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Comment by asdf6969 | Hacker News Reader

> Why don't you change it?

There is no general “you” with agency. The few people who have the ability to change it have no incentive to do that.

Dems in the last two elections before this one have had a single payer candidate. Both times the dem primary voters rejected him. If people want single payer they need to vote for it.

80% majority in a democracy can not change whatever they want? Or.. the ideology people inhalate is so strong ,it hacks democracy itself?

agreeing to change and agreeing how to change aren't the same thing at all though

Your core mistake is assuming that America is a democracy.

It is not. It has been very efficiently designed to strip as many people of their political voice as possible. Our major elections are literally engineered to give insane advantages to whichever party is currently in power

Most people know the overall system sucks, but they also think their insurance is mostly fine because they haven't had to use it very much (which is simply definitional, 80% of costs come from 20% of people). And so people fear the unknown. They would like something better but fear giving up what they have right now for something they haven't experienced. It is also a deeply personal issue, and has so many entrenched interests. Health care spending is 1/3 of our economy.

Any evidence that "most people" are given a voice into actual systemic change? I haven't been given an opportunity to vote for a candidate that actually wants to change our healthcare system, personally. Obama helped many people, but his moves did not really attempt to solve the problems of insurer inefficiency and grift, and instead codified their position as gatekeepers.

The US is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy.

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Having the majority of the population supporting something doesn't really mean too much in the US. I mean marijuana legalization was supported by near 70% of the population even 2 decades ago. Many states now have legalized recreational marijuana, and yet it is still federally illegal and the federal government could at any time shut down all the state approved marijuana sales. I think that by itself makes it pretty clear that the US is barely democratic and the will of the people is easily and regularly ignored by politicians.

The US is not a functioning democracy, so no, they can’t.

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