Hacker News Reader

Comment by eckza | Hacker News Reader

It's very naive! "We were hiding the truth then... but we're TOTALLY not now."

Mmhmm. Sure.

For my part, I find it best practice not to trust government any further than I can (over)throw them.

Hey but government healthcare totally wouldn't be corrupt at all, and the last 140 years of government regulations in healthcare are not an indicator of the future.

Sorry I'm always a bit mind boggled the way people both don't trust government and want more government.

I'm not even a huge government-run-healthcare supporter, but if you look at the health outcomes of Americans + the percent of the GDP which goes into healthcare, it should be fairly clear that corruption is already rampant. I'd honestly be impressed if the government could grift more than the private healthcare industry already has.

You're combining too much into "trust". I'm not worried that the military is being corrupt when it hides this kind of information. And I'm allowed to want less of some parts of government and more of others, and to think that some parts are effective with money while other parts aren't.

Maybe instead of "supposing" we could simply evaluate empirical data: the US has some of the worst health outcomes in the developed world despite spending more per capita than anyone else. Clearly something is wrong, and clearly systems like the NHS work very well.

Trust is contextual. I don't trust the government to be up front about their secret aircraft, but I know that healthy people earn lots of taxable income, sick people earn less, and dead people earn nothing.

Corruption hides in a complexity. A true “universal” program with no gatekeepers, no special qualifiers beyond citizenship, has a much smaller attack surface for corruption than the status quo. As soon as you introduce qualifiers and people to police those qualifiers you will get corruption.

The problem is that most universal programs are not truly universal.

Ideally the fed only does unconditional universal (I shouldn’t have to prefix this with unconditional since that’s redundant), and leaves everything else to the state and below.

There's no such thing as "true universal" healthcare and can't be because it has an inherently limited supply..

Either you have market pricing (existed before Medicaid), shortages of care with rationing (talk to old people from Canada and the UK if you don't think their health care is rationed), or some gross hybrid (the current American system)

What do the Nordic countries do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com