Your statement that Sweden is homogenous jumped out at me. I think some of us in the US think that Scandinavian countries are populated entirely by blond Scandinavians. But from Wikipedia I learn that 14% of the Swedish population was foreign born, including many from Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
It would probably be more accurate to say that as Sweden was socializing it was a more homogenous country. It will actually be interesting to see if Sweden can maintain its system now that it is experiencing rapid immigration. I think we’re beginning to see some cracks in the seams unfortunately. The Sweden Democrats are now the second largest party in the country and they have far-right wing roots. As immigrant crime rises, particularly crime against women, Sweden is going through some serious growing pains. Not that I’m predicting some sort of apocalypse, but it will be interesting to see where it leads.
Thats actually not so.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the US is number 3 for specialist remuneration, after the Netherlands and Australia. GP pay is the highest in the world, but only about 25 % ahead of nations such as the UK, Netherlands, Switzerland etc. And… thats not really enough to make a big dent in the costs. There are about 900 000 physicians practicing in the US today, lets call it a million. 500 000 are specialists. The salary difference between these nations for GPs are 30 - 40 000 $ per year. So you’re paying about 15 - 20 billion more for GPs.
The overspending in the US healthcare system is about 1800 billion.
As I posted in another thread earlier today, billing alone, something other systems mostly don’t do much, costs you almost 500 billion per year due to the vast bureaucracy you have created. Other major sources of excess costs in the US system are overprovision and medical inefficiency. Salary differences are only a couple of percent of the overspending.
Thats not actually so either. The US spends more money on research, but the US spends more money in every aspect of healthcare without getting better results. Per head the US does not produce more inventions than other large nations.
You realize we are talking about changing the system? There are valid arguments that this could be politically impossible. But if accomplished, a proper single payer system would be less expensive than what you got by far.
It is still a reduction compared to the irrational alternative. As pointed out, it is notorious that both a conservative outfit and a liberal one came with virtually the same numbers.
What I do think is that following the path we are doing is not sustainable and waiting for the bubble to burst will cause more harm than having more oversight and control over costs.
puddleglum, you’ve answered your own argument here.
As others have said upthread, you have a confused concept of socialism. But that’s okay, because the word is so often misused, and has such a broad definition, that it is a meaningless term, even if Bernie Sanders uses it.
So instead of arguing about what socialism is, let’s just ignore the word, and look at the hard facts.
And the facts which you posted, and I have bolded, tell the whole story. Venezuela did two stupid things , which can only be done by a dictatorship, not a free society:
First,they outright lied to the citizens and blamed the inflation on “Greedy store owners”, and tolerated no dissent. (this is reminiscent of a certain country in Europe in the 1930s blaming “greedy Jews” for all its problems)
Second, they outlawed private enterprise(in your words " passing laws to keep prices down")-i.e. preventing a businessman from selling at even a small profit.
So, first the government lied about the greedy shop owners—and prevented any political opponents from criticizing the lie by saying “no–you lied! Let’s hold free elections and let the people decide”).Without free elections, a country is a cruel dictatorship, and that’s all that matters…worlds like socialism are irrelevant.
Puddleglum, do you expect America to become a cruel dictatorship?
And secondly:
The Venezuelan government not only controlled the oil business(a basic tenet of “socialism”…when things went bad, the government went far beyond “socialism” and basically outlawed all other businesses, by controlling their prices and forcing them to lose money.
Again,puddlegum,do you expect any American government to take such extreme, dictatorial steps?
It’s true that American society is very divided by racial, and “tribal” groups who hate each other. The current culture of Identity Politics is ugly, and very unhealthy.
But America is a long,long way from becoming a dictatorship with no opposition party in the government, and no freedom to conduct regular business.
Bernie-style “socialism” ain’t gonna be the end of the country.
Yes, those are all good things. But they didn’t happen because of some crackpot theory that Canada has a smaller population. What does population size have to do with anything? Earlier you tried to make the point that Sweden has a fairly homogeneous population and the US doesn’t. But neither does Canada; in fact, if anything, Canada is even more diverse than the US, because of more open and progressive immigration policies.
But let’s get back to all those good things you list – cutting government spending, eliminating the deficit, running a surplus, reducing the national debt. You describe these economic miracles as having begun in 1993. Know what happened in 1993? This happened:
1993: Liberals, led by Jean Chrétien, win a majority and soundly defeat Progressive Conservatives, led by new Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who are left in fifth place with just two seats, their worst ever showing.
That’s right: in 1993, the federal Liberals totally decimated the Conservatives, who were reviled after years of mismanagement, and the Liberals proceeded to govern with fiscal responsibility for the next 13 years, resulting in all the progress you describe. Maybe the US would do better, too, if it didn’t have lunatic Republicans cutting taxes on their wealthy patrons and driving up the deficit and the national debt through pork-barrel projects and military spending. And if they didn’t have idiots like Reagan and his “Operation Coffee Cup” brigade back in the early 60s warning that if the US was foolish enough to enact Medicare it would bring on the dark days of communism and the end of freedom as we know it. Today they’ve moved on to trying to repeal the ACA because that’s too socialist for them. Heaven forfend that the blacks and poor people should have access to health care! Fat chance of ever getting single payer in the US with these lunatics around. Don’t blame the population size, or diversity, or the blacks, or America’s history. Put the blame where it belongs: the plutocrats and Republican ideologues.
Wrong again. There is more than one determinant of health care costs. Poorer countries with a lower cost of living like Mexico are going to have lower costs just from that. But the other major determinants are the efficiency of the system and the ability to control costs. The US fails miserably, and uniquely among developed countries, in both those areas because its health care system is driven by essentially unregulated private insurers, and is treated as a market commodity responsive only to the almighty dollar and not to the human needs of the patient.
It doesn’t help; even with formatting and fixing punctuation it is still unreadable.
Venezuela isn’t in economic and political freefall because it is “socialist”; it’s economy faltered and then failed because of bad management, patently unsustainable social spending, and more of all a dependence upon oil exports that brought in the majority of wealth into the country, much of which went into the pockets of a small group of politically connected people while basic socioeconomic inequalities and physical infrastructure went unaddressed. A badly run economy will belly flop no matter what political-economic label you ascribe to it.
The vast majority of developed nations have social benefit programs and some kind of assured health care with a public-private model without turning into a Third World quagmire of corruption and mismanagement. Those who suggest that the United States—which in every other context is venerated as the once and future “Greatest Nation on the Planet”—cannot take care of the poor and indigent to some minimal sustinance level or provide assured access to basic health care but somehow can managed to spend nearly twice as much money per capita on its military than the other NATO allies speaks to how much the “narrative” of economic opportunity and the role of the government in cultivating the conditions for broad prosperity and social egalitarianism has been hijacked by corporate interests out for immediate profit at the expense of long term health of the country and the people of it.
We can afford a little “socialism” like basic health care and price controls on phamaceuticals, subsidized education, and programs that provide permanent housing and job training to the economically homeless without breaking the public piggy bank, and if managed transparently, without being subsumed by fraud and waste. Sure, we might have to roll back those corporate tax cuts, and I’m sure telling Big Pharma that they can’t jack up prices on their drugs by double digit percentages annually to boost their profit margins is going to make some people angry, and cutting out the USD1.3 trillion private student loan industry is going to entail some “readjustments” by people used to making an easy guaranteed profit over a demographic that has little choice or knowledge of what they’re signing up to, but as they say in the infantry, “Tough shit, Petunia.” Of course, to accomplish any of this, we’d have to get the private “dark money” out of politics, and almost nobody has the guts to do that.
Stranger
Well, that’s a new twist on anti-socialism propaganda, to me anyway. “Sure, socialism may work okay for all those square-jawed clean-living white people up in Scandinavia, but would obviously be a disaster for sleazy mongrelized banana republics like Venezuela and… us.”
That’s what conservative patriotism has devolved to, folks. “America: Too Uncivilized for Decent Governance (So Suck It Up, Losers).”
Other first-world countries can afford generous safety nets because they don’t have to spend much money on defense. Why? Because the U.S. subsidizes their military; we promise to come to the defense of our allies. As a result, our allies can get away with spending a relatively small percentage of their GDP on defense, while we (in the U.S.) need a strong defense to protect us and them.
Even if we accept this argument (which is debatable on a number of fronts) at face value, it doesn’t apply to the parts of the social safety net on which other first-world countries spend less per capita than we do.
Partly that is true but it’s also true that the US wastes a great deal of money on ridiculously expensive aircraft, ships and other hardware. Do we really need as many aircraft carriers as we have?
Even if we accept that premise—which I think is overstating the US contribution to the post-Cold War security of Europe and understating how much having a massive standing military encourages the US to engage in fruitless and expensive military adventurism abroad—the reality is that the Department of Defense is actually the nation’s largest entitlement program, and even modest cuts to it could fund vast social welfare programs.
We’ve been adverse to welfare programs in general because of the failure of Johnson’s “Great Society” programs, and perhaps rightfully so in that they effectively did little to elevate people into a sustainable middle class, but that doesn’t mean that providing health care, educational assistance, and an economic ‘safety net’ are goals that we should not aspire to. I realize that for the very wealthy, maintaining a large underclass of people who can be easily exploited because of their lack of economic and political power is desireable, but it is an overall terrible thing for the future of the country, unless your ideal of a future is to look like India with its institutional social stratification. A prosperous middle class and reduction in socioeconomic divisions is a sine qua non for overall prosperity and viability…unless, of course, you want an economy based on factory workers and coal miners instead of intellectual workers and skilled craftspeople.
More to the point, we waste enormous sums of money on programs and technologies that are designed to fight the last war instead of preparing for future conflict. The F-35 and the Long Range Strike Bomber are but two of many development efforts that are essentially pointless but extravagant wastes of money to fight a type of war nobody is going to fight in the future.
Stranger
A lot of older folks think of “Socialism” as, to use a phrase of Bill Maher “Communism’s gay cousin”, but someone upthread has rightly pointed out that the right has really devalued the term by applying too, er, liberally. If you call X, Y and Z socialist programs someone who actually likes those programs can’t be blamed for thinking: “Gee, I must be a Socialist then.”
Look up where Big Pharma spends its money. You’ll see it spends more on marketing than on R&D - marketing which is not allowed in much of Europe.
Next time you hear an ad warning us that toenail fungus will kill us all, you’ll know why our drugs are so expensive.
You are contradicting yourself, since Canada did all this with single payer healthcare.
But perhaps part of it is not having unaffordable massive tax cuts which aren’t supposed to bust the budget but which always do. And which increase income inequality, making us more like Venezuela.
BTW we have friends who just fled from Venezuela - one kept her citizenship so they are legal. The poor might have gotten more in the past but there was never anything like equality. Even in the better days it was like an NRA nightmare - you had to hire someone to stay in your apartment when you went on a trip or it would surely get robbed. The US is nothing like Venezuela.
Note they got worse as they got more autocratic. Which is yet another reason to resist Trump.
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I don’t understand the significance of countries’ “similarity” here. If I want to make leaded petrol illegal, why must I first be like other countries that have implemented such a policy?
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The idea that the US is more similar to Venezuela than Canada required some pretty high-class cherry-picking. I’m impressed.
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At least the OP mentions another country than Venezuela, so we’re getting somewhere. In Conservative media right now it’s simply “If you reduce the cost of healthcare, you pass the event horizon and the only possible future is Venezuela”
I was wondering about this myself, and I hope OP explains it. But let me try to take a stab it.
Don’t you see that banning leaded petrol in a country of 100 million takes ten times the effort that it would take in a country of ten million? You’ll need ten times as many painters for your “No leaded petrol sold here” signs, ten times as many inspectors to sniff the petrol for compliance, ten times as many prisons for the violators, and so on. Not to mention ten times as many lazy government bureaucrats.
The U.S. began its phase-out of leaded gasoline when the population was only about 220 million. If we’d waited until today’s 325 million population it might have been impossible. Yes, China banned leaded petrol with a 1+ billion population, but they don’t have the ethnic problems the U.S. has. Some of the Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongols in China can pass for ethnic Han; others have the grace to stay in their own enclaves.
North Korea has a population of barely 25 million, but still may not have banned leaded petrol! That’s because they’ve adopted Bernie Sanders’ system of government — any attempt by them to ban leaded petrol would lead to high taxes and hyperinflation.
No, the Sanders-Kim model of economics just doesn’t work. If the Apollo Project that put a man on the Moon had been run by the government of an over-sized country like the U.S.A., it would have ended in failure.
Well firstly it’s not that I can’t imagine reasons why being similar in some way might be advantageous. The point is simply that “The US is very different from Sweden!” or whatever, is not an argument in itself.
It has to be shown what is different and why that means the whole program becomes impossible.
I’m not sure that the examples you’ve given work particularly well though:
And, all else being equal, you have ten times as many laborers around to do that work, ten times as many customers etc
The US spends 3.3 % of GDP on defense. France spends 2.3 and the UK 1.8. Meanwhile, the US spends 18 % of GDP on healthcare while France spends 11 % and the UK 9%. So you know, I don’t see how that extra 1 % of gdp on the military means you have to spend an extra 9 % on healthcare, or how saving it would somehow help.
Meanwhile, the European NATO forces has 1,5 million personnel. The vast majority professional. Russia has 750 000 about half conscripts. So I am not sure what the US would be protecting anyone from exactly.
Tell me the truth: Did you really not understand that my entire post was a satirical Whoooosh?