Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

We’re in an era of concierge medicine. At a broad level, I suppose everyone in the country being disease free was more an aesthetic priority than anything with intrinsic economic value.

We have a partisan lean on life expectancy [1]. Maybe the win-win is for blue states to stop fiscally bailing out rural ones [2] and focus on improving their own governance.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/01/america-li...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_taxation_and_spendin...

View on HN

"Blue states" are not airgapped enclaves, completely distinct and separate from other states. And there's a lot of diversity just within those states. The approach you're suggesting is not remotely viable. People who vaccinate can still contract illnesses and die from those illnesses. Many people can't vaccinate at all. Herd immunity is an absolutely essential part of the public health benefit of vaccination.

> Herd immunity is an absolutely essential part of the public health benefit of vaccination

It's the best solution. But it's being rejected by its beneficiaries.

Covid-era vaccination requirements provide the framework for a next-best fallback. Cities subsidise travel between their extremities and their cores--we can invert that into a cost for entering the core.

If you have money in America, you get great care.

If you lack money, you get to die alone waiting in urgent care after ER said it "wasn't serious". And your next of kin get a bill for $20k.

But you get to brag about how much more free you are than some poor schmuck in the EU as you die.

Strongly disagree. My son is going to be born into a county with an active measles outbreak caused entirely by misinformation and stupidity. We can’t vaccinate until 6 months. Absolutely preventable. Zero arguments against vaccination for measles. Public health is everyone’s problem.

> Absolutely preventable. Zero arguments against vaccination for measles. Public health is everyone’s problem

I sympathise with you. I'm not seeing a solution outside suspending this moronic minority's right to make decisions for themselves and their children or leaving the parts of the country that have chosen this fate to their own devices. In that framing, the question is which is leakier: suspending civil rights or literal viruses?

Having an active measles outbreak is a pretty routine occurrence.

France, Germany and Greece are included not just the Eastern countries.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11588923/

While it’s easy to blame anti-vaxxers, a large contributor are people who saw waning immunity and immigrants from countries with poor immunization rates.

Even with 100% immunization youll still have outbreaks occasionally as people come in and out and the vaccine just doesn’t “take” in some small percentage.

Vaccination significantly decreases the severity of measles even in most people where the vaccine doesn't "take."

Thus, number of measles cases doesn't tell the full story. One also needs to look at far rates of hospitalizations and complications.

My comment was in response to the complaint about outbreaks at all.

The pattern you're talking about in [2] isn't by choice, it's a result of blue states paying more federal tax. The decisions about who pays federal tax and how much are made by Congress.

> it's a result of blue states paying more federal tax. The decisions about who pays federal tax and how much are made by Congress

It's presently unclear who decides what is spent and by whom. Withholding funds seems like a valid Constitutional crisis to provoke. At some point, a Democrat will be President. Cutting transfer payments to red states is precedented by Trump.

Between robotics, industry and WMDs, the unfortunate reality is that cities have force projection far outclassing the previously impossible-to-hold country. I suppose it's inevitable that eventually asserts itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com