A better way to say it would have been “Medicaid for the poor is extremely restricted and there are vast numbers of poor who get nothing, a gap that the ACA partially tried to fill and which only Republican-controlled states rejected”. I think that still makes the point he was trying to make. But you are correct in that he worded it incorrectly.
Sorry, in my haste I misremembered what I had seen and misstated what I meant to say. The correct statement, from the last time I saw the facts, was that every state that had rejected Medicaid expansion either had a Republican controlled legislature or a Republican governor.
Fair enough, John. I’m not saying you’re “wrong”, I just wanted to be sure my point was clear. There was a point being made in another thread about the importance of fundamental principles, as distinctly opposed to outcomes, and I think this is an example of it – both in the socialist-oriented and capitalist-oriented approaches to social programs. The major difference that I see is that the former is universal by design and definition, whereas the capitalist approach seems content to let citizens fall through the cracks as long as free market principles get some play in the process, because for some reason that’s considered really important. Nowhere is this more true than in health care.
I think that the American attitude towards this, historically, has just been different. Basically, it’s assumed that if you can work, you work. In which case, you are covered. If you can’t work due to a disability, you are covered. If you can work but don’t, then you fall through the cracks (though there are private and even public institutions to cover that somewhat as well). Our own history with this goes back to, IIRC, the Civil War (widows and orphans fund) and, of course, FDR and the founding of the social security system we have today. Basically, it was never supposed to be a retirement fund for everyone, but instead something for those who pay in. That’s why The Rich™ don’t have to pay any more at the maxium than anyone else…i.e. there is a ceiling. You basically pay in, then when you get to a certain age you take out…I think at a maximum age (71?) you HAVE to start taking it actually.
Whether this is good or bad, I think it’s pretty much a ‘socialist’ type program, just with an American twist. Like a lot of things that evolved in the US, it stems from earlier times and trying to fix issues that were relevant then that, perhaps, have changed over time. Our systems all are tied to employment. Healthcare is much the same. And these systems have been in place for almost a century in some cases and stem from even earlier proto-programs or from earlier issues that people in the US were trying to solve. It would be nice if we could just dump the old crap we have in a lot of cases and streamline things so we could be just like the rest of The World(arr), but sadly a lot of people in this country are comfortable with the system they know, even if they complain it’s dysfunctional (which it is in a lot of cases), and they are scared of what they don’t know (and generally unconvinced because other countries are doing it some other way). For the majority, the system ‘works’ for some definition of ‘works’, so by and large stuff doesn’t get changed. Couple that with the fact that a lot of Americans have a distrust of The Federal Government(bad bad bad), and you have arrived at where things stand today. Until and unless a majority of Americans (a majority in a majority of each state) see the dysfunction and pressure their representatives for actual change it’s not going to change and we’ll just keep bumping along.
Which is my answer to the OP…obviously, based on the article in the OP, no one is really up for that, let along Americans. But to the less crazy question, we’ll get ‘socialist’ medicine like a single payer and/or UHC system when/if people are discontent enough with what we have to push for change. We, of course, already have ‘democratic socialism’ in the US, just like every other successful country on the planet. We just set the bar at a different place, and no one sets the bar where the article linked in the OP is suggesting. 
Even by your peculiar definition that social welfare only counts if the recipients literally contribute nothing toward it, we do have free healthcare for the impoverished, free food money for the impoverished, and, in many places, heavily-subsidized housing for the impoverished (i.e. housing projects).
That we don’t give free money and healthcare to retirees shouldn’t come as any sort of shock - how the hell could we ever offer such programs without people younger than retirement age funding it? There’s no way you could have such programs unless you had people “pay in” during your working years. It’s by default that such programs require contribution prior to receiving the benefit.
Guyana was a Marxist state with more or less competitive elections. (There was a lot of criticism of their human rights record, but IIRC they were broadly considered at least semi-democratic. Both main parties were communist and they differed on racial grounds (Jagan’s party for Indo-Guyanese and Burnham’s for Afro-Guyanese). Nicaragua too, to an extent although their Marxist party was voted out in 1990. (They are no longer Marxist but they’re back in office now, and apparently are doing fairly well with the economy, although Nicaragua was starting from a very low base).
More details, please. Exactly when and for how long?
[quote=“Shagnasty, post:21, topic:792874”]
Past time travel is not allowed on this board. Those countries already tried to jettison capitalism and it failed miserably to put it in the kindest possible terms. Back in 2017, you have idiot nation-states like Venezuela that are trying it again with the same results. *
I assume this is a joke, but it’s exactly because places like Russia have ‘tried it’ that there’s a significant chunk of people there who like communism, in principle.
In America, when you think about communism or socialism it strikes people as ‘something pie in the sky that’s never happened here’, so of course they mostly aren’t sympathetic. In Russia when you talk about communism people think 'oh what we had in the 1970s" and of course there are a lot of people who remember that era fondly. In Russia communism is to some extent something conservative/reactionary (it’s a return to a past era) so it tends to be favoured more by people of a reactionary inclination, particularly the elderly. This is why you have 55% of people who would prefer a centrally planned economy:
As to whether communist economies ‘failed miserably in the kindest possible terms’, I’ll argue with you about that as well. I would certainly concede that full-scale centrally planned industrialized economies as a whole underperformed capitalist industrial economies as a whole, but they still functioned reasonably well, just not as well as the western powers did, well enough that a lot of people recall them fairly favourably. Soviet citizens in the early 1980s (much less east Germans or Hungarians or Czechs) were not starving or homeless, even if they were much poorer than Americans or West Germanys.
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the most prosperous communist economy, the GDR, actually had higher economic growth rates than West Germany every decade between 1950 and 1989, as well as arguably higher economic growth rates than eastern Germany has experienced from 1991 to the present (arguably b/c the German government currently provides different numbers than some others I’ve seen). My cite here is the statistician Gerhard Heske.
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Median income stagnation in the US since 1975 has actually been worse than it was in the Soviet Union during the ‘stagnation era’ (1975-1985, before Gorbachev took over and initiated reforms that led to the collapse of the economy). Median inflation-adjusted income growth in the US since 1975, last I checked, was about 0.55% per year. In the Soviet Union between 1975-1985 GDP growth / capita was about 0.6% a year and inequality declined, meaning that median income growth was at a minimum that high. The late stage Soviets obviously had some very serious problems, but late capitalist economies have had some increasingly serious problems with median income growth as well (which were not as evident in 1980 or even 1990 as they are today), which means that capitalism’s ability to outperform communism may have been limited to some historical eras and may not be true for all time. It may be the case that capitalism really enters crisis mode when it’s much further developed than the Soviets hoped (specifically when automation reaches a certain stage). A hypothetical Soviet Union that had lasted into the 2010s would also be able to take advantage of better information technology and better communications to keep track of consumer demand, changes in allocation requirements, etc., so they would have had advantages that their 1980s counterpart didn’t.
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The communist economies had some other advantages (extremely low inequality and full employment including for less educated people) that could to some extent offset lower per capita GDP. Especially in an age when automation is replacing human labour, in particular in the kind of manufacturing jobs that people used to find fulfilling and rewarding, we might want to think about whether this might be a genuine advantage of a planned or at least semi-planned economy. (Yes America has low unemployment under Obama & Trump, but a job at walmart isn’t the same as a job in manufacturing).
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There are lots of models of communism and socialism which don’t rely purely on central planning. (Yugoslavian worker ownership for example, or the model that was tried out in China in the 1980s before they moved in a much more capitalist direction in the 1990s, or the HUngarian model with a mixture of central planning and floating prices). My own preference is for something like the Hungarian model (which actually, arguably, performed about as well on a year to year basis as their economy has performed since they switched to capitalism in 1989), but in a more general sense the drawbacks of a pure central planning mechanism, relative to the market, aren’t a good argument against a planned economy that makes selective use of the market and free or semi-free prices in some area.
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Venezuela is certainly failing but they’re failing for distinct reasons that weren’t a general feature of communist/socialist economies. They’re failing largely because they systematically under-invested in the oil industry, fired a lot of the oil industry staff, used the industry as a cash cow to fund social spending, and spent all their money on consumer goods to buy popular support. Many communist countries didn’t make that mistake (they made lots other mistakes) and they actually had quite high levels of investment in capital goods as opposed to consumer goods.