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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone can have care like the VA!

This is a false dichotomy, do not perpetuate this myth when dozens of other countries provide socialized healthcare that beats American healthcare across practically every metric. We can have a objective discussion about the merits of socialized healthcare without you injecting logical fallacies to be inflammatory.

> when dozens of other countries provide socialized healthcare that beats American healthcare across practically every metric

Plenty of counties also provide market healthcare with private insurance without the American issues, e.g. Switzerland [1]. If we want to keep a market-based model, there are reforms that point the way forward.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland

Lots of countries in South America also have socialized healthcare and it’s terrible. The question is, “Is America’s competency with government programs more similar to South America or Europe?”

> Lots of countries in South America also have socialized healthcare and it’s terrible.

Lots of countries in South America have a lot more problems than healthcare. Maybe consider their per capita GDP or something to offset that fact.

Even with that, Costa Ricans, Chileans, Cubans, Panamanians, Uruguayans and Colombians have longer life expectancies than the US, which manages to be 54th in the world while spending about as much tax money per capita as any other country does on healthcare.

It's not easier make it work on a bigger scale.

If you can't make the VA model work in America, that's good evidence that a bigger model would suffer the same, but bigger problems.

Universal healthcare will render the VA healthcare redundant. A soldier will have access to healthcare before deployment and after deployment, whether they got fucked up in a horrible situation or came back safe.

I'll add: it feels like the veterans are begging the VA when they should have that basic human right by default.

> It's not easier make it work on a bigger scale.

Ah, so that's why wholesale prices are so much higher than retail. Diseconomies of scale.

And if you can't make it work in America, the country with the most screwed up and corrupt healthcare in the world[*], how could you expect to make it work anywhere?

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[*] It's a big claim, but I don't know how else you refer to a country that spends twice as much on healthcare per capita than any other country, but comes in 54th for life expectancy, while being the main cause of bankruptcies.

Realistically, yes. Best case, it looks like Kiaser. They're private, but they're both the insurer and provider, and they compete in the market. Realistically, it looks more like the post office or the DMV.

Having received healthcare services in countries with socialized healthcare, no it doesn’t look like that at all.

Have you ever going through airport customs in Europe and compared it to the US? Sure, other places can do these things well, but the US doesn't have a track record of competent government services.

I hear USPS worked phenomenally well until it became a political target. I think the issue is less that we can’t and more that we won’t support or improve these systems for ideological reasons.

USPS is a sanctioned monopoly with a USO.

It's illegal to compete with it.

It's like saying AT&T "worked". Sure you could buy a phone service and pay $$$$ for it, but if I had a better way of running it, they would put me in jail for trying.

The monopoly is only over mail and is scarcely enforced nowadays. And yet USPS is still cheaper and better on parcels where it doesn't have a monopoly, so much so that private parcel delivery will often just use USPS.

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