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Comment by fasteddie31003 | Hacker News Reader

Can the government do anything right? Seriously. Can you give me examples of successful government programs?

  * The highway program
  * The national parks program
  * Army Corps of Engineers' projects
  * FEMA

?

USGS maps are also amazing, not sure really what project they came from but you can get a very good topo map of anywhere in the country. Really nice to have for planning hiking trips.

I'd add the NWS to that. I don't know of a better place to get weather information and forecasts than weather.gov. Perhaps it's just a lack of ads on the website compared to every other weather site.

I see successful government projects in many countries. Unfortunately in the US we have this belief that government projects are destined to fail, which means we don’t invest in them, so they often fail... self fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.

That’s not true! Blue states exist, and they invest in plenty of things. Those fail, but that doesn’t deter blue state voters.

If you look at why they fail, it can typically be followed back to interventions made by the right.

Sorry, no, that excuse is toxic because it provides cover for bad government that doesn’t work. We’re talking about states like California and New York that don’t have a meaningful “right.” California’s attempt at universal healthcare managed to self-destruct with Democrats having the Governorship as well as super-majorities in the state legislature. Every now and then these states will elect a moderate Republican just to get a reprieve from the repeated waves of failure of public services, but those failures can’t be blamed on “the right.”

People in blue states should be madder about the fact that their public services are bad. That just means that people get less than what they pay for, and people in need do without. If it cost Europeans as much money to build subways as it does New York or SF they probably wouldn’t do it! And even when it doesn’t like (like California HSR) and is merely 5-10x more expensive than it should be, that just means 1/5 or 1/10th as many people get the service.

People should be mad about the quality of public services in the states but "delivering universal health care" seems like a weirdly high bar to set.

It’s just the latest example of something European countries a lot less wealthy than California have managed to do that California can’t manage to do.

Right, but those are countries, and California is not. They control their borders, heavily restrict residency, and have their own central banks.

Europe has free movement of people throughout the Schengen Area and a common currency plus European Central Bank. It's not quite federalism but there is nothing here to disqualify California from providing universal healthcare.

Citizens of members states can, for instance, travel through Germany and remain there indefinitely so long as they're financially independent or actively looking for work, but they are not automatically residents of Germany. The two situations, EU member states and California compared to its peer states, are obviously not comparable.

There are clear reasons why individual US states haven't been able to provide universal health care. It's not because the idea is unworkable at a national level; it's because you can't do it state-by-state.

(I oppose single-payer health care, for whatever that's worth to you. I just think the bar Rayiner set for this discussion is silly.)

> There are clear reasons why individual US states haven't been able to provide universal health care. It's not because the idea is unworkable at a national level; it's because you can't do it state-by-state.

How do you figure? This is exactly how Canada's single payer system came about: province-by-province. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc. By 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer healthcare system. To this day, Canada's single-payer system is Provincial, not Federal.

Is there a state in Canada that doesn't provide single-payer health care? Because every state surrounding California would not be.

Not now, but between 1947 and 1961 there absolutely was. That’s the point: it didn’t happen from the top-down at the Federal level, it happened province-by-province and there was a period of time when it was patchwork. It was fine for the Canadians, and it can be fine for Americans as well.

Also, if I’m understanding your argument correctly, it’s that States can’t do this because borders are open, but there’s nothing stopping a State from applying its public insurance only for established residents of the State. This is how State university systems operate; you don’t get in-state tuition at UC Berkeley unless you can establish residence. In theory, someone at the borders could move across State lines in order to do that, but that’s probably a rounding error in the UC budget.

I’m curious why you think Canada couldn’t provide single payer health care. (For the record, I support a Canadian style system.)

The biggest challenge I see is that people might rush to California to claim the benefits. It’s not clear that’s a real problem (and it’s not the problem Vermont and California actually ran aground on).

The Supreme Court’s precedent in this area is a shambles. But if California offered state-run universal insurance, I bet the Supreme Court would approve measures to keep people from moving to California after they got sick.

Adverse selection of people claiming residency benefits isn't the only issue I cited there, right? There are things countries can do to finance universal health care that states can't do.

California would, in practice, need a variety of permissions from the feds to do approximately single-payer, which still wouldn't be actually single payer. Both the ACA and Medicaid would be major federal issues (in principal, it could opt out of Medicaid, but that would lose a lot of federal health care funding California is being taxed for). And it would still have the interface-to-other-systems problems single-payer is designed to avoid, because Medicare and VA would still exist and require coordination of benefits.

No European country would have similar problems, because they are independent nations.

Then maybe the left shouldn’t be clamoring for it?

There's always one person with this comment. From a USA perspective, social security, the space program, the all powerful military machine, operation warp speed, the UFO cover-up. FDA, EPA, FEC. The FTC seems pretty successful if you're a wall street trader. In California , medi-cal covers 1/3 of the population. Firefighters. Police... Kind of iffy here.

Social Security works because the federal government just needs to print checks. Well some contractor prints the checks. But will the government be responsible enough to fund social security sustainably into the future?

The US Space program is falling apart with NASA's SLS rocket failing basic tests and costing $20B. Oh and James Webb being delayed years and costing $10B (if it even works). The only bright light in American space programs is SpaceX and JPL.

The $750B a year military machine is a huge waste of money which deserves a post on itself. Here's a terrible waste from Biden's Defense Secretary nominee https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-austin-us-trained-sy... $500M for 4-5 actual fighters.

I'm ok paying police and firefighters at the local level. The government bureaucracy gets worse and worse the further you get away from local government.

I can go on.

Military: We haven't been invaded yet. And it employs lots of people. And it brings pork to lots of districts. We installed two puppet regimes on the other side of the planet! How is that not success?

Space: every single robot/vehicle/probe that does science across the solar system and beyond. Every single NRO satellite the size of Hubble pointed at our enemies.

I'm actually serious about social security. How does that not work? Between it and medicare that makes most of the federal budget, and it keeps people healthy and fed. Repeating a libertarian trope does not make it so.

Also I’ve heard the SEC and the like has enormously reduced fraudulent/swindling over the last century.

Medicaid seems successful.

This is a vicious circle. The less trust, the less effective government can achieve society's goal.

Just look at all the civil servants like nurses and firemen who still refuse the jab.

The U.S. government was purposefully designed to be inefficient. Checks and balances, multiple branches of government, rotating people out every so often, pesky votes and confirmations to decide anything. “Getting things done” was never the goal. The fact that everyone wants the government to be the one to get things done, and then acts surprised and frustrated when it can’t just shows...I don’t know, that we didn’t pay attention in school when the basics of the constitution were taught?

I mean, can you imagine if Trump (or whichever president you hate) had been in charge of some well oiled “gets things done” government for the last 4 years? The founders knew exactly what they were doing.

Here’s an argument for successful program: “The CARES superdole was a huge success”

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-cares-superdole-was-a-huge-...

Here are a few examples.

Hoover Dam

Panama Canal

Tennessee Valley Authority

NASA's Apollo Program

The Manhattan Project

Energy Star

National Malaria Eradication Program

Boll Weevil Eradication Program

Smallpox eradication

Safe Drinking Water Act and many other USDA, FDA, and EPA programs that regulate food, air, and water quality.

Can you give me an example where a system that isn't a government did a better job than a government could do, while maintaining a similar scale and level of inclusion?

It's easy to be successful when you reduce your goals from something like "vaccinate all long-term care residents in the state" to "vaccinate all the people who we have accepted into our long-term care facility which has a strict capacity limit and we turn away people when it's full or they don't pay us enough"

Also businesses and NGOs fail all the time. Businesses go bankrupt. NGOs continue funneling money into unproven or disproven programs. The world is complicated, and only more so when lots of people are involved.

There is a vast difference between "Can the government do anything right?" and "Can the Trump administration do anything right?"

The Federal government can be an amazing force for help in times of crisis when run by competent people. As we have seen, though, when run by actively malicious people, it can grind to a halt.

The current Covid vaccine situation is due to a bunch of idiotic Federal decisions made starting 12 months ago that continue through to the present day--including things like "Not paying money to vaccine companies in advance to help them ramp up faster".

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