WSJ also has a political agenda, which requires a second source for any story in there, from the other point of view.
18 Trillion -- yikes! It's not until the 5th paragraph that we find out that this includes health insurance and that me and my employer wouldn't have to shell out for that anymore. Does it save me money overall? A question not asked. But they do make a big deal about that number and how alarmed they are at it, even if it it's designed to save money.
edit: oops. Its 18 trillion over a decade. So 10% our GDP.
I'm even starting to think the electronics industry and software industries would benefit from being completely centrally planned.
History has shown that free markets fail to allocate well. And lots of socialist and communist countries have demonstrated that fully centrally planning an economy is possible and can be done well. Central planning rarely fails.
In the presence of non-rational behavior - such the the type of decisions people tend to make when making what they believe to be life or death decisions with extremely imperfect (and asymmetric) information - markets do not efficiently allocate resources. Throw in the fact that the decisions are frequently framed in terms of probabilities and made under duress and you've got a whole mess of psychological problems as well, even if the economic assumptions did hold (they don't).
That doesn't speak to a need for centralized planning per se, but it does mean that markets won't do the job correctly on their own.
But breaking away from the sarcasm, I agree that communism isn't useful. It's just there are already parts of the United States are mostly government controlled, so an argument that no parts should be falls flat on it's face.
http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...
This is likely true, but I also expect it would be worth it in terms of social stability and progress. It's okay if your costs go up if you also get better health and education out of the deal, so earning power also goes up.
There are many who agree, so lots of voters will be voting to express that agreement. You can try to change my mind, but you must do so by solid argument, not by telling me my opinion isn't operative.
As for what every voter gets - a pull at a lever with minimal connection to person and no connection to policy.
But instead on HN, my Facebook & any story about Bernie. His supporters automatically try to counter any kind of scrutiny of the guy, his positions & his plans. For crying out loud The guy is running for president, he's not a saint and he deserves every bit of scrutiny.
Not to justify it, but it kind of makes sense. Many of Bernie's supporters are finding a reason to participate in politics for the first time, or feeling cared about by the system for the first time, and when something threatens their new champion they feel like they themselves are threatened.
This definitely speaks to a wider phenomenon in society, where a lot of people had lost hope and are just now finding some, whether through Trump or Sanders. Taking that bit of hope away could be very destabilizing. There's also some interesting human nature in there, regarding conflating one's identity with one's beliefs.
On the back end, rather than Aetna shelling out money to the hospital so that you can get treated for free or cheaply, the government would do so - just like it already does for Medicare and VA.
So it is not $18tn additional burden - it is a similar burden, but not going through the hands of private insurers who take a cut.
Insurance is one of the things that a government can be very good at. It's not an area of great innovation, so the benefit of having it be a free market is relatively limited, and negotiation leverage is very important, so size is very beneficial. The natural tendency of the private insurers has been to consolidate and to look more and more like Medicare in terms of size. Except they also have a profit mandate, whereas Medicare doesn't, so they take a percentage of all spending and suck it out of the system. That portion isn't helpful to the users of the system.
3rd paragraph they break it down some -- 15 Trillion for health care over 10 years, or averaging 1.5 Trillion per year.
There were ~151 million Americans in the labor force and employed last month[1]. If they're the folks that will be paying, then it's something like $9,934 per year in taxes that need to be collected per tax payer, to support the (in 2013) roughly 316 million population[2] of the US with an additional roughly $4,747 in government spending.
(I'm using 2016 employment numbers because 2013 we were still recovering from the recession, unemployment was much higher, and it's better to play with conservative estimates.)
WHO[3] has 2013 numbers indicating Government spend on healthcare at $4,307 per capita, and total spend (govt. + private) at $9,146.
With 2013 numbers, we'd be bumping the public spending on health care to $9,054 per capita.
To note, in 2013, of the US private spending, $3,063 out of $4,839 is on insurance plans. The remaining $1,776 is the per capita out of pocket cost (again, for 2013).
I don't think I know of any single-payer systems around the world that covers all costs. UK, Germany, Sweden [3-5] all have expansive single-payer systems established. The out of pocket is indeed lower for these -- a few hundred to $700 ish per capita vs our $1,700.
Those programs, if you have a gander, are more substantial for the massively lower government spend per capita on healthcare overall. If we're suddenly looking at $9k per capita govt spend, vs the 3-5 for these other states, I'm not sure that we've yet fixed something.
The selling point of the Bernie concept must be putting this initially more-expensive insurance plan in place ($3,xxx vs $4,747) with the goal that sometime after 10 years we'll have seen enough price suppression that our out-of-pocket goes down enough to break even, or start to reduce total costs, over the private-only market.
10 years is a really long time. And adding $9,900 / year on average to each taxpayer seems like a big number.
[1]: http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/laus/us/usadj.htm
[2]: http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/us-population-2013/
[3]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-USA?lang=e...
[4]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-GBR?lang=e...
[5]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-DEU?lang=e...
[6]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-SWE?lang=e...
But vice/heavy and sometimes wired even still have content that I'd throw $4/mo at.
Depsite what most people say, this is the case for FoxNews, but you'd be hard pressed to convince any Liberal of this fact.
Also, people frequently confuse a "commentator" with a "journalist"
Commentator - Karl Rove
Journalist - James Rosen
No really sure what my point is... but having bias is the norm, not the exception.
This is however, a completely different question to how correct their opinion is. Judging that is a whole different ball-game.
Just that people tend to not see bias when it agrees with their personal notion of truth.
Also, there's roughly 0 unbiased coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict at this point. You kinda have to just read multiple sides from different news outlets and try to sift through the bias yourself.
E.g. most recently, it's hard to tell from a headline about an IDF executing an unarmed guy lying on the ground with a headshot whether or not it's a fair interpretation of the situation.
I'll have to apologize for not digging up good references because I don't have time. Several years ago there was a scandal in the Japanese press where one of the news outlets admitted to printing fictitous stories with an anti-nuclear agenda. This was before Fukushima (and I'm struggling to remember which news outlet it was, so I won't try to guess). I suspect that what is happening is that Reuters (and probably other news aggregators) are quite happy to take stories from established reporters on the ground. I think they do not rigorously check the facts, though. I have occasionally noticed other similar mistranslations, for example when the Japanese finance minister speaks at G8 summits, etc. Surprisingly often the report that gets picked up in the English news services is virtually the opposite of what is actually said.
My rule of thumb: If it is a contentious issue and it is happening in a country where English is not the main language, the odds that you will get an unbiased report in English media is virtually 0. The closer to home you get, the more likely you are to get good reports, but even then if you actually check the sources yourself you can find glaring errors in a shockingly large percentage of the stories.
People are people. People are busy. People don't check other people's work. Entertaining fiction sells better than complicated fact. It's really never going to work out. As long as you know that, it's fine.
No Agenda Show [1] (podcast) is pretty reliable source of information as they're 100% listener funded. They basically 'deconstruct' traditional news media, politics and world events and go above and beyond anything that will be ever produced by 'mainstream news'
The show is hosted by one of the 'founders' of podcasting.
What does help is getting some news from outside the country. At least that will give you a different view.
(Eg I remember all the German newspapers blowing in the same direction about something Deutsche Bahn did a while ago, while only the Neue Zurcher Zeitung (from Switzerland) dissented.)