Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

> ...all too often an outcome of a large bureaucracy

> If the US had universal healthcare, this would be less of a problem.

Italy's socialized healthcare apparently didn't cut it. There are plenty of examples of the existing U.S. healthcare bureaucracy royally screwing up in the covid response.

Do I'm not buying the logic that an even bigger bureaucracy is the solution to Kafkaesque bureaucracy, at least not for this problem.

I especially don't understand people who are railing on the responses of Trump or BoJo also arguing that the U.S. president should be even more in charge of this sort of thing.

View on HN

I can't imagine there's any healthcare system that has more bureaucracy than the US.

American single payer could well be.

In the US, the borked healthcare system is a root cause of poverty. That's where universal health care would help with this. There would be fewer people living hand to mouth.

In the U.S., healthcare is a product, not a right. Just like many other things: education, clean water, police, justice. Public versions aren't supposed to meaningfully compete with the private versions, because competently run public institutions constitutes a threat to the idea a) free markets are inherently superior b) classism is good.

On the one hand classism purports to be a motivator: if people just work harder, they can improve their class standing and buy more stuff; on the other, it's just a variation on aristocracy: some people are better than others, and they are wealthy people, it's an indisputable fact of their superiority that they can buy more and better versions of the basic things that we claim form a civil society.

If public institutions are incompetent in a democracy, how is it the culture isn't also incompetent? Incompetency and aristocracy are not civil institutions, yet we've managed to institutionalize them both by just making excuses for them.

Any idea how Canada is fairing during this crisis?

I think it's still too early to tell. I live in Toronto and we've been mostly shutdown for two weeks. I believe we took actions earlier into our outbreak than Italy and the US did with theirs so hopefully that will help. We had testing already in place in January so I think the numbers were reliable. There are backlogs now and people with mild symptoms aren't getting tested. Most clinics have moved to tele-health consultations to avoid spread. From what my friends in healthcare have told me, we're not overrun yet but we've cancelled all elective surgeries, etc. It seems like there are PPE shortages and healthcare workers have been rationing.

You're assigning certain biases to government. It would be replacing a thousand small bureaucracies with one. Wasn't the talking point that single payer would put the actuaries and medical coders out of work?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com