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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Like in the civilized countries.

While I agree with you, one thing that absolutely drives me nuts with this argument is scale.

Norway Pop. 5M (approx) Finland Pop. 5M (approx) England Pop. 53M (approx) Canada Pop. 35M (approx) United States Pop. 318M (approx)

The scale is way off from many other countries who have implemented the kind of healthcare reform being talked about.

When you get to hundreds of millions of people all kinds of issues arise that you don't see elsewhere.

China and India are the only countries more populous than the United States and I'd be nervous to experience their health care system. In fact you have to go quite far down the population list to get a first world country where that kind of healthcare is being implemented (happy to be proven wrong here)

We already have the healthcare system in place, and it already works well. The problem is cost. While it's impossible to say what the cost driver is, when you look at the performance of companies in the healthcare sector, you'll see they're doing extremely well, outpacing the S&P500 by 50% over the past decade. [1]

So at least some large portion of this cost increase is going into the pockets of executives and shareholders.

[1] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=5485&...

Wonderful argument. Don't do things our way then you are not civilized. That's the way to win people over.

And being offended over someone pointing out the uncivilized healthcare in the USA rather than being at the awful healthcare system is so productive, yes?

Yes. Because I don't care for the divisive nature of the comment. If the person can learn to refrain from such childish comments in the future then I would find it productive.

Besides, my opinion of the comment has no bearing on my opinion of the healthcare system in any way. I can be offended by both at the same time thank you very much.

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