On the off chance other Americans were unaware of this: Other countries are democracies too (and many are better functioning)
> because private citizens can voice their disagreement
I'm not sure that's true anymore in the US. At least not without fearing repercussions.
IMO universal healthcare is awesome as the final safety-net that provides critical care, no matter your financial or employment situation. Yet it doesn't need be the only option. If businesses or people with money want to pay more to get care faster from private sector, that's okay too. It's how the system works here in Finland.
* private is good for better rooms, more scenic views, personalised spa like service and near immediate access to non life essential procedures
* public keeps the majority of people alive and triages procedures, you can get overnight heart stent surgery for free if required, might have to wait a few months for non critical knee surgery.
Safety nets would be great, but a net that arrives several days after you have already fallen to the ground is not very helpful. That is what rationing-by-queueing does. Maybe Finland is great - I believe you! Britain's system is not.
I'm from the UK, everyone I've met in the NHS has good intentions but the system itself means the standard of care is very poor. I have no option to go elsewhere with my £'s if a receptionist is extremely rude to me or a doctor won't listen.
Not to say the US system is perfect, just that adding even more government intervention (and associated plunder) by making healthcare universal, is perhaps not the answer.
In the UK, private healthcare is very much an option if you have the £.
Uh huh. Because companies that have the explicit purpose of making as much money as possible don't "plunder". Why do you think it is that the US spends more public money per capita than many other countries and yet still has worse healthcare outcomes?
One of these is an obvious, outright lie. I wonder which.
If you want free at the point of healthcare, clearly you are better off in the UK than in the USA. If you want to pay for better care (like, well off middle class, not millions) then you're still better off in the UK than in the USA because we don't have perverse incentives for healthcare insurance, so the cost is lower even when you include the price of NHS services you aren't using. And if you're paying literal millions for healthcare then you ought to be paying for others' healthcare even if you aren't using it in principle.
Does it make logical sense that public healthcare should work better? That's irrelevant because, empirically, it does.
Some other Americans (there is some overlap) also think that the US is so large and diverse that essentially its States are their own countries and the US is more like its own continent, and talking about the American _nation_ or even _country_ is meaningless. It is a union of States (though it is rare that someone argues that the US is not a country).
North Korea is officially a republic, but it's closer to a hereditary, absolutist monarchy in practice. The UK is officially a constitutional monarchy, but in practice not all that much would change, if they demoted the royal family.
That whole intro is whack, really;
There are many things that I or Anthropic or most of you would look at as mass domestic surveillance, that are legal, and it is DoW’s position that it’s their job and duty to do everything legal to protect our country, including those things.