https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control. No other military could even try, but the the USA could. It's not a matter of lack of military capacity.
Iran military is trying alright.
Complexity.
There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.
That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').
But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.
Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.
There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.
That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.
Health insurance company margins are meaningless. All the large insurers are actually "pay-viders", meaning they own huge (and growing) chunks of the physicians (providers) they pay out.
Go read STAT's Colossus investigative series on the myriad ways UnitedHealth Group abuses this structure. All the other pay-viders do the same.
Pay-viders can "generate x% profit" for any value of x. They control all the relevant levers, which also by coincidence eliminates any incentive in the entire system to reduce costs.
They are required by law to only make a certain value of x, and so, surprise surprise, they all make x!
Where do you think that money comes from?
You could just delete united healthcare and save bucketloads of money. They don’t actually do anything anyone wants, other than extract money as a middleman.
I never understood these kinds of arguments and they always come from those defending US military might.
Either they can do it or they cannot, if "the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it" is true, which it appears to be, then the US Military cannot control Hormuz.
So it means we aren't fighting in Iran the way we would in defending a hypothetical invasion of the lower 48 states, great.
But does it mean we'd fight any differently in the South China Sea, a Russian incursion into Poland, etc. Unclear, and presidential whim based.
Of course, other Presidents have been willing to put in some sort of effort to make to make a case. And usually have some of theory of victory or purpose. And generally avoid making weird random claims about invading NATO allies.
The entire 25+ year GWOT era has resulted in 7k American military personnel dying.
Vietnam that number was closer to 60K in 8 years, when US population was also 33% lower.
Dramatically different impact on society.
Sending marines to take an island in Hormuz or a carrier under fire in the South China Sea might look a lot closer to Vietnam than GWOT in a hurry.
All the money in the military has gotten us, almost certainly, the ability to conquer virtually any plot of land anywhere on the planet at any time.
But that does not (thankfully) intrinsically generate the political resolve required to do so.
Democracy and markets are beautiful things. It's fantastic that it can constrain even a military as mighty as the US and a commander in chief as braindead as Trump.
I've seen the same logical fallacy used everywhere; including people hyping Russia and China.
They don't though
People always say this, but I suspect Americans are more unhealthy in general and actually need more healthcare per person.
We have a development pattern where people barely walk, but less walk or cycle to work.
I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran. It's far too easy for Iran to launch drones/torpedoes from small watercraft or from nearby land. I expect they could control Hormuz for a while, but it would be very expensive and I'd expect the logistics to break down fairly quickly if the economics doesn't stop it first.
I suppose "could" here is a bit of a stretch. Like technically, yes, you could if you whipped up your country into enough of a frenzy to support it. Hell, Iraq happened (twice), so I suppose it has historical precedent. And yes, a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran. But I can't imagine any circumstance where that's possibly going to happen in today's reality (outside of an Iranian terrorist event on USA soil, for instance).
I doubt that - Iran is very large and would require something like conscription in the US to get anywhere near the required amount of troops. The US doesn't have a great track record with conquering and occupying other countries.
This is like saying "I could easily afford a Ferrari. It's just that I wouldn't be able to make the interest payments on the loan". Military conquest is more than just guns.
The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans?
There was never a path to victory that didn't involve ground troops. We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. Previous administrations did not do this because the cost was well understood.
There has never existed a military who could win this conflict without ground invasion. This was understood when this administration started it.
My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war.
If the US military does not have the ability to hold, occupy, and install allied regime change, then the US military cannot win a war with Iran. You cannot separate the short term wins from the long term objectives. No one looks at Imperial Japan and says "they easily bombed pearl harbor, but due to policy failures they couldn't keep control of the South West Pacific theatre.
The US winning WW2 wasn't just dropping the nukes and high fives. There was rebuilding the Japanese nation, aligned to the US, becoming a long term ally.
This is no different than Afghanistan. Future humans aren't going to look back and say "the US easily controlled Afghanistan for 12 years, and then just returned to the Taliban". The lessons learned will be the US failed to hold Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power and it was a military failure.
No matter how you dress it up, I can't afford the ferrari.
The USA and its allies could sustain the Afghanistan occupation indefinitely, but chose not to(prematurely, in my opinion).
In Afghanistan, the west chose to lose, but victory was possible. We were(we, I was there in 2010) winning hearts and minds of the younger generation but abandoned them. Another Donald victory.
Iran is an impossible situation.
US would lose a land war with Iran. They’d lose it spectacularly too.
In Afghanistan, there are some mountains, but they are in the middle. The Taliban fucked off into the mountains and they couldn't do jack.
Iran on the other hand is a plateau fortress lined by mountains on all (accessible to US/western allies) sides. A land invasion of Iran means no supply lines and no way out. The words "one does not simply" come to mind. It is essentially the ultimate meat grinder unless you can win decisively in days, which is impossible because the entire apparatus you are trying to destroy is distributed within aforementioned mountains and operates with decentralised/autonomous command that has been preparing for this exact eventuality (being invaded by an opponent with vastly more firepower and overwhelming air superiority) for the last 40 years. Not to mention absolute fucking hellscape it will be for troops on the ground with FPV drones and Shahed flying into clusters of US marines and being broadcast on Telegram.
A land invasion of Iran is empire suicide. You can't win, you can't go home and you are left with just pouring an infinite amount of resources and lives into the most asymmetric and geographically hostile theatre of all time.
But the commitment does not exist at present. No one wanted this apart from a few hawks and the Israeli security establishment.
Yeah it's stupid, though with this administration stupid seems to be the flavor they prefer.
This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.
> the reason
2. Running out of munitions is bad but it's the least bad possible problem. We know how to solve it, just pay for higher volume munition purchases. There's no suggestion the missiles don't work well. They actually are quite effective! We just spent the minimum on expendable purchases and bought new carrier groups instead.
Restocking at much much much higher volume than we just spent will cost $50-100 billion, which is not cheap, but is not THAT expensive compared to any other government program (it's like... 2% of our COVID spending). And it's actual effective reindustrialization unlike other uses of the money.
You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).
Maritime insurers are understandably conservative. If the ship stays trapped it continues to pay premiums (insurance company wins). If it risks passage it risks a $10M payout (insurance company loses). If there's risk of a single missile the insurers won't allow the ships through. How can an insurance company thousands of miles away stop a ship? "If you risk the passage you're not covered by insurance"
Pretty sure Iran has spent the last 30 years ensuring that they can mount gorilla attacks indefinitely in the face of overwhelming invasion.
That has been their deterrent strategy for decades. Intelligence analysts out front should have told ya.
(A massive invasion would also not open the strait.)
This is a lesson that conservative administrations have refused to learn for decades. I hope Curtis Lemay is experiencing a toasty afterlife for all of the suffering he has caused humanity due to a zealous conviction that aerial bombing campaigns win wars, and his lasting legacy in conservative war strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Post-war_advoca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_hawk
Big picture, I'd categorize the problem as human nature and "sounds too good to be false".
Notably, one of the largest "Liberal hawks", LBJ, often disagreed head on with Curtis LeMay because LeMay was too insane in his villainous disregard for human life. LeMay's dehumanization of the citizens of foreign nations was on par with Nazism, imo.
I'll give you that Obama and Biden are a black mark on leftwing politics in terms of aerial bombing as they continued the status quo instead of enacting positive change. But the both-sidesism is a bit too much here.
If "aerial bombing as an effective strategy" still means "you can win wars just by dropping enough bombs", I'll disagree. Because that use of "conservative" (simplistic maximum macho force) is equally applicable to Army leaders who want to occupy every square inch of the enemy's territory, or to Navy leaders who want to sink everything associated with the enemy and establish a water-tight blockade.
There's nothing liberal about a political leader reining in a nut case like LeMay. George Wallace quickly regretted his selection of LeMay as his '68 running mate. Or look at America's military actions during President Reagan's terms - for all the big talk and military build-ups, actual military actions were very carefully limited.
But in a very different sense of the word "Conservative", aerial bombing is often extremely Conservative. That sense is minimizing political commitment to a conflict. A leader (with effective air superiority) can drop some bombs or launch some missiles, talk tough about having "delivered a message" - then quietly drop the whole thing, having risked fairly little, and without giving the impression of having failed or retreated. From the PoV of a political leader managing risks, putting boots on the ground would be far less conservative.
Based on this paragraph, I think we are in agreement?
My point is basically that conservative leadership, both within and outside of the military, has sought (and implemented!) simple solutions to complex problems that end up backfiring immensely. In this case, the problem is “enemy country bad”, and the solution is “bomb them submission”. I’m not sure we need to go into details on how that’s a terrible idea?
That’s not to say that liberals don’t put forth simple solutions to complex problems, it’s just that conservatives have successfully implemented obstructionist strategy starting with Newt Gingrich in the 90s, and the closest we’ve come to anything on the national level to liberal policy has been the ACA, which was so hamstrung that it was nearly unrecognizable when compared to the Romneycare it was modeled after. It’s also the stated goal of Project 2025 to roll back nearly all of the progressive policy wins of the Obama and Trump 1 eras (the latter wins coming only via judicial decisions, not executive or legislative).
Boats in the water and boots on the ground can be popular. But it needs a credible story, told by credible sources.