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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds of years from now, when this time period is documented in history books, my great great grandchildren will look back on our greed-driven for-profit healthcare system as a shameful black mark in American history, just like we look back at the history of slavery today. They’ll ask “How could a democracy have allowed random, treatable health conditions to ruin people financially?” They’ll be horrified by how greedy and barbaric we are as a people, same as how we look back at the Civil War era society that promoted slavery.

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No they won't, it'll be whitewashed in textbooks and only those who study history will know. There's already so many so-called black marks that are worse and already quietly overlooked.

What are some of these worse black marks?

During elections people used to be bribed with alcohol.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/swilling-the-pla...

One of a thousand examples.

Colonialism is one of them. History books in US and UK still teach that the colonizers saved the savages and brought them to the modern age. They continue to completely ignore that most colonies underwent centuries long recession as a result of the repression. Japan was never colonized and became quite advanced.

No they don't in the UK.

Which books? I've read through a fair number of history books published in the US, and they have tended to have a strong focus on the problems caused by colonization while criticizing the idea of 'saving' the locals.

> History books in US and UK still teach that the colonizers saved the savages and brought them to the modern age.

My history books (1980s public school, New York, US) most definitely taught nothing of the sort.

I don't think that's true. I went to school in the UK in the 80's and my kids are going to school in the US now, and this is far from what I remember then and not what I see now. "Colonial guilt" is how I would sum it up. Not to say there's not a lot of whitewashing and selective reporting, far from it. But it's probably been 50 years since "teach that the colonizers saved the savages"..

You have a point about the economic impact of the colonialism, and the economic value that was extracted. At least in the case of the UK, that was made it a global power. That is usually not discussed much, because it's history, not economics...

I wouldn’t argue it’s worse than slavery, but as a singular event Bikini Atoll was horrific.

Ask a Native American.

Slavery

Annihilation of local tribes by colonisers

forced opium enslavement of China

dividing up China between France/Britain/Japan

pestilence from European cattle annihilating 2/3 of inland african people via starvation

the policy of the Holy Roman Emperor and The Pope to keep german states at war with italian states

emperor Chin executing the whole village where any crime at all occurred

The Spanish Inquisition

The Khmer Rouge

The Long March under Mao

Stalins purges and gulags

the list goes on

The original premise was that black marks will be overlooked. I don’t know how to break it to you, but the ones you’ve listed are infamous and hardly overlooked.

Premise: No they won't, it'll be whitewashed in textbooks and only those who study history will know. There's already so many so-called black marks that are worse and already quietly overlooked.

And you just offered a ton of support for the competing hypothesis that our period of history will be infamous along with the ones you’ve listed.

you dont need to break it to me... ask a group outside of HN and they will come up with a couple if you’re lucky.

try it.

No offense to this site, I like it a lot so far, but I wouldn’t favorably compare it in terms of non-technical knowledge to most of the educated population. You listed a ton of really infamous events, ones that are routinely covered in intro classes at all levels of schooling, and have entered even pop culture. If you think that most people are unaware of all, but a couple of them, you’re grossly underestimating people. I’d argue that the only two many people wouldn’t know are the actions of the pope one, and the Chin emperor. The rest are familiar to pretty much everyone who made it through high school.

> the ones you've listed are infamous and hardly overlooked

You think? Here's my experience (I went to school in Germany).

> Annihilation of local tribes by colonisers

Saw some TV documentaries on it. Not mentioned in history class.

> forced opium enslavement of China

Heard about it on a history podcast. Not mentioned in any sort of mainstream media or curriculums.

> dividing up China between France/Britain/Japan

Hearing about this for the first time now.

> pestilence from European cattle annihilating 2/3 of inland african people via starvation

Hearing about this for the first time now.

> the policy of the Holy Roman Emperor and The Pope to keep german states at war with italian states

This rings a bell, but only very distantly. So maybe I've heard about that somewhere, but no idea where.

> emperor Chin executing the whole village where any crime at all occurred

Who's emperor Chin?

> The Spanish Inquisition

Saw some TV documentaries on it. Not mentioned in history class.

> [the last three bulletpoints about communist dictatorships]

The gulags were mentioned in history class. Nothing about Mao or the Khmer Rouge. I saw some documentaries about Mao on TV, though.

In general, history education in school was infuriatingly superficial wrt the 20th century. The curriculum was basically chronological, starting with the antique Egyptian empire in 5th grade and ending with contemporary history in the 10th grade. (Then in 11th through 13th grade, the same structure, but condensed into three years.)

The obvious issue with this structure is that you always run out of time at the end of the curriculum, so you have to rush through the most recent parts of history, which IMO ought to be given the strongest emphasis of all periods.

These are certainly bad, but generally well-documented historically. I don't formally study history, but have read about most of these.

This is a moving target; I haven't been in school for a while. Here's two:

The complicity of US corporations in the holocaust.

The way the US protected people who committed atrocities to gain a scientific advantage after WW2.

I'd love to learn more - got any sources?

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen talks a lot about how whitewashed, and classist history text books are, and why that is the case.

A summary of the book is that history textbooks have a tendency to avoid showing anything negative done by great American historical figures because they are held up as heroes for people in imitate. There is a narrative of constant progress that is told in the textbooks that does not match with actual history. History textbooks avoid talking about class struggles altogether, because if they did they would be labeled as Marxist. There is a general avoidance of discussing immoral foreign policy. The book backs up these claims by citing many popular textbooks and how they cover, or don't cover, historical events.

(The following summary of the book is my own understanding of the book's opinions and not necessarily my own. I haven't studied history enough to hold my own opinion.)

The US foreign policy for the Americas in the early 20th century is something that tends to be thoroughly ignored.

Treatment of indigenous peoples around the world is also another big blinders, although the US has done one of the better jobs of being forthright about poor treatment (compared to Canada, say).

And let's not forget how the US rolled all over latin America during the cold war...

Try "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler, USMC major general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_Unit...

The problem with that book is so much of its unverifiable and unsourced or a gross exaggeration of the actual facts. It is not an accurate representation of history, and seems to just try and shock the reader.

I googled around a bit, and it appears that most of the criticism comes from those on the right who aren’t a fan of the narrative.

Even though I'm inclined to beleive you, that's not really a rebuttal to what the parent comment said.

Regardless of who the criticism comes from, the point still stands. Also, one of the first results that came up: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/wineburg-histor...

I don't know if that guy is a liberal or conservative, but he is a Stanford professor, and that seems like a pretty reputable source. At least more than Howard Zinn.

I read that, and it isn’t exactly a scathing critique. He appears to recognize at least some value in it.

Do you by chance consider yourself a conservative?

No I am not a conservative. I have read that book, and the first time I read it I liked it a lot. I thought it was the definitive book on US history. However, I have heard from many reputable sources about the problems that the book has, and Howard Zinn himself has an obvious agenda. Regardless of ideology, a book that paints itself as nonfiction history book should be objective and unbiased. The Peoples History of the United States is undeniably biased in my opinion, and for that reason I do not recommend it except for someone's own personal enjoyment.

Isn’t that sort of debate pretty common when it comes to history books? The entire point of the book was to write about history from the point of view of those who “lost.” Of course it’s biased in that respect, and it was on purpose.

It depends on what political system we have by then. If we do develop further and progress to a one whole planet mentality (no countries/borders etc) then we will know our history as it was.

If we continue on the current path then im afraid we'll still be divided with all the consequences (same old same old).

" No they won't, it'll be whitewashed in textbooks and only those who study history will know. There's already so many so-called black marks that are worse and already quietly overlooked. "

Can you name a political system that didn't selectively rewrite or selectively teach history? I think of it as a spectrum, but very non-ideal whichever direction you look.

I think comparing this to slavery, the Indian wars, Jim Crow, etc. more than a little hyperbolic.

There's a big difference between using violence to control other people, take their land or systemic disenfranchisement and the best healthcare being affordable to a big chunk of the population.

Things that are Really Bad(TM) involve people actively doing things that we consider highly immoral today. Healthcare is just a case of failing to find a workable solution. The situations are very different.

It's deeply immoral to use violence to control people. It's deeply immoral to hoard money and resources (to "be rich" in today's language) and ensure the system of resource hoarding continues over generations through lobbying and corruption. That's the extent of the comparison -- the magnitude of the immorality -- and I think it's fair?

>"It's deeply immoral to hoard money and resources"

This sounds like "it's deeply immoral to plan ahead" to me.

To me, there's planning ahead, with a large emergency fund and survival supplies for one's family, and then there's hoarding money and resources.

"When you start talking about whether it is moral to be rich, you end up heading down some difficult logical paths. If I am obligated to use my wealth to help people, am I not obligated to keep doing so until I am myself a pauper? Surely this obligation attaches to anyone who consumes luxuries they do not need, or who has some savings that they are not spending on malaria treatment for children. But the central point I want to make here is that the moral duty becomes greater the more wealth you have. If you end up with a $50,000 a year or $100,000 a year salary, we can debate what amount you should spend on helping other people. But if you earn $250,000 or 1 million, it’s quite clear that the bulk of your income should be given away. You can live very comfortably on $100,000 or so and have luxury and indulgence, so anything beyond is almost indisputably indefensible." ~ Nathan Robinson, It's Basically Just Immoral To Be Rich

Or you can save all that money to work on your own projects like curing cancer. Eg, tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are being wasted every year on crappy (not even reproducible in principle) medical research:

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/01/14/paul-glasziou-and-iain-...

How do you expect anyone to compete with the government and fund useful medical research if they aren't allowed to accumulate enough wealth to compete with the tidal wave of crap that governments are producing? You need to "hoard" at least a couple hundred million dollars to even hope to compete with that.

Maybe we can agree if people in positions like Larry Ellison's or Elon Musk's were hoarding money with the intention of funding medical research, setting up entities that make it difficult-to-impossible to blow it all on buying a Hawaiian island or lifting a car into space for entertainment, then we wouldn't be having this exchange.

If you look at the latest news stories about Memorial Sloan Kettering (ProPublica is a place to start) and conclude that the government should minimize involvement in medical research for the betterment humankind Because Competition... you will certainly find plenty of friends, I suppose

I'm not saying competition is good for medical research, but having done medical research I am well aware of the unbelievable rate at which crappy papers are being published. And then when you try to publish a paper you're expected to somehow address all these previous crappy papers... We simply need some alternative to the current system and they are all being drowned out because they simply cant compete funding-wise.

Also, think about Elon Musk with 22 billion (https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/elon-r-musk/). His entire wealth is what governments currently waste on crappy medical research every couple months.

Lets say NIH is producing 99.99% crap (about 1 in 10k papers is useful) at ~$30 billion per year. Elon musk could set up MIH (Musk Institutes of Health) that is 100x more efficient (producing 1/100th the papers, but that are "only" 99% crap) for ~$300 million/year. After 73 years, about one human lifetime, the fund would be bankrupt. That's why I say you need to accumulate at least a couple hundred million dollars to hope to have an effect.

It’s a case of failing to find a workable solution despite there being one right in front of you, because you’re pointedly ignoring it.

I agree with you, but

> and the best healthcare

The US does worse across a wide range of health measures.

>I think comparing this to slavery, the Indian wars, Jim Crow, etc. more than a little hyperbolic.

>There's a big difference between [...] systemic disenfranchisement and [...] healthcare being affordable to a big chunk of the population.

I edited your post a bit. Frankly, I don't see the difference unless you don't classify healthcare as a right. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights would disagree with you, but that's okay.

If that doesn't float your boat, we can look at outcomes instead. In both cases, people are forced to live without dignity regardless of whether or not that end is achieved by systemic financial coercion, by strapping someone to a board and pouring water on their face, or by bludgeoning them.

All are inhumane.

Healthcare is not a 'we can't find a solution' problem. It is a 'a lot of people are making a lot of money off this combination of inelastic demand and opaque pricing for technical service' problem. Call a spade a spade.

From when it was sold[1]:

> "I'm shocked it sold at all," Lederman's wife, Ellen, told The Associated Press on Friday. "We would let little kids play with it and have their picture taken."

> Auction manager Laura Yntema told NBC News that the winning bid was placed online — but she declined to provide further information about the buyer, citing the auction house's confidentiality rules.

So an anonymous person provided for Lederman’s retirement in exchange for “ownership” of a piece of metal, with little intrinsic value, no sentimental value, and that will forever be know as “Lederman’s Nobel medal” never as belonging to the buyer.

Just another way to look at how the “mechanics of society” worked in the case.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/physicist-leon-...

How are nursing home costs handled in other healthcare systems?

Are nursing homes even prevalent in other countries? When I visited Thailand they were appalled at idea of putting elderly relatives in a random building and not with family, but I don't know if they are the exception or the US is

One thing people don't usually mention alongside high cost of nursing homes, is that it seems to be pretty well bounded in time: see for example, https://www.geripal.org/2010/08/length-of-stay-in-nursing-ho...

I had very similar figures (avg 18 months), although unofficial, from a person involved with nursing homes over here (western european well developed country with good medical system), although I obviously cannot cite.

So yes, please visit them as soon as you can after admission, don't put away...

I'm not actually certain that the Civil War era is viewed universally as a barbaric time, or that slavery is universally viewed as a black mark in American History. There is still plenty of popular music and subcultures that look on those times positively, perhaps even fondly. In some sense the culture behind the civil war is still very strong in America, and whether or not it was bad is still heavily debated.

What? There's certainly debate around whether or not slavery was the cause of the Civil War, but slavery is absolutely universally viewed as a black mark in American history.

These delusions that hateful ideas don't have any traction in America are exactly why Trumpism has been able to succeed. There are sizable groups of people in this country with terrifying beliefs. You've got to take off the blinders.

"The Times found that nearly 20% of Trump supporters did not approve of freeing the slaves, according to a January YouGov/Economist poll"

http://time.com/4236640/donald-trump-racist-supporters/

Well, apart from all those people who protested the removal of Confederate statues.

Those people will also be viewed as a black mark on American history

There's not really a debate about whether or not slavery was the cause of the civil war, at least not among historians. You can go a lot deeper on this if you want, but take for example one of the first sentences in the Mississippi Declaration of Secession: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery"

I entirely agree with you, such statements can be found in every one of the secession declarations. Unfortunately, those documents don't make their way into discussions involving the history of slavery and the Civil War on the right.

I think when we use the word "debate" like this, we're doing a huge favor we don't owe to a group of people who are — in bad faith — not acknowledging a set of facts. Just because a group of people hold some belief doesn't make it valid. There's no "debate" over whether vaccines cause autism, there's no "debate" whether climate change is real or affected by humans, and there's no "debate" over whether slavery was a central issue in the Civil War.

Who is "heavily debating" slavery? Among whom is it not "universally viewed as black mark in American history"? Not any black people, I bet!

There's a fairly heavy debate about whether or not people in jail should be forced to work for no pay.

The 13th amendment calls it out as an exception to the ban on slavery and there is not universal support to change that amendment

The parent is very clearly referring to pre-Civil War-era chattel slavery.

You mean just like we're still debating whether the Nazis were wrong and whether it was right to stop them? I bet you no Jewish people are debating that like no black people are debating whether slavery was wrong. How can you possibly make an argument that any type of slavery is not wrong? I'm very curious to hear this argument if you have one.

Yes, marginalized people will not be discussing whether their marginalization was a good things. However, there are neonazi or Nazi sympathetic subcultures, some of them fairly large. It would by incorrect to then state that it is universally agreed upon that nazis were evil and a black mark on history. Similarly, there is a significant movement in the United States that either waxes nostalgic about or outright prefers the pre-civil war era with its slavery.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think such people's hateful opinions should be counted when speaking about such things. There are always going to be people who do not think murder, slavery, and torture are not wrong but right. They are a small minority and while it's important you make note that such scum and their opinions exist, it's also important to note that they do not represent a significant portion of people either in number or in strength of opinion. There will always be outliers but I'd say most people and all decent people agree that slavery and the nazis were both wrong.

I find it funny that you think in hundreds of years we are not going to be greedy or barbaric. It is basically hardwired into the human condition.

Completely agree but don't think that changes the likelihood of future generations looking back shamefully. They'll look back just as we do and say "at least we don't do that anymore". They'll be hypocrites, but it doesn't mean they'll be wrong about us.

For one we are a Republic not a democracy. If we were a pure democracy its arguable whether we would be in better or worse shape. If we were a Republic as our constitution was drafted, prior to the supreme court gutting state and individual liberties with the commerce clause,etc. I think we would be in much better shape

What is the purpose of your first sentence? Colloquially we speak of democracy as being something with representation that is elected with a large majority of the adult population being eligible to vote. Surely you know this so I can't figure what the point of being so pedantic is. Your assertion in the last sentence certainly needs more evidence to support it. As it stands it's unlikely to sway anyone and quite frankly paints a picture of you being a fanatic. This is especially so since the Commerce Clause was the justification for the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act greatly increased individual liberties.

Hundreds of years from now? I look at it that way now and I assume all decent people do too.

We evidently have many not-decent people who vote for like minded Congressional representatives. At least a majority otherwise this would have been fixed by now.

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