Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, on How to Pay for Medicare for All

[SlackerInc]

I’m going to put the vaccine digression into a spoiler box:

@Gary_Kumquat

You’d have to be a complete fucking idiot (Hello, you) to look at companies who are clearly interested in making a profit, and conclude that they’d enable such a conspiracy, to the detriment of their own bottom line, when they could easily destroy it by just a single person out of the hundreds of thousands involved leaking any decent bit of evidence about the secret mind control drugs, etc, etc.

Whoaaa…talk about a strawman! I have never even heard of this “secret mind control” stuff. What I saw was a landscape where Big Pharma, like any other giant corporate entity, was under enormous shareholder pressure to constantly grow (the “ideology of the cancer cell”, as the saying goes) and were snaking their tentacles through vaccine standard-setting boards just as they have done elsewhere with all their junkets and pharmaceutical reps. Just coincidentally, these boards were significantly increasing the number of recommended/required vaccines. So I saw them pushing unnecessary drugs, with undesirable side effects, in every direction they could (surely you don’t deny that) and what better place to do something similar than in “vaccine schedules” that essentially make them a mandatory purchase for the entire population? (Saying they are “only two percent” of the pharmaceutical industry is silly, when Viagra is only one-tenth of one percent, and no one can seriously say that’s unimportant to Pfizer’s bottom line.)

I mean, did you know that eating certain “superfoods”, or even just getting a little midday sun, reduces blood pressure as well as medication or better? You won’t hear that from Big Pharma, I assure you.

@Riemann

SlackerInc was capable of ignoring overwhelming evidence to reach stupid and harmful conclusions.

In point of fact, I did change my mind and began fully vaccinating both my children (then 3 and 5) in 2005 after seeing the “overwhelming evidence”. But most of those studies had not yet been published in 2000 when my eldest child was born.

(As it happens, the two children I subsequently had in the past decade who got the full vaccine schedule starting at birth both have autism, while the older two do not; that does not change my mind about the evidence, which really woud have to be part of some vast conspiracy far beyond the ability of Big Pharma to effect.)

@Gyrate

Sure, in these discussions people are comparing the current US system with other systems on a “if we could wave a magic wand” basis but no one believes that an actual transition to UHC would be simple.

You may not, and good for you. But a lot of people have not researched this much at all, and are willing to accept the “wave a magic wand” rhetoric at face value from someone they admire like AOC. So she ought to stop doing that, and so should the people in this thread and those like them across the country.

@Grim_Render

That was the problem Vermont faced: Adding yet another layer and actor to the system doesn’t realize any of the savings UHC normally entails. If you had allowed the state to use Medicare, Medicaid etc funds to set up a system the cost calculation would have looked very different and far more affordable.

Are you saying they should have set up a state equivalent of Britain’s NHS?

First of all, that is the exception rather than the rule even among UHC countries.

It does seem to work well for the UK, and certainly in theory is the best way to streamline everything and keep administrative costs down.

BUT it strikes me as essentially impossible to imagine that something like this could be created in the U.S., due to political and economic hurdles. And if it somehow overcame those, I don’t believe most people would culturally adjust well to it, no matter how well it worked statistically speaking.

I mean, have you been to a VA hospital? That’s the American equivalent. When my eldest was born, I had to go through the tunnel from the regular hospital to the VA hospital to get film for my camera (quaint, I know) for some reason. The hospital he was born in had works of art everywhere, flowers, an airy lobby, etc. On the other side of the tunnel, it was like someone was making a movie about a Stalinist gulag. It wasn’t technically dirty (although the paint job was chipped and faded), and everything looked functional enough, but to call it “drab” would be an incredible understatement.