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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

This comment thread is full of people sharing their uninformed opinions without reading the article. It's maddening, the article is very good and worth a careful read.

Two pull quotes to whet your appetite:

> The country spends about $4.3trn a year on keeping citizens in good nick. That is equivalent to 17% of gdp, twice as much as the average in other rich economies. And yet American adults live shorter lives and American infants die more often than in similarly affluent places.

> Much less attention is paid to a small number of middlemen who extract far bigger rents from the system’s complexity.

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This has been the situation my entire adult life; I've never understood why American Exceptionalism means that we seem to get screwed on healthcare (and seemingly just about everything else), but I think I've more or less come to accept it, and mostly I just try and avoid the medical system.

> and mostly I just try and avoid the medical system.

Me too, but the medical system knows no matter how healthy we were when we were young, in the end we'll need the medical system in one way or another.

I did not say I succeed, sadly. I actually have a somewhat problematic hip condition that would probably best be solved by replacement, but that seems like an irreversible decision that binds me ever more deeply into the system, which is depressing.

I had a lightbulb moment when I realized the USA is not a country (or collection of states) that exists to benefit the citizens. It's not there to provide healthcare or education or food to kids and all that.

It's a system (or whatever word you want to use) designed to benefit companies and corporations. Everything is designed the way it is to create maximum profit for the owners.

Think about the whole concept of an LLC, look at tax rates and the kinds of fines a company gets when they do something bad. They profit hundreds of millions and get a $400,000 fine for breaking the law. This is not an accident.

> It's a system (or whatever word you want to use) designed to benefit companies and corporations.

You will note that this is literally the concrete political definition of "fascism". Typical definitions highlight more the cultural features of such a politics (i.e., deference to authoritarian rule, ethno-based identitarianism) but the literal organizational aspects of fascism are described well by the above quote (bundling the governmental, industrial, and cultural aspects of a nation into a singular mass directed centrally for the purpose of benefit of those at the top -- primarily high-ranking government officials and owners of massive critical industry leaders -- by support or extraction from the bottom).

The AI has been running things for its own benefit for hundreds of years.

>They profit hundreds of millions and get a $400,000 fine for breaking the law. This is not an accident.

Can you give an example of this?

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