[ExI] Healthcare (was: Re: Piker)

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 30/10/2026 23:20, spike wrote:
John wrote:
>
> >…Why is it that the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway as well as nearly every other nation in Europe….
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>  
>
> Those countries are socialist.  The USA is not.  Our socialists hate us.  They hate our country.


These countries are /not/ socialist. How many times have I said, use of the word on its own just causes confusion? China, Vietnam, Cuba, these are Socialist countries. Some of the countries you mention are Social-Democratic. The rest are simply not Socialist. Having the word 'social' in some of your policies is not what makes you a socialist state!


>  >…CAN afford to pay for something very much like Medicare for all even though they are not as rich as the US?


I think we all know the reason for this: In America, health care is treated as a profit centre, rather than a service to the people.

This is what results:
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-system-compare-to-other-countries/

Fix this first, then you'll be able to implement universal healthcare.

And good luck with that!


> The people of the USA are richer than the people of Europe in general.


That's only true if you're looking at mean wealth per capita. Look at median wealth, and it's a very different picture.


>   But the governments of Europe are far richer than the government of the USA.  The American government is the poorest government in world history, having the largest debt ever accumulated.
>
>
> >…And why can I say the same thing about Japan, Taiwan and South Korea? They all have something like Medicare for all. AND THEY ALL LIVE LONGER THAN AMERICANS!
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> It isn’t about their medical systems.  Americans are rich enough to afford bad health habits.


That strikes me as ridiculous. It's the poorest people in America that have the worst health outcomes, not the best. This is about the medical system, combined with the extreme disparity in wealth between the richest and the poorest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult

Note that the US has the biggest difference between the median and the mean wealth per capita of all the countries listed, which highlights the extreme wealth inequality.

In fact, most americans are not more wealthy than most people in most of the other countries, shown by the very low ranking of the US in the median wealth table.

It looks to me as if the US could benefit greatly from a healthy dose of the 'Socialism' that you seem to be so horrified by (by which I mean of course, Nordic-style social democracy, not Communist-style socialism).
-- 
Ben
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." - Pablo Casals, via Albert Einstein