Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Spaniard here since this article[1] about Spain was prominently noted in the linked article, there isn't a basic income plan here and nothing like that has happened, please stop with making up this kind of stuff about other countries.

There is regular unemployment insurance and an unemployment plan targeted to temporary job freezes (ERTE) that has always existed, nothing to do with basic income. I would also like to see BI even if it's just a test, but what we have here has nothing to do with it.

The government has just made the rules for these pre-existing unemployment plans a bit more flexible (or arguably not). Also the rent situation has become a lot better.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.nl/spain-universal-basic-income-...

Edit: removed references to the future since I cannot predict it and moved those to the present.

Edit 2: it's also interesting to see the original headline was "Spain is moving to" (already false, there's no specific plan now) but in this article the mention was "Spain decided to institute the program" (ridiculous).

Seen similar misinformation about Nordic countries and their UBI testing/experiments.

There is definitely a component to how much someone wants to believe something to clickbait/fakenews.

I'm about as "red as they get" and there's something really grating about US citizens talking about "UBI", and pointing to a variety of social policies in various European countries.

These policies are hard-fought and need to be well balanced to be effective in the long term. You can't just implement them without thinking about repercussions and side-effects.

I'd say, if you're a US citizen, forget about "UBI" as a simple answer to the various social wrongs within your country, and focus on your healthcare; that's where various European models could be used as a partial model, and it's a very good and achievable first step towards a fairer and healthier society.

We never hear about the downsides of other countries models either. It's always a cherry-picking of the best policies and pretending there's never any trade offs. That kind of disingenuous promotion doesn't do any favors when it comes to convincing people.

> It's always a cherry-picking of the best policies and pretending there's never any trade offs.

Well it's not like UBI is the exception here. This is normal in all forms of political discourse.

Interestingly enough, 5-10 years ago in Spain you could hear some proponents of private healthcare to compare it with the US. Now I think there's enough understanding that the US model doesn't work that the proponents instead talk about Singapore or other private models, no one compares them to the US anymore.

Some arguments against universal health care I have heard in Spain: • Not enough choice, since you cannot e.g. pay more to get better treatment. • It's more expensive, since there's no free market to move prices down. • It's more efficient, since people are not paid to do nothing and impossible to fire (common complain about gvmt jobs here).

No beef here, just relaying what I've commonly heard

My impression is, if you compare health care costs across various wealthy countries, it's pretty clear that socialised health care is cheaper than privatised health care. Netherland has universal but privatised healthcare, and has one of the most expensive health care systems in Europe, costing more than half that of the American health care system. And it's not particularly better than the more socialised healthcare systems of the surrounding countries, as far as I can tell.

And the only place in health care where you can have a free market at all, is in elective treatments. Treatments that you can choose not to use when they are too expensive. For everything else, it's your health and possibly your life at stake; you can't really say no to treatment, so you pay whatever it takes, and that's a situation that's easily abused by profit-seeking companies.

> it's pretty clear that socialised health care is cheaper than privatised health care

Causation goes the other way. If your healthcare is cheap, you might as well socialize it, and it will mostly be OKish; if it's too expensive (as in the U.S.) you have no chance of running a satisfactory socialized system. Switzerland has largely private healthcare and mandatory ("universal") health insurance, but its costs are not too high despite it being a comparatively small country with inherently higher costs of providing such services.

> For everything else, it's your health and possibly your life at stake; you can't really say no to treatment, so you pay whatever it takes

This is not really true. There is such a thing as pointless overtreatment, and the right balance of benefits vs. costs can only be reached with increased price transparency on the part of providers.

Aneurin Bevan, The Minister of Health under which the NHS was created, said that to win support of the doctors, "I stuffed their mouths with gold".

The mistake we all make is thinking the market includes us, the patients. If there is anything resembling a 'normal' (price discovery) market, it's between hospitals and other care providers and the government. The entity with the funds can foster healthy competition between the entities with the product/service. If you need medical attention, you need medical attention. A treated patient is not the customer, they are the output.

> "Causation goes the other way. If your healthcare is cheap, you might as well socialize it, and it will mostly be OKish; if it's too expensive (as in the U.S.) you have no chance of running a satisfactory socialized system."

I see no reason why it would work that way.

I mean, switching the US to a completely socialised system is certainly going to be a hell of a task, and even Medicare is way more expensive than it should be, but that's also because it's required by law to be expensive; Medicare is not allowed to negotiate lower prices, which throws away the primary advantage of a socialised system. But from what I understand, Medicare is still generally cheaper than privatised healthcare for the same treatment (though more expensive per patient because it insures only older people).

"Switzerland has largely private healthcare and mandatory ("universal") health insurance, but its costs are not too high despite it being a comparatively small country with inherently higher costs of providing such services."

The only graph I could find showed Swiss healthcare being even more expensive per capita than Dutch healthcare. This seems to confirm my suspicion that a privatised is generally more expensive.

While I agree with your point generally, it can still be useful to have competition between hospitals.

The NHS in the UK had great results with publishing clinical outcome statistics making people shun places with bad practices. This lead to a decline in deaths and complications.

"focus on your healthcare"

Very true. No UBI without health care for all.

Yes. I'd say:

No UBI without good affordable health care for all.

No UBI without good affordable education for all.

No UBI without humane unemployment benefits for all.

No UBI for all, because you already managed it.

Wouldn’t a (high enough) UBI mean the free market would create “affordable” education and “affordable” health care and obviate the need for unemployment benefits?

There is no free market in education credentials or in healthcare. Both sectors are heavily regulated by the government.

Regulation isn’t the reason those sectors aren’t free markets. On the contrary, regulation exists because they can’t be free markets. Both lead to market failures due to information disparities, principal-agent problems, massive externalities, and a lack of free choice (in the case of health care).

The issue is the amount of regulation, of course. Regulatory capture can have worse effects than most market failures, and healthcare is one of the most obviously "captured" sectors.

Most health care is not emergency care so there is a lot of choice. Same with education.

They could easily be freed from massive amounts of regulation.

I would prefer more regulation to make sure prices are transparent. The current system is set up to make prices as opaque as possible. The employer has a lot of information, the provider has information, the insurance has information, but the patient is being kept in the dark. That is, until the big bill comes in the mail.

Completely agree. Prices are required. What hospitals are doing now basically amounts to fraud.

In no other 'market', since it's not a market, do customers have no idea if what the price of goods and services are.

No country that has achieved high-quality affordable education and health care for its citizens has done it via market-based means. It probably can't be done.

Healthcare in Switzerland and Singapore is largely private.

I don’t know about Singapore but in Switzerland there is a lot of regulation around insurers and doctors to set prices. Same in Germany.

It's not a free market though. It is heavily regulated.

It’s not in the US either. Health care is intensely regulated.

Not the pricing and billing practices. At least not in a way that’s beneficial to the patient.

Oh it most certainly is regulated, but I would agree not to much benefit for patient.

Although the reason you pay $0 co-pay for preventative visits is because the govt says insurance companies have to.

Money is a representation of wealth, if you print more of it, the money loses it's value to match the wealth. We call this inflation. You cannot give away wealth that you do not have.

If we truly had a free market, we'd have none of these issues, since wealth aggregation wouldn't be prevented through regulations.

For example, you can already get free education of mostly everything from the Internet, but without getting a piece of paper at the end with the stamp of some university. It's a form of regulation, since without that piece of paper you'll have a hard time selling your services. Similarly, you can get all the information you need to lead a healthy life style, making it less likely for you to even need health care. But still lots of people just eat till obesity ruining their own bodies. In Japan there's a system where your company does yearly health checks and if you gain weight, you have to pay more in taxes or some such scheme. Curiously nearly nobody in Japan is obese.

... so you know... obesity isn’t usually from eating to excess because you can. It’s from eating high calorie low nutrition foods. Poor people in the US aren’t obese because they have excess it’s because it is cheapest to buy high calorie foods. Obviously I’m not talking 400lbs, that still takes effort and money, but 250lbs is easy to hit when poor.

With that read, most European countries have UBI and then some. I assure you, the proponents of UBI in Europe will violently disagree.

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