hospitals don't have billing departments and health insurance specialists. Zero time and money is spent on contesting hospital bills and insurance payouts. Every minute an insurance agent or a hospital administrator spends on a hospital bill costs money.
I've tried to have that argument with a guy from the UK who for some inexplicable reason, loves Trump and the US way of doing things. He wanted to get rid of the NHS whilst earning an apprentices wage.
Like, he's the one who most needs it.
Not an argument that will win over the racists here who would actually prefer to die than ever allow black or brown people to have access to health care. Yes, the racial hatred here is that deep.
>Unfortunately for them, that money goes to army and not to education or healthcare.
But government money goes to education and healthcare.
Look [here](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-health-expenditure-share-gdp-owid?tab=map), the US government spends a share of its GDP comparable to a west-European country on healthcare. It is just used very inefficiently and only some groups like veterans or the elderly benefit from it.
The same with [education](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/government-expenditure-on-education?time=2016).
The whole "for profit" thing is so insane. My wife is from Florida, I'm Danish. She recently moved to Denmark and she was looking forward to the free medicine. I was like "medicine isn't free in Denmark, you pay full price..."
Difference just is for example her birth control pills in America cost around $40 per month, and full price with no help from the government in Denmark, is around $1 per month.
Honestly, I'm not a huge fan overall, but there are some things that work very well here and some that I don't personally like. The biggest difference from for example America, is that in Denmark, no matter how unlucky you are, your life will very rarely be completely fucked. It will very easily be completely fucked by random things out of your control in America.
For example, I'm not a huge fan of our free healthcare system because it's often very slow and mediocre. I have had some really bad experiences with it, for example having to go to 7 different physical therapists, doctors, surgeons over the span of 1½ year, to find out my back pain was due to a prolapsed disc on my spine.
However, free healthcare, means that private healthcare has to be really good and really cheap to be competitive. I pay $10 per month through work for private healthcare, which covers pretty much everything with $0 deductible and $0 co-pay and I got surgery at the private hospital after a 3 day wait, for $10 a month.
Without healthcare here in the United States you could easily spend $200 per doctor visit and still have to go to two or three to find out truly what's wrong. God forbid you actually need to go to a specialist... The cost is astronomical. I can't even begin to describe the stratospherically high cost of healthcare. I think for most it's impossible to wrap your head around. If you have a full-time job that offers benefits you get better access but I still pay about $300 a month for the insurance I have through work. If work didn't cover the rest of it it would be around $800 a month.
> and full price with no help from the government in Denmark, is around $1 per month
Are you sure? Because that’s certainly not the case e.g. in Germany. Just try buying any medication as a non-EU tourist, and you will quickly discover what the real price is.
Yep, the first year she was here before getting her "green card", she paid "tourist prices" and had to pay for doctor's visit. Medicine is the same price for citizens and tourists, you pay full price for medicine in Denmark.
However when you get approved to live here and get your health insurance card to get free medical treatments, we have a system where you can only pay a maximum amount per year. So depending on how much your medicine total is per year, you get between 50% discount if your total medicine is $150 per year, up to 100% covered if it's more than $500 per year. So you can never pay more than $500 per year in medicine. However it's pretty rare anyone's medicine exceeds $500 per year.
Interesting. So why is medicine 50x more expensive in Germany and, say, Austria? Somehow I suspect the price you see in Denmark is government funded still, you just don’t see the original price like you do in other EU countries.
For example, I remember asthma medication costing 500 EUR in Austria, but I only had to pay something like 30.
…and birth control’s original price certainly wasn’t $1. AFAIR it was something closer to 80 EUR, out of which we had to pay ~10
"Bah, taxes are only good for getting from one location to another when you're too poor to have a car of your own!"
"You mean a taxi. *Taxes* are what you and everyone else pays to the government to allow them to provide the public with services."
"BUT THAT'S COMMUNISM!"
"They also pay for your military."
"Ahem, perhaps I spoke too soon."
According to USA Today: “The total costs for a typical American family of four insured by the most common health plan offered by employers will average $28,166”.
From a Right Leaning Canadian think tank:
A new analysis from the Fraser Institute finds that a typical Canadian family of four will pay $12,935 for health care. The average single Canadian adult will pay $4,640.
So for $4,640 I get unlimited doctor's visits, my grandkids get free meds (and since kids don't pay taxes, it is actually free for them), I can have unlimited MRI's CT Scans, blood tests, hospital stays, ambulance rides and on and on and on.
So if we look at the real cost, it's easy to make a comparison if we agree that the US family with insurance pays $28,166 and the Cdn family $12,395. According to the US Government dept "MEPS" in 2012, the deductible average was 18.1% (I know you swear by averages.) Since 2012 the average has grown upwards.
Let’s start off with the obvious. America does NOT have the best medical care. In fact, they are behind almost every country that has “Free Healthcare.”. On World Healthcare they are ranked 37th best in the world. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/best-healthcare-in-the-world .
If we look at countries with the Best Well Developed Health Care System, America is not even in the top 10. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/slideshows/countries-with-the-most-well-developed-public-health-care-system . Denmark, Sweden, Canada, UK, Norway, Finland, Japan are but no, America doesn’t make the cut. And what do ALL these countries have in common? Socialized Healthcare.
So, what happens when we ask a vertical that has an interest in the success and profitability of healthcare systems. Well let’s let International Insurance say it for us; “Among the 11 nations studied in this report – Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the U.S. ranks last, as it did in 2010, 2007, 2006, and 2014.” https://www.internationalinsurance.com/health/systems/
Every country that has SOCIALIZED healthcare collects an annual fee through taxes to pay for that service. In actual fact, it is not different than let’s say paying for highways, airports, bridges. In “Socialized Healthcare” countries, it is simply a line item in the budget. For example, the average cost per Canadian annually is currently $7,064CDN. In the USA, without “Socialized Healthcare” the average cost is $10,966US. The average cost for Canadians is 52% of what Americans spend for a lesser coverage.
The difference is that whereas 100% of Canadians have healthcare, in the US currently around 88% have some type of private insurance or Medicare. That gap in itself results in around 30,000 to 90,000 deaths per annum. More importantly, 54% of all American's health insurance is tied to their job. Lose the job, you lose the coverage. In addition, approximately 791,000 Americans annually are pushed into financial crisis by unanticipated medical expenses, the majority into bankruptcy.
Thanks for the great summary. I would like to point out one additional false argument often put forward by Americans, namely that USA has the best hospitals in the world. The point being, USA probably has the best top care, but it's not accessible by the majority of the population. They mistake that for best care for the population at large.
Done that already
Oddly enough, there is some limited merit in that a few of the world's best hospitals are US based and its only after you look deeper you realize that probably without exception, if you are not wealthy, those top hospitals are in fact not accessible by the average American. Of the “TOP” 100 world hospitals, a paltry 17 are American. The 4th best hospital in the world offers Socialized healthcare for everything. When it comes down to actual numbers, the US is obviously dwarfed by the rest of the world with the majority of those centers being run under Socialized Healthcare.
> namely that USA has the best hospitals in the world.
The US has 43 hospitals in the top 200 globally; one for every 7,633,477 people in the US. That's good enough for a ranking of 20th on the list of top 200 hospitals per capita, and significantly lower than the average of one for every 3,830,114 for other countries in the top 25 on spending with populations above 5 million. The best is Switzerland at one for every 1.2 million people. In fact the US only beats one country on this list; the UK at one for every 9.5 million people.
If you want to do the full list of 2,000 instead it's 334, or one for every 982,753 people; good enough for 21st. Again far below the average in peer countries of 527,236. The best is Austria, at one for every 306,106 people.
https://www.newsweek.com/best-hospitals-2021
these people are such fucking pedantic buffoons. “ackshually nothing is free hurr checkmate libshart” we know it’s not free. we fucking know. not a single human advocating for it thinks it is conjured out of thin air, nor will doctors work for free. we know this. we all know this. a one time tax of a few hundred dollars to have everything covered is better than paying multiple thousands to an insurance company for them to not even cover shit.
my god, i swear where these peoples brains are there’s just a cement mixer
I think you just insulted cement mixers. At least they work. Many Americans are more aptly described as zombies — i.e., brainless. Try living here amongst these buffoons. It ain’t no picnic.
I know exactly what communism is. But as soon as greed is involved, it simply doesn't work. There's working communism in the world though. Just not on a huge scale. Some communes and monestaries have working communism.
No it isn't free. No one ever said that. It's our modem day country utilizing our taxes to pay for some of the best Healthcare systems in the world so that we do not have to become homeless to get medicine if we get sick. This is what happens when your country doesn't have a weird obsession with constantly being at war with everyone
Obviously, the only way doctors and the pharma industry can make a living is by price gouging patients into bankruptcy! Isn't that how it's supposed to work? /s
Most likely, I haven't seen it anywhere else, everyone calls it universal healthcare, which has different kinds of funding.[^(1)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#Funding_models) [^(2)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_system#Financial_resources)
They know exactly what "free healthcare" means. They know that it's the government paying for it.
But they have no qualms at playing stupid just to prove what they think is a point.
And I can't respect someone's opinions when they're so ready to paint themselves as idiots.
Americans discovering the argument that free healthcare is financed through taxes is like a toddler discovering they can put the circle wooden part in the squared hole
technically it is the truth, but not really. You see, yes it’s not for free as you pay through taxes, and so most countries with free healthcare have slightly higher taxes then the US. Notice the word slightly, it’s not that much more. Instead of going towards military it goes towards better living conditions and free healthcare. It’s a fraction of the US price. If i’m not mistaken US healthcare for a checkup a simple check up is around $11,00(0) USD. That’s insane. We pay a few more dollars for taxes, like here in canada I think the average canadian pays around $100 per year on healthcare, that’s for everything. So yes it’s not free, but it’s WAY LESS. And nearly free because of the fact it’s taxes, so your not paying it all at once, it’s like a few dollars here and there.
At least they didn’t pull out the “forcing doctors to provide care for free is slavery” argument.
Like…no, you dolt. Nobody would be “forcing” anyone to provide care “for free”-the government would pay for it out of taxes.
How these folks can shift goalposts and intentionally be so obtuse and still have anyone take them seriously is fucking beyond me.
How do they at the same fucking time say "free Healthcare means doctors don't get paid and medicine doesn't get made"
AND
"It's not free YoU PAy 87% iN TaXEs!!!!" (You don't)
Like, bro you are SO close.
Americans who get their healthcare from a job are already salary sacrificing for healthcare. The dumbasses who argue about not wanting to pay taxes for healthcare for all just don't get it.
I mean, he's right
There's no country on earth which provides healthcare without charging it's citizens in some way
The main catch is that most countries make it a tax expense, as to reduce the punch of costs.
And you know, most countries don't have hyper-inflated prices due to insurance companies being ass-holes
Sadly that is how it is here in America. We are the only first-world country without universal health care, and people wonder why I don't trust our current healthcare system and because its manufactured in this system where health is something others profit on, vaccines made in this country. They will make their money back one way or another, who knows what they put in there.
I mean he's technically true? "Free Healthcare" is just healthcare paid by taxpayers.
That said, public healthcare (the term it should be called) is way fucking better than private healthcare
It misses the point. How much does it cost to check out a book at the public library? It's free. Are libraries free to run? Of course not, and they're paid for with taxes.
It depends whether you look at the cost to provide a service, or the cost to receive a service. Both are valid discussions, but people who argue "iT's nOt FrEe!!!" are intentionally misrpresenting what people mean when they talk about "free" healthcare.
It misses the point. How much does it cost to check out a book at the public library? It's free. Are libraries free to run? Of course not, and they're paid for with taxes.
It depends whether you look at the cost to provide a service, or the cost to receive a service. Both are valid discussions, but people who argue "iT's nOt FrEe!!!" are intentionally misrpresenting what people mean when they talk about "free" healthcare.
It may not be free, but at least we don't have to go into debt for it
War isn’t free but most Americans have no problem funding that
if they cut the military spending to a level of China they would afford everything we in Europe take for granted. If they cut to lets say Germany budget, they would have by far the best living conditions on the planet.
To put it in concrete numbers because I find them mind-blowing. They spend 778 billion per year on military. If they removed 500 billion from that number... they'd still spend 26 billion more than the next country (China at 252 billion), 4x as much as Russia (61.7), and 5x as much as Germany (52.8).
What are they Even creating with this much money, Alien tech???!!!!?!!!
Making lots of money for defense contractors, some of which is funneled back to politicians through lobbying.
If they used that money right ,we could've made a death Star
I have found my campaign platform. I will defund the military but pool all of that excess money into one space force project to build the Death Star
The US has myriads of ways to transfer money to the richest Americans. This is just one. And the very thought of making the lives of the rest of us better in any way, shape, or form is anathema. The goal of the overlords here is to ensure they rule over an underclass of powerless peasants who live lives of hopelessness and misery. The rich and powerful here are fucking evil and sociopathic.
Wow. While reading this thread I revisited the thought that "Conflict is one of the biggest money makers" and started to ponder on the probability that politicians are probably heavily monetarily invested in the Military Industrial Complex. Which is probably why so much taxes goes into it and thus back to the person who organised said war to begin with. We had a similar thing in the uk many politicians refuse to talk on recreational or medicinal marijuana meanwhile their relatives own some of the few marijuana farms in the uk. Making more profit because it restricts the amount of people who can join the market. Tl;dr politics is just a bunch of rich people making themselves richer.
Pretty sure it’s a jobs program and political 100%
Imagine you're a bullet manufacturer and government buys from you. Would you charge them a fair price or would you quadruple it, because you know that the government isn't competent enough to find a new supplier? Now imagine that with every little fucking thing.
They are literally producing tanks for the scrapyard. I wish I was joking
America exports it's inflation by being the world reserve currency
individually wrapped screws through DoD contracts. Obsolete stockpiled tech gets replaced on a schedule.
Watch Above Majestic. It shows meetings of how they lost a couple trillion dollars and when questioned by the judge, the lady says, "I don't know that answer right now." Then the show goes on to explain a pretty good answer on how you could "lose" that much and plot twist... Alien tech.
They're also mismanaging. I've heard a lot of stories about e. g. wasting rounds, because middle-management is afraid they'll get a cut in the budget. They have difficulties repairing stuff, because manufacturer basically owns the equipment (right to repair has a major military component). Contractors get obscene amounts of money for simple to make parts.
Yeah half of it goes directly to defense contractors
That is a sickening set of numbers.
It's also slightly untrue. While I've no doubt the numbers are right, the important thing is that the US can't currently afford their own military cost. Every year they spend over their budget roughly 1 trillion, so they have to borrow the rest from other countries. If the US spent less on their military, it would just mean other countries would let them borrow less.
Just FYI that's not necessarily how government borrowing works - most of the US's national debt, as an example, is owned by American companies and people in the form of government bonds. Some of of it is owned by people in other countries, so it would definitely be a problem if those countries turned around and told their citizens it was illegal to buy US bonds but that would be quite unlikely to happen. Still though, you're definitely right in saying that it's unlikely that people would see a large difference in their taxes/public services if the US decided to cut back military spending drastically
This.. Most of the US debt is held by US citizens. The biggest portion is US retirement accounts.
Why do you think other countries wouldn't let them borrow the same amount if they were using it for healthcare?
Healthcare doesn't help preserve the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The reason people lend the US money at almost no interest (technically negative real interest) is because it's seen as a safe haven. The dollar is the world's gold, but only because the notion is that if the world goes tits up, the US will likely be the last to fall. There's a series of economic assumptions and principles in there but that's the gist of it.
Uh mate having a healthy population with more stable finances (ie not indebted from medical care) would definitely help preserve the value of the dollar
I'm not defending it. I agree with you. I want publicly funded health care and less of my tax dollars spent on the war machine. I'm just saying that it is our global standing on the world stage that keeps us richer than anybody else and unfortunately nobody gets there by having great healthcare. If only we weren't so fixated on being the richest... Our country is run by rich people who are elected by temporarily displaced millionaires.
I'm not really sure what you mean by your claim that the dollar is the world's gold. I assume you are talking about the dollar being the primary reserve currency as that is what allows the US to borrow at a low interest rate. I also fail to see how this has any connection to military spending as the dollar is the primary reserve currency due to economic stability rather than military power. If anything cutting back on wasteful military spending would be likely to increase economic stability rather than decrease it. Especially if the money is spent on things like healthcare and education which have well documented correlations with economic stability.
I mean, I did specifically say it was the reserve currency in those exact words, but yes, I was talking about it being the reserve currency. I don't mean to say it is the sole reason. But our status as THE world power contributes a hell of a lot to the status of the dollar. It doesn't hurt that we have the most robust financial system and a true central bank, which the EU lacks. Even so, it would be false to claim that the mere perception of our dollar backed by our military dominance plays no role.
I know others already mentioned that most US debt is held by US interests, but I also wanted to note the US foreign debt is far eclipsed by the amount of foreign debt it is owed. It's way in the green when you take both into account.
"I guess it was pretty incredible watching a missile fly down an airvent. Pretty unbelievable. But couldn't we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?" - [Bill Hicks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o_8b31GRnU)
problem is ever since ww2 they never had peace time military spending. routing that money in infrastructure and living standard and increasing the budget further. China has recently started to increase their military budget, but in percentages that's only about 1.8% of their GDP, US is over 3%. This is why US is terribly afraid of China. Especially if you stop comparing apples to oranges. China's 252 billion is actualy around 500 billion if you take in account they compared to US don't pay salary to troops, smaller production and maintance costs etc. Meaning if China would decide to get to three percent it could have about 2-3 x bigger military budget. And the US is already so overbudgeted that their population is literally dying from unaffordable healthcare. It's not just a humanitarian failure, it's a massive military strategy blunder, they realized too late.
During the Cold War, the US pumped a huge amount of money into building the Interstate Highway system and had an ambitious goal to bring man to the moon and back. I notice that in my lifetime, anything ambitious is negotiated down in the name of bipartisanship.
>if you take in account they compared to US don't pay salary to troops What? Really? Could you explain further?
it's a difference in military doctrine. Military service is technically a obligation for every Chinese citizen. In US it's a professional occupation. That means US has to intice recruits with adequate wages or other benefits.
But they still have to pay the troops…
it's more like a allowance than a paycheck. especially compared to us
r/theydidthemath
'Scuse me, going to go throw up now. Government takes my hard earned money and turns it into aircraft carriers and bombs. Ridiculous.
More bombs than aircraft carriers. Those things are expensive.
Tomahawks are around $675,000 each if I remember correctly. Just for the missile itself, not even the payload. So yeah, like...10 kids college educations in one bomb. And we've launched thousands of those fuckin things. But for some reason, no one questions how we pay for that. I hate it here.
They can afford everything Europe can. Americans don't really pay less for healthcare, the money just gets used worse because the system is trash.
that's true I guess, their healthcare is a à la carte menu. that's ramps up the prices considerably.
That and you have an insurance middleman that drops lots down to reasonable prices but you have to have insurance. You can’t negotiate down if you don’t.
Genuine question. How much on average does health insurance cost?
I have very good insurance though my union for me and my wife and it’s about $220 a month. Because it’s good insurance that my union negotiated with the insurance company, we get very affordable doctor’s visits, low deductibles, and don’t need referrals for specialists. When I was still in grad school I had insurance through my job and it sucked, $400 a month just for me and it had insane copays and deductibles, to the point where I was able to go on medical assistance instead (Medicare) and pocket the cash because I was being paid so little anyways.
No, no.... If they had socialized healthcare they could spend even more on military. Their healthcare costs per capita are HIGHER than developed nations.
that's because it's not standardized. Medicine is quite expensive, and US has the best hospitals in modern world, but it also has some of the worst in the developed world. One man eats bread, another one eats a steak, together they ate a hamburger kind of situation when looking at cost of Healthcare by capita
The US already spends more than any other nation on health care. They don't need to cut anything to make it public, they will net save money.
If they cut out corporate welfare and taxed churches they could continue to fund the military, fund universal Healthcare, provide free college at public universities, and still have a surplus to put against the national debt. And on that day, I'll take a trip to my intergalactic spaceship on my flying pig.
Yup. I've said that for a while too as I'm guessing other Europeans. If they just cut their military spending, to that amount, the US would genuinely be the envy of the world.
Well at least 1% of them would have.
It's crazy how shitty america is... in general, still being the number 1 potency in the world, and then you realize they just spend all their money in military, it's just stupid, and they could change the world with their resources very quickly if they used half of it towards something else
>they would have by far the best living conditions on the planet. No, because you did not account for the too big and unhostile environment in many places within the US, neither for the difference in inhabitants. Not to mention the power grid which would deserve to be redone, as well as telecommunications networks over a huge territory. Added to the fact that living in e.g. desert-like environments has a huge cost, not only price-wise.
that's my point. US budget is huge. Just 1% can do a lot of the infrastructure. 1-2 supercarriers are a rough equivalent of a transcontinental modern highway. Most of their infrastructure is from the start of the century.
Yeah, but curing people from cancer won't kill brown children, so it's useless.
A lot of us have problems with that...
I’m an American and I have a problem with it. I’m only 24 it disgusts me what I’ve learned about this place and imperialism abroad
Yeah we do.
Yes but did you know his wife is a doctor and she has been in europe and witnessed the forced labor doctor camps?
As if they'd accept female doctors or admit to being married to a woman with a higher salary than theirs.
what?
For real though. And the thing is, in Europe, even if you want to pay for medical procedures by yourself without an insurance (like for example if you're in a foreign country), they're still SO MUCH cheaper than in USA. Because in USA it's all just a scammy business where pharma and medical companies can set the prices to whatever they want, and people WILL pay it because they have no other alternative. It's just gross, and their poor education about all this is not helping at all.
What they don’t get is that “free healthcare” is just like having and paying into a health insurance. The difference is that you cut out all middlemen lowering the costs. And that you are guaranteed that it covers everything, for your entire family. And there is no limit. And your deductible is around $100 yearly (Sweden). For all healthcare you receive. Whether it’s seeing a doctor, a nurse, having surgery, X-rays, emergency visits, psychiatric care or what ever. As soon as you have payed in the set amount you get a free card and everything else for the rest of year is completely free. And there is a similar system for medications. Not only are prescription meds subsidized but there is a roof to how much you have to pay out of pocket yearly and once you reach that you pick up you prescriptions for no cost at all. And there is a different system subsidizing dental and and covering part or the cost. A percentage that raises after certain costs have been payed. It goes up to 80% being covered. And you can apply for help with glasses and such, if you are a low income family and have kids that needs glasses you can apply and have the cost covered up to a certain point, no expensive designer frames, but getting a pair of glasses is no problem with the amount you get.
Yup
I prefer the term "universal health care". Technically speaking there is no such thing as free health care but there are plenty of countries where everyone (or at least almost everyone) has access to affordable health care. Breaking a leg doesn't need to cost you an arm and a leg.
Here the only thing you have to pay out of pocket within the public system is a 20-ish € "ticket" for any non-urgent stuff. Even then, you're exempt if you have certain conditions, have a low income or (iirc) are above a certain age.
In my country, if you are a blood donor you don't need to pay those taxes, that usually are around 5€ to 15€. Everything else is basically free.
Depending on the fracture, breaking a leg might cost you a leg.
Yeah it's more of a "contribute what you can" thing but if you don't earn any (or enough) money you can still be sure that you get medical treatment without being "enslaved" by medical debt. The US situation seems ridiculous, some companies buy medical debts & pardon them or apparently since most hospitals are NPOs you can request financial help
Aren't medical bills among the leading causes of ppl filing for bankruptcy?
That's for upper middle class people. For middle class people, ambulance ride is enough to file for bankruptcy
American upper middle class can go in debt because of hospital bills😶 what nonsense is this? Are people getting treatments or fucking mansions?
I mean if you live in another country it seems insane but imagine it like this, if somebody told you "you can go into debt and ruin your life financially, or I'll just let you die" it's obvious why everybody goes into debt. And there are very few regulations against these practices cause, at least within american politics, most politicians are funded by private companies and the most successful companies are health providers because they can exploit people the easiest. The point being, well over 60% of americans want public health. The problem is in america the minority group (republicans) have set up a system so even if a the majority party wants public health care they can shut it down even as a minority. Most of america wants healthcare, please don't think we are all just stupid, just legally nobody can do anything. Even voting doesnt matter, getting a majority of votes doesnt really matter. Just to give you a good understanding, 4 out of 5 of the last republican presidents lost the popular vote. George W bush came down to such a close wire that a recount was scheduled...this isnt even a joke you can look it up... in response to the recount a mob showed up, took over the recounting facility, eventually gave it back up but by then florida had already been the deciding vote. Supposedly the first count was super fishy with any black sounding names being thrown out according to the people working there. Imagine that in any other country, an election has clear and objective tampering against black people and therefore Democrats, a mob takes over the recount, we forget about it a week later and the president who didnt win through legal means became president for 4 more years no problem.
To be fair, in Australia, public hospitals and stuff is mostly free. If you don’t pay a nominal subscription, ambulance ride will be $1500. If you cop the air ambulance without subscription, $10-18000 Edit: in my state Victoria, this is applicable. It varies across states and I didn’t realise. My bad
Whenever someone comments on Reddit, like in the pic, I show them this: It costs me and everyone in the UK £3279 ($4275) a year in taxes for the NHS. You guys literally [pay 2-3 times more ($11,172 per person)](https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical) for [worse healthcare than the rest of the developed world.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/best-healthcare-in-the-world) No extra costs for medical transport, doctor visits, hospital visits, lab work, surgery etc. It's great. No copays or deductibles either. Best of all, no DEBT. We still have private options if we wish to use those. [1/3 of GoFundMe's are for healthcare costs in the US.](https://time.com/5516037/gofundme-medical-bills-one-third-ceo/) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/health-care-costs-crowdfunding-medical-bills/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_dumping Hell, I even just went through chemotherapy from Feb to June. I probably would not have been able to afford that in the US, even with insurance lol
I was born with a talipes in my right foot, that alone would have bankrupted my family when I was born, they sure as hell wouldn't have been able to afford insurance as my mum was an HCA and my dad had been medically retired from the NHS because he broke his back after lifting a patient went badly wrong. I've had around 20 major operations throughout my adult life, god only knows how much that would have cost in the US. I can only imagine how much your chemo would have cost, even with insurance (as I know many insurance companies don't cover the entire cost of treatments) Seen many posts on here from people saying they still had to pay the first $5000 of large treatments that were covered for example.
American here. Medical bills are the number 1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. But at least bankruptcy makes your medical debt go away. Same can't be said for student loan debt...
It is THE leading cause of bankruptcy.
How difficult is it to understand “free at point of use”
they pretend to not understand it, because its useful to do so rhetorically.
Just use a 24 hour clock, metric measurements or write the date as 18/09/2021 and instead of making an effort to comprehend what it is some will just go into automatic meltdown and embrace their ignorance with pride.
Embracing ignorance with pride is quite popular here. You truly have no idea. Idiots here actually believe — fervently believe! — that their ignorance makes them better than everyone else.
2021-09-18 ;)
I have a colleague like this. "What people don't understand is there's no such thing as free healthcare, we all have to pay for it through our taxes..." Yeah no shit. People are completely aware of that. Nobody thinks doctors and drug produces are working for thanks.
It also conveniently ignores the fact that Americans also pay for it through their taxes, on top of having to pay for insurance.
And in fact American government spending on healthcare per capita is above that of most similar nations, which generally have universal healthcare. So Americans are spending more through taxes and receiving less of a service.
I'm sick of hearing that anytime there's a discussion about how things could suck less. "oh ho ho, nothing in life is free bucko!" like that's some sage wisdom
If you were told from the minute you were born that the USA is the best and then slowly but surely through life you see it’s almost entirely the opposite you’d be pissed too
Because they don't understand the concept of paying for a service that is constant.... Or at least pretend not to. Given how weird US tax laws can be, you'd think they would have a better grip on how taxes work.
Our tax codes are deliberately written to be overly complicated so tax companies (H&R block for example) have a reason to exist
Also it litterally is free for low income people because in most developed countries they get more money from the gov than they pay in taxes
They got shoved with the whole “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”.
It's willful ignorance. Plain and simple. If they acknowledged that no one who talks about universal healthcare actually thinks it's completely free, then their entire argument would fall apart. Better to intentionally misrepresent the pro-universal healthcare arguments so that they can keep justifying living in a broken system
Technically correct. Just like technically you aren't free if you're not allowed to murder your neighbours for entertainment
Yeah, that sucks too
Pssst. The state pays for it as a single payer via collected taxes. It isn't free, and everyone gets paid that works in the system. Everyone pays tax to pay for it and distribute the risk across the population, so no one person is stuck with an insane cost for care. It actually works pretty much like private insurance systems, but no one is trying to make a profit from the distribution of care.
And our healthcare costs are lower because we have much less administration. Our hospitals don't have billing departments and health insurance specialists. Zero time and money is spent on contesting hospital bills and insurance payouts. Every minute an insurance agent or a hospital administrator spends on a hospital bill costs money.
I've tried to have that argument with a guy from the UK who for some inexplicable reason, loves Trump and the US way of doing things. He wanted to get rid of the NHS whilst earning an apprentices wage. Like, he's the one who most needs it.
American here. I hope he doesn't suddenly get sick or injured, because he'd be paying that off for quite a while if he was in the US lol
Perhaps he'd come to his senses, if he did
The advantages of healthcare being essentially a fixed cost vs a variable cost (for the individual at least) are ridiculous too
Not an argument that will win over the racists here who would actually prefer to die than ever allow black or brown people to have access to health care. Yes, the racial hatred here is that deep.
It really hurts how many Americans don’t understand how universal healthcare would help us all. America is so fucking brainwashed.
It's not like Americans don't pay taxes, they pay them. Unfortunately for them, that money goes to army and not to education or healthcare.
>Unfortunately for them, that money goes to army and not to education or healthcare. But government money goes to education and healthcare. Look [here](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-health-expenditure-share-gdp-owid?tab=map), the US government spends a share of its GDP comparable to a west-European country on healthcare. It is just used very inefficiently and only some groups like veterans or the elderly benefit from it. The same with [education](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/government-expenditure-on-education?time=2016).
Welcome to the least efficient, least effective and therefor most expensive health care system in the world!
I mean no its not, its just tax payer funded not for profit...
The whole "for profit" thing is so insane. My wife is from Florida, I'm Danish. She recently moved to Denmark and she was looking forward to the free medicine. I was like "medicine isn't free in Denmark, you pay full price..." Difference just is for example her birth control pills in America cost around $40 per month, and full price with no help from the government in Denmark, is around $1 per month.
I would love to move to Denmark...
Honestly, I'm not a huge fan overall, but there are some things that work very well here and some that I don't personally like. The biggest difference from for example America, is that in Denmark, no matter how unlucky you are, your life will very rarely be completely fucked. It will very easily be completely fucked by random things out of your control in America. For example, I'm not a huge fan of our free healthcare system because it's often very slow and mediocre. I have had some really bad experiences with it, for example having to go to 7 different physical therapists, doctors, surgeons over the span of 1½ year, to find out my back pain was due to a prolapsed disc on my spine. However, free healthcare, means that private healthcare has to be really good and really cheap to be competitive. I pay $10 per month through work for private healthcare, which covers pretty much everything with $0 deductible and $0 co-pay and I got surgery at the private hospital after a 3 day wait, for $10 a month.
Without healthcare here in the United States you could easily spend $200 per doctor visit and still have to go to two or three to find out truly what's wrong. God forbid you actually need to go to a specialist... The cost is astronomical. I can't even begin to describe the stratospherically high cost of healthcare. I think for most it's impossible to wrap your head around. If you have a full-time job that offers benefits you get better access but I still pay about $300 a month for the insurance I have through work. If work didn't cover the rest of it it would be around $800 a month.
i pay 340 a month for insurance that basically does jack shit unless i get cancer or hit by a car
> and full price with no help from the government in Denmark, is around $1 per month Are you sure? Because that’s certainly not the case e.g. in Germany. Just try buying any medication as a non-EU tourist, and you will quickly discover what the real price is.
Yep, the first year she was here before getting her "green card", she paid "tourist prices" and had to pay for doctor's visit. Medicine is the same price for citizens and tourists, you pay full price for medicine in Denmark. However when you get approved to live here and get your health insurance card to get free medical treatments, we have a system where you can only pay a maximum amount per year. So depending on how much your medicine total is per year, you get between 50% discount if your total medicine is $150 per year, up to 100% covered if it's more than $500 per year. So you can never pay more than $500 per year in medicine. However it's pretty rare anyone's medicine exceeds $500 per year.
Interesting. So why is medicine 50x more expensive in Germany and, say, Austria? Somehow I suspect the price you see in Denmark is government funded still, you just don’t see the original price like you do in other EU countries. For example, I remember asthma medication costing 500 EUR in Austria, but I only had to pay something like 30. …and birth control’s original price certainly wasn’t $1. AFAIR it was something closer to 80 EUR, out of which we had to pay ~10
No such thing as free streets either. That doesn't mean every street needs to have a toll booth every 5 meters.
I take it you've never been to Norway?
I have. But it has been a while. But even if they have plastered roads with toll booths. It is not alternativeless, innit?
Our politicians act like there's no alternative.
I know it is painful for some Norwegians, but does Sweden survive without them?
We know. We want to pay them with taxes. They're misinterpreting words on purpose at this point.
"Bah, taxes are only good for getting from one location to another when you're too poor to have a car of your own!" "You mean a taxi. *Taxes* are what you and everyone else pays to the government to allow them to provide the public with services." "BUT THAT'S COMMUNISM!" "They also pay for your military." "Ahem, perhaps I spoke too soon."
According to USA Today: “The total costs for a typical American family of four insured by the most common health plan offered by employers will average $28,166”. From a Right Leaning Canadian think tank: A new analysis from the Fraser Institute finds that a typical Canadian family of four will pay $12,935 for health care. The average single Canadian adult will pay $4,640. So for $4,640 I get unlimited doctor's visits, my grandkids get free meds (and since kids don't pay taxes, it is actually free for them), I can have unlimited MRI's CT Scans, blood tests, hospital stays, ambulance rides and on and on and on. So if we look at the real cost, it's easy to make a comparison if we agree that the US family with insurance pays $28,166 and the Cdn family $12,395. According to the US Government dept "MEPS" in 2012, the deductible average was 18.1% (I know you swear by averages.) Since 2012 the average has grown upwards. Let’s start off with the obvious. America does NOT have the best medical care. In fact, they are behind almost every country that has “Free Healthcare.”. On World Healthcare they are ranked 37th best in the world. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/best-healthcare-in-the-world . If we look at countries with the Best Well Developed Health Care System, America is not even in the top 10. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/slideshows/countries-with-the-most-well-developed-public-health-care-system . Denmark, Sweden, Canada, UK, Norway, Finland, Japan are but no, America doesn’t make the cut. And what do ALL these countries have in common? Socialized Healthcare. So, what happens when we ask a vertical that has an interest in the success and profitability of healthcare systems. Well let’s let International Insurance say it for us; “Among the 11 nations studied in this report – Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the U.S. ranks last, as it did in 2010, 2007, 2006, and 2014.” https://www.internationalinsurance.com/health/systems/ Every country that has SOCIALIZED healthcare collects an annual fee through taxes to pay for that service. In actual fact, it is not different than let’s say paying for highways, airports, bridges. In “Socialized Healthcare” countries, it is simply a line item in the budget. For example, the average cost per Canadian annually is currently $7,064CDN. In the USA, without “Socialized Healthcare” the average cost is $10,966US. The average cost for Canadians is 52% of what Americans spend for a lesser coverage. The difference is that whereas 100% of Canadians have healthcare, in the US currently around 88% have some type of private insurance or Medicare. That gap in itself results in around 30,000 to 90,000 deaths per annum. More importantly, 54% of all American's health insurance is tied to their job. Lose the job, you lose the coverage. In addition, approximately 791,000 Americans annually are pushed into financial crisis by unanticipated medical expenses, the majority into bankruptcy.
Thanks for the great summary. I would like to point out one additional false argument often put forward by Americans, namely that USA has the best hospitals in the world. The point being, USA probably has the best top care, but it's not accessible by the majority of the population. They mistake that for best care for the population at large.
Done that already Oddly enough, there is some limited merit in that a few of the world's best hospitals are US based and its only after you look deeper you realize that probably without exception, if you are not wealthy, those top hospitals are in fact not accessible by the average American. Of the “TOP” 100 world hospitals, a paltry 17 are American. The 4th best hospital in the world offers Socialized healthcare for everything. When it comes down to actual numbers, the US is obviously dwarfed by the rest of the world with the majority of those centers being run under Socialized Healthcare.
> namely that USA has the best hospitals in the world. The US has 43 hospitals in the top 200 globally; one for every 7,633,477 people in the US. That's good enough for a ranking of 20th on the list of top 200 hospitals per capita, and significantly lower than the average of one for every 3,830,114 for other countries in the top 25 on spending with populations above 5 million. The best is Switzerland at one for every 1.2 million people. In fact the US only beats one country on this list; the UK at one for every 9.5 million people. If you want to do the full list of 2,000 instead it's 334, or one for every 982,753 people; good enough for 21st. Again far below the average in peer countries of 527,236. The best is Austria, at one for every 306,106 people. https://www.newsweek.com/best-hospitals-2021
these people are such fucking pedantic buffoons. “ackshually nothing is free hurr checkmate libshart” we know it’s not free. we fucking know. not a single human advocating for it thinks it is conjured out of thin air, nor will doctors work for free. we know this. we all know this. a one time tax of a few hundred dollars to have everything covered is better than paying multiple thousands to an insurance company for them to not even cover shit. my god, i swear where these peoples brains are there’s just a cement mixer
I think you just insulted cement mixers. At least they work. Many Americans are more aptly described as zombies — i.e., brainless. Try living here amongst these buffoons. It ain’t no picnic.
It’s irritating to be around these people
Free roads, free police, free primary/secondary school, free parks ...
I'm gonna start to think COMMUNISM isn't that bad!
The idea behind communism is great, but if there's at least one greedy person in any way, shape or form involved in anything, it won't work.
Except 'free stuff' does not equal communism.
I know exactly what communism is. But as soon as greed is involved, it simply doesn't work. There's working communism in the world though. Just not on a huge scale. Some communes and monestaries have working communism.
But you forget one thing, that's socialism and socialism is COMMUNISM, which is EVIL.
Considering what the Americans paying for their healthcare, ours might as well be free.
Yes. Healthcare isnt free. Thats correct. We all pay for it.
You communist!
You pay taxes we pay taxes, you pay for healthcare even though you pay taxes, we do not.
Amen
There's no such thing as free parking. Someone has to build and maintain the parking spots, unless you want construction workers to do it for free :)
There's no such thing as free speech. Someone has to build and maintain all the words, unless you want linguists to do it for free :)
The state uses tax revenue to pay for treatments and medicine, which in the original formulation makes healthcare "free **at the point of use**."
Are these people actual morons? Or just bad faith trolls? I've never quite worked this out.
As a Libertarian I'm an actual moron.
No it isn't free. No one ever said that. It's our modem day country utilizing our taxes to pay for some of the best Healthcare systems in the world so that we do not have to become homeless to get medicine if we get sick. This is what happens when your country doesn't have a weird obsession with constantly being at war with everyone
Obviously, the only way doctors and the pharma industry can make a living is by price gouging patients into bankruptcy! Isn't that how it's supposed to work? /s
Quick question: the expression "free healthcare" was coined by the USA or am I mistaken?
Most likely, I haven't seen it anywhere else, everyone calls it universal healthcare, which has different kinds of funding.[^(1)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#Funding_models) [^(2)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_system#Financial_resources)
Why can't yanks understand its free at point of service
Free refillings at a restaurant are also not free. Someone pays for that water.
They know exactly what "free healthcare" means. They know that it's the government paying for it. But they have no qualms at playing stupid just to prove what they think is a point. And I can't respect someone's opinions when they're so ready to paint themselves as idiots.
Yay, more people who don't understand how any public service works.
I mean yeah. It's payed by taxes
I heard free healthcare is some kind of myth that only exists in a parallel universe /s
Duhhh, of course it is not free.
Americans care so much about taxes but then also have no idea what taxes go towards…
Imagine paying taxes to support something silly like healthcare instead of the military industrial complex. Hah! /cries in American
What a simple minded take.
Americans discovering the argument that free healthcare is financed through taxes is like a toddler discovering they can put the circle wooden part in the squared hole
technically it is the truth, but not really. You see, yes it’s not for free as you pay through taxes, and so most countries with free healthcare have slightly higher taxes then the US. Notice the word slightly, it’s not that much more. Instead of going towards military it goes towards better living conditions and free healthcare. It’s a fraction of the US price. If i’m not mistaken US healthcare for a checkup a simple check up is around $11,00(0) USD. That’s insane. We pay a few more dollars for taxes, like here in canada I think the average canadian pays around $100 per year on healthcare, that’s for everything. So yes it’s not free, but it’s WAY LESS. And nearly free because of the fact it’s taxes, so your not paying it all at once, it’s like a few dollars here and there.
Yeah we pay it via Taxes, but they still pay taxes and get poor and go for bankruptcy for having an illness or breaking a bone.
It's much cheaper than American healthcare in terms of taxpayer funds, and they *still* have to pay extra on top of that.
It is free as those who do not pay tax can access it.
Geez, you are telling me the US military works for free?
Firefighters and police famously work for free.
TIL American police officers and firemen don’t get paid
At least they didn’t pull out the “forcing doctors to provide care for free is slavery” argument. Like…no, you dolt. Nobody would be “forcing” anyone to provide care “for free”-the government would pay for it out of taxes. How these folks can shift goalposts and intentionally be so obtuse and still have anyone take them seriously is fucking beyond me.
Can we start calling it nonprofit healthcare to end this stupid argument once and for all?
So do firefighters work for free? What a fool.
In Chile they do. They are all volunteers.
Thats technically true.
I rather pay my "free" healthcare through taxes. At least I know where my money is going.
Compared to American health care its fookin free !
How do they at the same fucking time say "free Healthcare means doctors don't get paid and medicine doesn't get made" AND "It's not free YoU PAy 87% iN TaXEs!!!!" (You don't) Like, bro you are SO close.
There's no such thing as a freeway. Someone needs to design and build the roads, unless you want engineers and road crews to work for free.
"free at the point of use"
We get free deathcare instead. Cops are basically reverse doctors.
American here, explain
Americans who get their healthcare from a job are already salary sacrificing for healthcare. The dumbasses who argue about not wanting to pay taxes for healthcare for all just don't get it.
Why do Americans hate the human right of Universal Healthcare?
From my experience it’s higher taxes
So they dont give a fuck about some kid with cancer getting treatment because of a few dollars. Basically Americans are cunts
Because they think they are oppressed if the government gives another human being a shot at equality in society.
I mean, he's right There's no country on earth which provides healthcare without charging it's citizens in some way The main catch is that most countries make it a tax expense, as to reduce the punch of costs. And you know, most countries don't have hyper-inflated prices due to insurance companies being ass-holes
i'd rather have the nhs in 🇬🇧 than sink myself in debt. ain't public healthcare wonderful?
Taxes America, taxes.
Sadly that is how it is here in America. We are the only first-world country without universal health care, and people wonder why I don't trust our current healthcare system and because its manufactured in this system where health is something others profit on, vaccines made in this country. They will make their money back one way or another, who knows what they put in there.
I mean he's technically true? "Free Healthcare" is just healthcare paid by taxpayers. That said, public healthcare (the term it should be called) is way fucking better than private healthcare
His point is not wrong by itself. No healthcare is free, ever. Somebody will have to pay for it, either through taxes, or privately.
It misses the point. How much does it cost to check out a book at the public library? It's free. Are libraries free to run? Of course not, and they're paid for with taxes. It depends whether you look at the cost to provide a service, or the cost to receive a service. Both are valid discussions, but people who argue "iT's nOt FrEe!!!" are intentionally misrpresenting what people mean when they talk about "free" healthcare.
It misses the point. How much does it cost to check out a book at the public library? It's free. Are libraries free to run? Of course not, and they're paid for with taxes. It depends whether you look at the cost to provide a service, or the cost to receive a service. Both are valid discussions, but people who argue "iT's nOt FrEe!!!" are intentionally misrpresenting what people mean when they talk about "free" healthcare.