Hacker News Reader

Comment by all2 | Hacker News Reader

> So at some point we decided those were a good idea.

I know that this isn't true for at least Social Security. The original promise was that it would be purely voluntary. It was later rolled out to be mandatory. It has also turned in to a stack of IOUs.

Obamacare was a stack of lies (prices didn't stay the same, quality and access to care decreased, providers could not be kept). It also is a money pit.

I also know that despite our awful implementations of social programs no other economy in the world currently rivals that of the US. Even in poor economic conditions. The poorest of the poor in this country is in magnitude better conditions than their companions in other countries. I'm don't want my country weighed down any more, the way most others are.

View on HN

> The poorest of the poor in this country is in magnitude better conditions than their companions in other countries.

This is objectively untrue by pretty much any measure.

For instance on plenty of health related metrics the US is significantly worse than most first world countries (such as infant mortality), and some regions are worse than even many third world countries (such as Texas).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...

44th on this list

The idea that poor people are significantly better off in the USA is a flat out lie.

If enough people don't like those things we can get rid of them, right? I guess enough people like them.

Also, specifically:

> It has also turned in to a stack of IOUs.

I mean, that's what an awful lot of financial instruments are. It'd still kinda be true even if the fund were bales of cash in a warehouse.

Replying in parallel because I cannot reply to the child post.

> infant mortality

The measures used in the US for determining infant mortality are much more stringent than in other countries [0]. This accounts for the ranking: we track mortality where others do not.

[0] https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/09/infant-mortality-dece...

National Review is garbage. That article states, "Any assumption that the practice of underreporting is confined to less-developed nations is incorrect. In fact, a number of published peer-reviewed studies show that underreporting of early neonatal deaths has varied between 10 percent and 30 percent in highly developed Western European and Asian countries." Yet the article doesn't include references to these "published peer-reviewed studies". Garbage.

I had to do some digging, which is frustrating. Proper journalism cites sources (when able to - corroboration is sufficient in some cases). I apologize for not doing my digging before hand.

Here you are:

1) the WHO admits that measures in countries it collects data from are often not taken in a consistent manner. "Monitoring progress is challenging in light of weak health information systems in some countries. Problems such as underreporting and differences between official data and estimates made by international agencies are some of the contributing factors."

2) We have "... anecdotal evidence suggests that countries do not use consistent practices in measuring these data [2] [3]"

I'll have to do more digging. These are hard to find references. There may be a hard copy of [2] at my university's law library.

[0] http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Life-stages/materna...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193257/#__sec2...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12343088

[3] Hartford RA. New Perspectives on Infant Mortality in the United States: Findings from International Research Studies. Presented at the Association for Social Sciences in Health Meeting at the National Institutes of Health; Bethesda, MD.. Feb. 4, 1992 <-- What's interesting here is that the authors of [1] left a link to scholar.google.com, with no specific reference. This may take a while to track down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com