It's their own choosing, they have three major political parties that are all right wing (reps, dems, libs).
If a political leader even hints at raising taxes the only valid excuse for it would be to go to war.
They despise caring for your citizens so much, they made a slur out of the word 'social'.
I'm sorry for making such harsh generalisations about the U.S. folk, but from a European standpoint U.S. anti-social culture is just so outlandish.
Our democratic system is flawed and invariably leads to just two major parties.
Just assuming a more social system wouldn't work just because the U.S. is larger seems rather speculative to me. Have they tried, and did they fail?
I am also not swedish :P
True, but not are as populous as a Scandinavian country. Additionally, it would take a massive (massive!) restructuring of the tax code across the federal, state, and local levels to allow the states to increases taxes enough to provide sufficient services on their own. The federal government would also need to cede a fair of power to the states (think education, health care, social services).
I'm not necessarily suggesting this is a bad idea--there are just considerable obstacles to implement such a policy shift.
Each war and crisis has ratcheted up centralized power, typically by way of granting war time powers that never seem to completely fade away.
To help illustrate, money is an important proxy to government power, and the federal government spends roughly twice that of all state governments combined ($3.8T vs $2T).
> Have they tried, and did they fail?
The federal government has welfare programs that can be augmented by the states. California, for example, does this with food stamps (SNAP to CalFresh), health care for the poor (Medicaid to MediCal), and welfare for families (TANF to CalWORKS). To fund these, among other services (e.g., the University of California system), California has the highest state income tax in the nation (topping out at 13.3% for those earning over $1M).
I imagine that some states do not go much beyond the minimal federal programs.
For example, starting in 2014, Medicaid (health care for the poor) was expanded to cover those earning under 138% of the poverty line (a perfect example of the confusing way in which assistance is determined). Many states chose not to expand Medicaid, so they will not receive additional federal funding for the program. States that did, however, will.
On the health care front, some states have attempted to introduce universal health care. California successfully passed a bill, only to be vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Only two successful instances come to mind: Vermont and Massachusetts.
Vermont passed a single-payer universal health care system in 2011. Unfortunately, I am ignorant of details on its implementation.
Massachusetts has "RomneyCare," which has since been augmented to strongly resemble (in my eyes) the Swiss health care scheme. Insurance is mandatory, but coverage cannot be denied. Private insurance is subsidized by government. Health care costs are heavily regulated.
It's worth noting that the law as written, did not leave much of an option for the states to not expand Medicare. However, the law was gutted by the court system, so most of the right-leaning states chose not to expand it.
I see this stated all the time, but I've never seen a good explanation of why that is.
You could also make all kinds of claims about why a small and sparsely populated country like Norway or Sweden could never be prosperous - they don't have the economies of scale to attract investment, they speak languages that not many people outside of those countries know, etc. But they seem to have figured it out.
Rather than just giving up and saying that we cannot replicate their success, maybe we should be looking for novel ways of implementing such a system (after first confirming that what they're doing actually doesn't work in a much larger country, rather than just taking it as fact).
Would you say in a job interview that you think a problem 30 times larger is just 30 times as hard to solve...? (That is a different class of problem.)
That depends entirely on whether the problem scales linearly, sublinearly, or superlinearly.
Your response is just another example of the defeatist attitude that most Americans have when it comes to comparisons with Scandinavian countries that have solved many of the social problems that plague the US these days. You can give no concrete reason why it would be so difficult to replicate these solutions in the US, instead repeatedly stating that it won't work because there are 30x as many people.
If we had taken the same attitude when it came to building out the interstate highway system after WW2 just because we have significantly more land area than European nations, we would have never been able to connect the whole country. But instead, we came up with workable solutions and successfully implemented them.
I am from Sweden, please check so personal attacks are relevant first!
I try to make this point: The Scandinavian systems do have big problems too, which isn't that publicized. I wouldn't recommend anyone to carbon copy it. Look at e.g. the German implementation instead, larger population and (from the outside) it seems to work less bad than in Sweden.
See my other comments. (And yes, the US health care is uniquely fubar:ed.)
Re scaling:
Nothing I've ever seen says that organising big groups of people in complex endeavours (companies, societies etc) scale [sub]linearily! (Consider network effects of people. And all the differing areas/cultures. And organized crime/gangs in USA.)
But sure, I am certainly no specialist. References welcome?
I think that it's unfair to say that we despise caring for our citizens. We're just really bad at it.
We have old age retirement (Social Security; for workers), disability insurance (SSDI; for workers), welfare (TANF; for families), food stamps (SNAP), universal healthcare for the aged (Medicare; 65+), healthcare for the poor (Medicaid), subsidized housing, unemployment benefits, and so on. Much of the aid is temporary.
All in all, it's a confusing, rickety system with different rules for different localities. Much of our social spending is devised to be "means tested," so it's confusing as hell to determine what kind of help you can expect based on your income, family size, state, city, etc... It's a mess.
Things are improving on the health care front, thankfully. Though, not all states chose to go through with Medicaid expansion.
That said, you have certainly painted some truth with your broad brush.
As I understand it, many European systems are tilted towards higher taxes, lower economic growth, and more social welfare spending. America's system is tilted towards lower taxes, higher economic growth, and lower social welfare spending.
For us, things like social welfare fall by the wayside. From my American perspective, things like economic growth tend to fall by the wayside on your continent (unless you're Norway, blessed with fossil fuels).
Difficult to compare countries, but (unless you've got kids) the tax you pay in the US is pretty average. And if you are a high earner, it seems you'd be better off in Germany or China.
[1]:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26327114
* What's with the tax breaks for having a couple of kids, are the government really keen for Americans to breed?
While I was certainly willing to take bigger risks then, with no dependents, at no point did things like healthcare or my ability to get food or shelter enter into my considerations, and the extremely low risks for us involved in potential failure made the decision process for deciding to go for it very different on a personal level from the ones I've been involved in later, in the UK and US.
We did live on tiny amounts of money for the following two years - the first year we financed with our student loans, while still notionally studying. But the prospect of the business failing and leaving me destitute and without access to healthcare, for example, were not really possible. My worst case prospect of going on social benefits for a while would in fact quite possibly have raised my living standards above how I was living out of choice to try to get the business off the ground.
In retrospect, it's a fantastic level of freedom to have to never really have to worry about being put in any truly awful situation. I didn't really realise until I moved to the UK - while the healthcare system here measures up well with the Scandinavian systems, most other things are far less generous here (and contrary to what most people think, I don't pay all that much less tax than I did in Norway)
Anyway I'm just a low level system admin that looks at this stuff and always freaks out. It's ironic because the perceived situation is not unlike how women often feel the need to settle down before their looks go away.
When I'm healthy and I can take a step back (I'm 28), I kind of feel like if you are interested in technology you should be able to find work into old age. Maybe the reality truly is something different but I hope not.
The people I really feel bad for are Indian H1B workers. At least Chinese have a decent shot at getting citizenship, I know quite a few Microsoft employees (I live in Seattle) and the Indians are basically high paid slaves. They all make more than double my salary, but they can build a whole life here and then if they get too old or their performance suffers they get kicked out.
Anyway there are lots of hard things in the world I hope that old IT workers really don't have as much of an issue finding work as seems to be implied on a regular basis by my preferred news outlets
You are only set for life if the political climate in your country remains the same, and your country can afford the current model in the future, and so on. That is a lot to bet on, in my opinion.
For instance, the health care is a centralised system. Those never work. Doctors don't have time/incentive to diagnose problems unless they are obvious (or you're related to a politician -- yes, like in Soviet). Many Swedes (how many? No one knows) drag easily cured problems around for years and decades.
From my own and friends' experiences -- simple knee problems that stopped favorite exercise, lack of iron/vitamines that gave depressions, hard to recognize allergies that resulted in tiredness, thyroid problems etc.
I am here to tell you Scandinavians that it doesn't have to be like that!
If you go into a health care place in Romania, you are a valued customer they want to make happy. They will screw you over by giving you extra tests, not telling you something (anything) to get you out the door (because they only have minutes with any given client)!
You can't get that for money in Sweden. If you have health care problems, go to East Europe or something for the next vacation. (A recent article on BBC discussed that Polish doctors were working in Britain, because Polish immigrants were spoiled with the health care and the British system seemed similar to Sweden).
Please remember this when you're too chronically tired to make enough fuss so the doctors will try to find your problem to get rid of you.
(I have experience with the Swedish and partly with the Finnish health care systems, e.g. the Norwegian is a bit different but I don't really know enough to have an opinion.)
It aligns everyones incentives when it comes to healthcare funding (as individuals at least). Conversely, while the UK NHS is excellent, the wealthy often "opt out" of depending on the NHS (as well as the state schools), and so have little incentive to support NHS funding (and in fact, the Conservatives were strongly against the NHS until they realised just how popular it had become in just a couple of years after it was introduced).
The Scandinavian model is inferior from the point of view of those who can afford to pay their way to superior care. It is also strongly dependent on a rough consensus on how much health care is worth, as those who believe health care is worth more does not have an easy option for getting more if they're in a minority, and this is certainly a problem.
I'm Norwegian, but I must admit I prefer the UK model - as much as people in the UK complain about the NHS, it's still one of the public services with the highest approval ratings, and so popular it is pretty much untouchable, yet there are "outs" for those who believe they are particularly badly served and it doesn't seem to majorly affect other service allocation in the UK. On the other hand, there are aspects with the UK model that demonstrate exactly what the Scandinavian models tries to prevent: The UK NHS is often accused of a brain drain from Africa and other regions, by hiring large numbers of doctors and nurses away from poor countries.
I also wrote about how people can get real health checkups. (This might drastically improve the life of 0.5% - ?% of the population, no one has examined this afaik.)
A philosophical/political discussion as answer to that -- arguing why it is morally right to have a system that doesn't work (here, even destroy people's lives) -- is very Scandinavian. And very "Animal farm".
Edit: About Britain's NHS and Eastern Europe. tl;dr: NHS sucks, Eastern Europe health care cures people. I.e. same as in Sweden. http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21579018-health-clinic...
I don't know how practical it is to really opt out completely of the NHS - I'm not aware of much private emergency care and if you have an accident you'll almost certainly get taken to an NHS hospital. Also we had an experience where although we have private health insurance (I get it from my job) - when my son had a nasty eye infection we were actually better off going to the specialized NHS eye hospital rather than waiting to see the same consultant at a private hospital a few days later.
Seems to work great for all my relatives in Norway. However, if your statement is more that a centralized system is not perfect I agree.
The single payer system in Norway works generally so well that health-care is something a norwegian does not have to worry about. This is very different from the USA where it has to be on the top of your mind, and a significant portion of the population has no insurance.
> Doctors don't have time/incentive to diagnose problems unless they are obvious (or you're related to a politician -- yes, like in Soviet)
You are still buying in to the cold world propaganda where socialism equals communism, and because soviet was communist then all socialism is bad?
Even america has socialism in all it's confusing array of emergency and social support infrastructure. However, the system here is not well organized and therefore confusing and inefficient.
I think the discussion would be more productive if we focus on if there should be more more socialism in the US, and if that is a good thing. Pretending that socialism does not exists in the US government is not productive.
> From my own and friends' experiences -- simple knee problems that stopped favorite exercise, lack of iron/vitamines that gave depressions, hard to recognize allergies that resulted in tiredness, thyroid problems etc.
I know people that have been diagnosed and treated for all of these and more complex issues in Norway. And no, the people that got treated was normal working-class families with few connections. However, anecdotes are not very useful since I am sure you can find those in any health-care system.
I see a lot of these anecdotes from opponents of single-payer health care, and I am sure you can find plenty of anecdotes in any health care system. However, do you have any study comparing health care systems that supports your claim that a single-payer system can never work?
Evidence seems to suggest otherwise and Dr Danielle Martin answered some of the more common "evidence" given by opponents like e.g Sen. Bernie Sanders:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/13/danielle-martin-richard-burr_n_4958164.html
First, I explicitly mentioned that I'm not familiar with Norway, but it is similar to Sweden/Finland, where I have lived.
Second, I argue that lots of cases, but hardly a majority, fall between chairs in Sweden/Finland. Diagnosis (access to doctors etc) is bad in Sweden, according to international benchmarking.
No one knows how large these problems are since this is not researched, which is typical for Sweden with the big Ol' Boys networks where media, politicians and big corporations have understandings.
>>However, do you have any study comparing health care systems that supports your claim that a single-payer system can never work?
You are reacting by reflexes on internal US discussions here. See my other comments.
I am arguing something else: Centrally planned systems, like the Swedish/Finnish health care, are inefficient with lots of problems. This is not controversial. And have nothing to do with all possible "single payer systems".
See my other comments for a link to the Economist, re British health care.