The US loves war, they have had the war on terror, the war on drugs and now they have the war on immigration and freedom.
But sadly there has never been a war on sickness…
What would that look like, I mean you have the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, what about setting up a Public Health corps?
I am talking, military uniforms, armored mobile trauma centers, guns (every one in the US loves guns), emergency swat style units to quickly access unhealthy people, Public Health corps facilities where unhealthy or sick people get taken to and treated, tactical gear for doctors and nurses, picatinny rails on syringes, camo scrubs, tactical public vaccination vehicles (thinking like a jeep without a roof, fully loaded with doctors and nurses with air rifles firing vaccines, doing raids in anti vax areas.
Humm, I kinda want to see a movie like that, enforced mandatory public healthcare…
So public health (which is different from universal health coverage or single payer system) was a thing and it did a whole lot of eugenics.
Ever wonder where baby contests come from?
In some places in North America you couldn’t get married unless you had pre marital blood tests.
Can you imagine how the antivaxxer and skeptic community would handle that kind of stuff?
I am well aware of governments doing a lot of shady shit in the name of public health.
My country, Sweden, for example, did a shit load of terrible stuff, among the most famous examples are:
- Forced sterilizations were a thing here from 1934 all the way up to 2013 with various criteria.
- The tooth decay experiments at Vipeholm is an absolutely awful thing to learn about.
I am also aware of the US government’s tendency to use their population as test subjects without consent under the guise of public health.
While I knew all of that, I didn’t think about it at the time of my comment, I was busy trying to find a fun name for the fictional force.
Forced Benefits Institute?
We literally already have that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Public_Health_Service_Commissioned_Corps
Well, maybe not the tactical stuff. But all the rest.
Considering the US tends to lose wars on nouns maybe it’s a good thing they haven’t tried yet. What you really want is for them to declare a forever war on health and people will get sick less often.
But sadly there has never been a war on sickness…
Narrorator in future documentary: “And that is how smallpox, once irradicated from the human population, became the next major pandemic.”
The US military won the war on sickness for themselves when they got the VA. I say we bring the fight to the general public.
Yeah, just ask the famously healthy veterans
Could the VA be improved? Yes! Would access to something like the VA be an improvement for uninsured Americans? Also, YES!
Please accept my apologies for my snark, attacking incremental progress serves only the status quo.
Apology accepted and appreciated.
Time to launch the War on War.
No, sorry, that’s infrastructure. Only punishment.
They give a fuck. That’s why it is not universal. How else to maintain dependency?
A sizable and obnoxiously well-funded faction of Americans have been fighting New Deal reforms for almost a hundred years. Rural folks living on astro-turf for generations believing that bootstraps were not a joke. Sacrifices must be made on the altar of capitalism. Same reason MAHA wants people to die of preventable diseases. Thin the herd, cull the weak, fuck the poor, save humanity. “We can’t afford it” has always been absolute horseshit. The willpower isn’t there, corporate America needs its subsidies, failure is free money. They won’t take their own advice and let the free market decide. Socialism for oligarchs, gambling for everyone else.
What’s crazy is how rural America was solidly behind much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, but Civil Rights drove such a wedge that they followed George Wallace right out of the Democratic Party, and by the early 70s had fully aligned with Richard Nixon. The racism was/is that deep, that all those people just gave up everything else they supported politically to try to ensure the government continued to oppress minority groups.
Hundreds of Millions to tear down part of the White House and rebuild it stupider…
Look it up. It’s not stupid. It’s a datacenter.
Million, billion, trillion? What’s the difference?
A factor of a thousand. The refecting pool is a silly distraction! Total bullshit, but you could renovate a million reflecting pools for the price of one useless war (assuming you don’t value the lives or property of the people you’re fighting).
What’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? Essentially a billion dollars.
Yeah… innumeracy really isn’t helping anybody here.
Confused at where the 1.5 trillion comes from, but maybe I’m just not following closely enough.
It’s a big club, and you’re not in it. You do help fund it though.
1,500,000,000,000 16,000,000 3,300,000,000Zillions of dollars!
It’s wild that adding 16M and 3.3B to 1.5T is still just about 1.5T.
We should install a Sarlacc pit in front of the Supreme Court, Congress, White House, etc. Every politician needs to walk across it one at a time to get to work. Every week each person gets to vote for one politician to be consumed by the Sarlacc.
Will America continue to be a hyper-individualist/ everyone for themselves/hustle and grind/zero sum/I got mine so fuck you society? Or will we come together and try to make our nation a good place for us all to live the healthiest, happiest life possible? I guess we’ll see. I can tell you, though, the former is not sustainable. The everyone for themselves/zero sum way requires violence to maintain, and it will end in violence.
It will eventually depopulate, leading to the wealthy being forced to have some sort of agreement, to make things humane for each other, except by then, America will be so weak, it will get invaded like hell.
But yeah, power is what ensures rights. If power is applied maliciously, you will have no rights.
But powerful people looking after their own interests, knowing what a war can cost them, will compromise, and just accept a fair set of rights.
We’re 37 trillion in debt we don’t have money for the stuff we’re spending on
I can tell you who disagrees, anyone who still believe in capitalism. If they say capitalism hasn’t failed or is failing are the enemy.
No, it’s working perfectly well!
If you are born rich, into eugenics, and think the born poor are the root issue of all problems.
I mean
Yeah
But there are a couple issues with this statement from a logical standpoint grounded in reality:
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It’s estimated that Universal Healthcare would be cheaper, actually. Letting hospitals and insurance companies set prices drives up the margins, and almost all of the insurance industry is just needless overhead. It would cost negative money to make the US Government the pricemaker for medical care, and the US Government would spend less money than it currently does to maintain it.
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Even if that were not the case, HYPOTHETICALLY, if you just extrapolate the costs of Medicaid to cover everyone, you’re looking at between tens of billions to hundreds of billions, not 3.
ok but for 2 don’t forget about the trillion. thats a lot of billions
Yeah but you’re not going to convince people to slash defense budget by a full trillion. It would be madness while China and Russia are acting more aggressive than they have been in over 50 years.
yeah but it would not even be close to a trillion and china and russia don’t spend nearly what we do combined.
Well it’s already not a Trillion, so yes. The $1.5 number is Trump’s request for 2027. Even Republicans, as stupid as they are, are afraid of the banks letting them go default.
If you cut 100 billion of it, you would still have 1.4 trillion to kill brown people with.
Well, no, you’d have about 890 Billion because the 1.5 Trillion is an imaginary figure that Trump made up. The largest parts of that are paychecks and maintenance.
To cover costs, we cannot compare the current system. The current, utterly bloated, most expensive system would not exist with universal healthcare.
The US currently spends about $5 trillion on healthcare. About $1T of that goes through Medicare, another $0.9T through Medicaid, which leaves about $3T. Non-government spending is $1.6T through private insurance, $0.6T out of pocket, and $0.5T charities.
The “universal healthcare would be cheaper argument,” which I believe, is based on shifting that $3T of private payments into government spending and bringing the ~85% efficiency of care by private insurers up to the 98% that Medicare claims. i.e.: eliminating roughly $400 B of insurance company profit. That still requires $2.5T revenue increase, which is about 50% of current revenue.
You’re operating under the assumption that the US Government would pay the same prices that they currently pay via medicaid and medicare as well as the same prices that private pays. That’s not the case. Generally, the US Citizens pay double or more than what citizens in other developed nations pay.
Docs in the rest of the world don’t start with $200k student loans, and nurses don’t start $50k in debt. US medicare for all won’t magically give us Swedish hospital rates.
I geniunly wonder what the total cost looks like. Like does it cost sweden 200k to train a doctor?
Agree. I’d love to see someone do a rigorous accounting of any degree program, especially with international comparisions. I once went through a couple of US state universities, and that generally supported the hypothesis of ‘cost of instruction hasn’t changed in 50 years, but burden of payment has shifted from state taxes to tuition,’ but that was based on whatever the schools published as ‘cost of instruction.’ I’d believe that international cost of instruction follows purchasing price pairity, and it seems more expensive in the US because it’s all tuition and no public payment.
Education aside, the USA already solely pays for residency programs. I just don’t see any room for bargaining or negotiations if every hospital is suddenly forced to receive funds for healthcare solely from the federal government or lose practically all business.
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Then fucking do something about it instead of complaining about it on social media every second of every day.
For the strongest, most free nation on the planet, you Americans sure are a bunch of cowards when it comes to defending those freedoms you so claim to love so much.
You want change, force it. Trump is going for another term and you’ll all just sit there and complain on social media.
Fight.
As I read your comment, I was preparing to argue with you. But that last sentence. That single word.
Yes, that is precisely what we need to do (and for many of us, to keep doing). Fight.
People aren’t going to vote in primaries. Ain’t no one picking up guns, yada yada.
These people complaining are either rare or lazy as fuck.
But the liberals piss money away, right? What a joke.
I think it’s bad framing. Deficit spending on war should be called out on its own potential badness compared to tax paid single payer healthcare. It’s easy to dismantle this kind of argument compared to explaining the actual plan in simple language. We will save everybody money and supercharge the economy with single payer healthcare by reducing how much you pay, how much your employer pays, and increasing overall quality. And we will pay for it at the same time. The only people who lose are middlemen and vultures whose income stream are dependent on the current system. And the provision of care will be responsive to what society wants (if folks actually take the responsibility to ensure it, which unfortunately Canada and the UK prove they often don’t). Comparing that, a real plan, to just dumping your money into a pit with a useless war and wasteful governance shows that you’re qualitatively different than the idiots who cannot pour piss out of a boot with the instructions on the heel.
