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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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It’s not irrational. Europe spent decades in economic doldrums before the Thatchers and Merkels and Blairs forced reforms and liberalization. The US largely avoided that. (Though, we’re still stuck with the legacy of FDR, and in many respects Europe is overtaking is on economic liberalization and deregulation.)

As to ACA, it’s a step toward what’s basically the Dutch or Swiss healthcare model. We don’t need to socialize insurance or healthcare services to have a workable system.

The Thatcher years in the UK really weren't anything that special when it came to GDP growth:

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/2688/economics/data-on-ec...

What they did do was a huge move towards financial services and away from manufacturing - and we all know how well that turned out....

> Europe spent decades in economic doldrums

Is that so? By whose standards? Europe is doing fine across the board. There are fewer billionaires but at the same time we don't have medically induced bankruptcies.

> We don’t need to socialize insurance or healthcare services to have a workable system.

You probably do. Simply because disease is distributed randomly (or actually: worse than randomly), unlike wealth.

I could see the case for Blair being a reformer and pushing an agenda of liberalization, much less so for Merkel and Thatcher left the UK in much worse state than she found it even though somewhere in the middle of her rein things were marginally better.

Whose healthcare did the Republicans decimate? People get worked up any time the system changes (e.g. Obamacare caused some people to lose their health insurance plans and in-network doctors); many Democrats were voted out of office after the passage of the ACA. The Republicans realized that and (narrowly) chose not to repeal Obamacare.

The point is - in case that isn't clear yet - that both Obamacare and whatever is the current flavor of the month are both absolutely terrible for the voters and yet they continue to self-flagellate in spite of there being many examples of properly run healthcare systems.

We have unemployment, Medicaid, social security, workman’s comp, social healthcare won’t be any different.

I’m a doc.

Chronically underfunded with taxes going up repeatedly beyond what was initially promised?

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