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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

> I cannot comprehend why anyone would be against health care for all?

Then you probably shouldn't voice an opinion on the issue. If a lot of people disagree with you can't come up with a coherent explanation for why, then you almost certainly don't understand the problem space.

> Can someone help explain to me what the oppositions point of view is?

Government-run healthcare is not socially optimal.

Edit: The people downvoting me are salty because they realize that they can't form a coherent argument for an opposing opinion. Guess what - I already know all of your talking points. I would engage with you on them, but this shitty website won't let me post more than like 5 times an hour.

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More people are in favor of universal healthcare than against it.

No one fully understands the problem space, those that do only understand the parts they care about. However, the current system just doesn’t make economic sense for 90% of current and future Americans.

Therefore, we should change the system, and given the success of universal healthcare schemes throughout the developed world, we ought to try it ourselves.

> More people are in favor of universal healthcare than against it.

In the US, you can get an answer in either direction depending on how you phrase the question. When you bring in the fact that this will cost money, people tend to flip. Most people in the US already have healthcare through the government or through their employer, so they don't actually really care enough for anyone to pull this off politically.

> Therefore, we should change the system

I agree, the current system is sub-optimal.

> given the success of universal healthcare schemes throughout the developed world

What success? Most countries with "universal healthcare" A) are poor relative to their demographic-imputed economic capacity B) have low-quality care compared to market-based healthcare systems, and even compared to the worst-of-both-worlds American healthcare system often have horrendous metrics on quality of doctors, procedure wait times, etc.

Perhaps some of our richest, urban, and politically left states could show us the way. It's not like they don't have enough money or political support.

Maybe unchecked immigration and a vast welfare state will work out just great. I'd just rather California prove it out first before we roll it out to the rest of us.

US healthcare is severely under-performing in comparison with other systems. https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-...

People should acknowledge the system as flawed and not have market ideals stand in the way of fixing this flawed system.

Another note is that universal healthcare does not imply government-run healthcare. I live in a country which is an example of this - Israel.

US healthcare isn't good. I never said it was. But the correct direction of reform is towards market-based healthcare, not to make it even more DMV-like.

> universal healthcare does not imply government-run healthcare

There is no practical way to implement one without the other in the US.

> But the correct direction of reform is towards market-based healthcare

I suppose if you subscribe to, say, the normative-over-empirical approaches of the Austrian school of economics. If you are concerned with universality and cost-effectiveness, instead of the doctrines of the free market cult, reform toward the shape of systems which empirically do those things better than the US, which there are plenty of examples of in other advanced economies, would make sense.

My evidence is that I've lived in countries with market-based healthcare (Thailand, Mexico) and countries with socialized healthcare (Canada, UK), and the market-based healthcare is always infinitely better. My wife had to wait months to see a psychiatrist in Canada, before we moved away. WTF? In Thailand it's like $50 and you get in right away.

> empirically do those things better than the US

Why are you bringing up the US? It's not market-based healthcare.

> Why are you bringing up the US?

Both the source article and every comment in this thread except for one on the middle explicitly references the US; I didn’t bring it up, it was the established subject of the discussion.

> Government-run healthcare is not socially optimal.

This needs justification, especially since socialized medicine works better in so many other countries.

I can't comprehend how someone can believe in a flat Earth or that vaccines cause autism but I'm knowledgeable enough about those issues to emphatically state that such people are stupid or willfully ignorant.

With regard to government run healthcare not being socially optimal. The United States spends far more money per capita on healthcare than any universal health care system in the world. There are lots of examples which show that universal healthcare systems can be much more optimal than the American system.

The factors that cause America to spend a lot of money on healthcare don't go away when you switch to a single payer. If anything, they get worse.

Reform needs to happen elsewhere; for example, we need to stop using taxpayer money for extremely cost-ineffective treatment of very old people (which is where most of our money goes).

The factors might not go away. It depends on how the reform is done. To say that they won't go away is incorrect. You don't know this. As with all reforms, they can be done well or poorly.

Sure, in a magical world where we suddenly switch to a perfect utopian medical system, the problems will go away. But none of the concrete proposals in this thread will make the problems go away.

It's hard to claim that this can only happen in a magical world when there are numerous examples of universal healthcare that provide better outcomes with lower costs.

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