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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

It's hyperbole to say that Sanders is anywhere near the Venezuelan regime politically. He wants a single payer healthcare system like Canada. It's really hard to convey sarcasm in text, but I'll give it a try: Come and see the socialist dystopia that is modern Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal! It's a modern hellscape!

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Sanders and Corbyn from the UK both explicitly praised Venezuela when oil was at $120 a barrel. Sanders even said Venezuela was a place where the american dream can really be realized. When oil dropped and the whole thing fell to pieces they pretended that it never happened

The Sanders quote was a misattribution, that has been recited so many times that looks properly sourced. Quillette has a properly researched defense of Sanders:

https://quillette.com/2018/03/10/sanders-venezuela-meme/

Corbyn, on the other hand, has explicitly and often praised Venezuela and Chavez. There are plenty of primary sources, e.g.,

https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/309065744954580992?l...

That doesn't really mean much; Trump fucking praised Kim Jong Un. But nobody says America is going socialist because of that.

People just want free stuff and forget they ultimately pay the bill.

People just want a system that works, modeled after other systems known to work, instead of horrible brokenness.

Could trying to fit a dissimilar country's system to our own result in a broken system?

It could, but I don't see that as the likely outcome. Dissimilarities with other countries are greatly exaggerated, and government is better at getting things done than many people give it credit for.

It is possible that the result would still be broken, but it is certain that the result of doing nothing will still be broken.

We can either just keep things broken, learn from what others have done use those lessons to take our best shot at fixing things, or we can completely ignore the hard-won lessons of others and go for an untested and novel approach. Which is most likely to work?

Maybe first figure out exactly what is broken and why?

Seems to me that this has been pretty thoroughly explored already.

In that case it would be interesting to see the premise that gets us from "US' healthcare system is horribly broken" to "Canadian healthcare system is a suitable model."

Things like cost per capita and outcomes lead you there pretty naturally. We pay a shitload more and don’t get noticeably better results.

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