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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

Christ Jesus, the USA are on average as good as Merthyr Tydfil, the epicenter of Welsh coal mining, which Maggie Thatcher destroyed. It's bad, but no one anticipated it to be that bad.

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I'm not surprised at all. If you compare individual US states to other countries, some parts of the US south have worse healthcare systems than third-world nations. The US is by far the worst health country in the OECD.

At the same time US government spends the most in the world on socialized healthcare.

Of course they do. Just look at how that entire system is set up. It’s very clearly a for profit driven industry first and foremost and a healthcare system in a very distant second place.

The US government spends the most in the world on subsidizing corporations for healthcare. There is nothing "socialized" about it. The public in general gets very little of that benefit. And that holds true even if you include Medicare.

I meant only Medicare and Medicaid. The US government spends on Medicare and Medicare more then any other country on healthcare.

Don't forget the VA, but this stat always shocks people. I don't think people's brains can even hold on to it. It's important to use italics: The US government spends more on healthcare per capita than all socialized systems. The difference between life and death in the US isn't about paying lower taxes, it's purely rent-seeking; i.e. we pay once for healthcare, and we pay once again to the landlords of healthcare, directly out of our pockets.

That's really only because healthcare is so absolutely insanely more expensive here.

You'd have to normalize those numbers. It doesn't mean the same thing if the US spends a billion dollars on 1 million procedures when a more civilized society can do those same million procedures for 300 million.

Between Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA, there are more Americans with socialized healthcare than Britons in the NHS.

Also - Medicare is for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and indigent, and the VA for current and former servicemen, neither of the three groups are good risks. You'd expect higher than average costs even in a well-run system.

There are also hundreds of thousands more Americans going bankrupt from healthcare costs.

If Medi-* actually worked properly that wouldn't be happening.

Per capita based on those eligible? Because if so, that's not surprising, given individuals from those groups are more likely to need expensive healthcare (esp. the elderly). Whereas for countries with universal healthcare, most recipients are not likely to need to expensive treatment. If it's per capita based on total population then I agree it's crazy.

I don't think it's really about healthcare. It's about everything else in life, that makes people obese or driven into a life of drugs (meth, etc.). Healthcare doesn't really save you from that.

If you choose to look at drugs from a healthcare perspective, you'll find countries that have had some success....

It's not so much about the quality of healthcare as it is the price.

You could have the best hospital for free — if you are sedentary, eat poorly, and engage in risky behavior, you will die sooner.

Yeah, well, as long as I can sling code for 100K+ a year in this fine country, it’s not my problem what happens thousands of miles away over in Mississippi.

—HN

Live fast, die young. What's the issue?

Why don't they just e̶a̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶k̶e̶ learn to code?

Do you understand the irony of saying this when we're literally on a thread discussing and caring about the problem that is obviously more affecting the demographics that are non-HN'ers?

No. I don’t understand the love people have for molesting the word “irony”.

That was a meta-comment about what 99/100 threads about “why is Europe poor” or “why do schoolchildren have to practice mass shooting drills” are about (i.e. classic Europe/America culture war fodder); people talking about their precious FAANG jobs and how they couldn’t mine data for 200K annually in their native Moldova. Well, sure, people are dying of preventable disease but, y’know why are they making such bad choices? People should just apply themselves (like me) and learn to code.

Then of course people disagree with them. But the locus of the conversation is still about the upward mobility opportunities of tech nerds.

Then out of those thousands of comments there are “other side of the tracks” observations (I mean stats) about how those who didn’t apply themselves are doing.

You do realize some people on this message board live in Louisiana and Mississippi

Okay Mr. periodless.

Could have fooled me since we’re apparently just talking statistics, not relaying personal experiences.

Its actually worse, imagine all that with no social safety net, no functioning medical system. Here our medical and educational systems are so destroyed that not even the wealthy have a good outcome, wealth just enables their kids to get into addiction earlier than poor kids.

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