[rayhendricks]

It did not fail at providing money to the military-industrial-congressional complex. But of course we need more fighter jets instead of Medicare for all and UBI.

China is not going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland, this thing is totally unnecessary.

[mohaine]

How are you sure someone isn't `going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland`?

I'm pretty sure no one is going to do that and yes we way overspend on the MIC but really sending militaries over to other countries was the status quo for almost as long as countries have existed.

There is no real reason to expect that will not happen again just because we are going on 80 years since anyone made a serious effort to do it. You could also argue that it has been 80 years because it was made so expensive to wage war that money/resources is no longer a reason to do it. There just isn't an ROI.

[jboog]

The US and NATO is so far ahead of China and Russia in the conventional fight it's comical.

No one outside of the US or its allies even has a blue-water Navy. China has ONE carrier and it's a pile of shit compared to what we have. We have 11 super carriers, add in the smaller ones and we have another 40 or so. That's not even counting the rest of NATO.

Let's not even get into to the backwater that is the PRC's air force.

Yeah they have 1.3 billion people. Big deal. How exactly do they get them over here?

Nuclear war, now that's a different story but having another cool bleeding-edge fighter jet isn't going to stop a full scale nuclear conflict. China and Russia have enough nukes they all might not make it to the continental US but it's enough to destroy us. We can certainly do the same. The basic game theory of MAD hasn't changed much in the past few decades.

[hef19898]

There are multiple account of carriers being "sunk" during excersices by non-nuclear subs. Numbers still matter, and while the Russians and Chinese are't he best in force projection, the Chinese not yet, neither one is to be triffeled with in their backyards.

[jboog]

I'm not saying China can't sink a carrier or two.

What I am saying is that if they do we have a backup of about 40-50 more. And that's not even counting Nato.

Or the fact that hundreds of other ships and subs led by Navy folks that are far better trained and with better equipment than anything China or Russia could ever hope to compete with in the next 15-20 years at best.

My point isn't that China can't give us a bloody nose or two, it's just that they are so far behind the NATO force's militaries that we don't need to waste another few trillion on the latest greatest tech.

[michaelt]

If the American establishment thought there was any chance of attack by Chinese fighters, they wouldn't have built a shitty plane as a jobs program.

[andys627]

It's unlikely enough that we should spend this money on Medicare for All, climate change, etc. We already have a gillion fighter jets too...

[missedthecue]

The total costs to keep all F-35s in the air until 2070 (likely after you and I are dead and in the ground), would not even cover 6 months of Medicare for all or UBI. Not sure how you can draw such an equivalence.

[thanatosmin]

Just the acquisition costs would cover the entire NIH budget for a decade, though.

[missedthecue]

That wasn't the comparison being made

[lakecresva]

How are you calculating the cost of medicare for all?

[missedthecue]

I just took Bernie Sander's estimate, which looks like it comes from Yale. His website says $4.7 Trillion per year. But you can really take any estimate out there, and it wouldn't change my point.

https://berniesanders.com/issues/how-does-bernie-pay-his-maj...

[cwhiz]

You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close.

Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.

[tele]

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

"Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."

[542458]

That really doesn't have any bearing on the point that the costs of the F-35 and M4A are dramatically different. Funding or not funding the F-35 isn't the determining factor in funding M4A.

[syshum]

The Lancet study is very flawed on several economic fronts, the biggest being that it assume the government could tax / collect 100% of spending that Americans do voluntarily today in the private system to devote it to a government run plan. That is completely improbable and unrealistic expectation.

it also assumes government run systems will be as or better efficient than private system, we have 100's of years of history (including this very story) the proves that to be a fallacy

[cwhiz]

There are dozens of these studies. Vermont tried to implement a single payer system to realize these costs, and it was an epic failure. Read up on it.

https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7427117/single-payer-vermont-...

What people don't seem to understand is that you can't just vacuum money out of a giant industry. The money we spend in health care doesn't go into an incinerator. There are approximately 16.5 million people working in the health care industry. This study assumes we'll save 13%, a wildly optimistic figure, but we'll go with it.

Pick the 2.15 million people to fire.

[jjoonathan]

Sure, if you pretend we aren't already paying for health care and don't credit that against the price of MFA, MFA looks awfully expensive!

[cwhiz]

Ah so now we're talking about the elephant in the room, the huge tax hike. Most people pay a percentage of their healthcare costs, their employer covers the rest, and it comes out of pre-tax dollars. We'll still need all that money so now it will have to come in the form of a huge MFA tax on businesses and individuals.

[markus_zhang]

That 3.6 trillion dollar, I don't think it's well spent and I wonder how much went to the Insurance companies, big Pharmas. SOmehow as the most powerful country in the world, US has shitty medicare comparing to Canada, Germany, etc.

[samstave]

Just because we SPEND money doesnt mean that the price is VALID.

"Medicine" is grossly overpriced.

our entire model is FUCKED.

Source: designed and built and commissioned several hospitals and an entire family of doctors. Fuck the US health care system and fuck the military-industrial-spyware-congressional-graft system. I was the tech designer for SF General (before Zuck stuck his name on it) (I designed the entire nurse call system there, among many other things)

My brother was the head of the VA for Alaska, commander of the 10th medical wing USAF, personal flight surgeon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the pentagon.

Grandmother was a surgical nurse for decades in Silicon Valley.

Top cardiologist in California (and mayor of Saratoga)

Aunt is top NICU nurse at El Camino Hospital (which I was TPM on building...

Among other many accolades that my family has; we all agree - Healthcare is GROSSLY overpriced and BS.

FFS I had to go to the hospital recently and they charged me $4,000 for the ride to the hospital and $12,000 for giving me vitamins and holding me over night.

FUCK the medical industry pricing.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

The business model for healthcare is divorced from the actual healthcare provided. Emergency care for instance tends to be billed at nutty rates. IMO, the best thing to do is to avoid ambulance/emergency if possible, although this isn't always an option and can be risky, and to shop around for everything where possible. Call up your insurance company with codes and provider numbers and find out what everyone around you actually charges for something.

Each medical group can also have their own economic models which are optimized for different things. One local group actually has reasonably priced specialty visits, but their outpatient services are crazy expensive ($1000 in-network for a NCS/EMG), and that's how they've structured things. Another semi-public group (University of California based) charges significantly more for visits, but significantly less for outpatient procedures ($1000 for an in-network 3.0T MRI).

[joshuamorton]

> $3.6 trillion per year on health care

Yes, and this would decrease, significantly if the us healthcare system were more proactive and more people had good insurance. Not to mention that much of this is what is already spent, so clearly we can afford it. If taxes increased by exactly what your premiums were before, it's revenue neutral.

[mnd999]

Healthcare is super expensive in the US though. If the system was more efficient, like European systems, it could work.

[grecy]

> You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all.

How in the world to other countries pay for Healthcare?

The USA has tax revenue per capita very similar to New Zealand, the UK, Italy and Canada - all of which have good Healthcare for all. [1]

The USA has more than double the tax revenue per capita than South Korea, which also has good healthcare.

It's not about the cost, it's about how the USA is choosing to spend it's tax dollars.

[1] https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue

[cwhiz]

They started from a different baseline. Now we have an industry that supports over 16 million employees and is a significant percentage of GDP. You can't just pull the rug out from under it.

[LegitShady]

Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US.

I live in Canada, and waited more than a year for a specialist. It took me 2 years to find a family doctor with decent reviews who was accepting patients . I needed an MRI once and the wait was measured in months. I waited four months for just a cortisone shot, before the pandemic.

I'm not claiming one system is better than another. Certainly if you're wealthy and have good benefits in the US, the standard of care is much much higher.

On the flipside, if you need cancer care in Canada you're probably not going to need to declare bankruptcy.

[grecy]

> Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US.

I'll need a citation for that.

When a country has 29 million people without health insurance [1], and medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, I think it's safe to say the average standard of care is way, way lower than Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. where literally every person gets care.

[1] https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...

[Unklejoe]

It really depends on what you mean by "standard of care".

Yes, there are a lot of people without coverage in the USA, and there are a lot of people in deep medical debt.

However, when it comes to the actual quality of the healthcare facilities, the USA does have some of the best in the world (CHOP, UPenn, Mayo Clinic, etc.). The fact that it's extremely expensive/overpriced is a different issue.

[rayhendricks]

It’s just distributed weirdly and almost designed to be difficult to navigate.

If you’re poor and in a blue state you get free healthcare comparable to the rest of the developed world. But go over the 30k/year threshold and you’re getting a high-deductible plan and a random number generator for a hospital billing department. Then once you get a job at FAANG and you get great healthcare.

[nradov]

It depends how you look at standards of care. Despite medical coverage gaps the US still has the highest or among the highest 5 year survival rates for most forms of cancer.

[LegitShady]

I think you have to actively ignore the last three sentences that I wrote to think this is a reasonable reply.

[LegitShady]

your reply to this comment is too many deep - I can't reply.

My reply is a sample size of one because I actively don't speak for other people, on purpose. That isn't a flaw in my argument, that's intentional. If there was one delay in a health procedure it wouldn't be of note. But there are lots of delays, and my doctor needs 2-3 months notice for an appointment, and only wants to discuss one thing per appointment so he can maintain the # of appointments he needs to do throughout a day by not making any one to long, and get paid again for another consult, and he's a good doctor (for real).

But again, you have to actively ignore the last 3 sentences of the post you replied to, for this to be a reasonable and in good faith response to what I wrote. I have no interest in engaging with people who don't read what I write, while telling me what I have to think.

[grecy]

I live in Canada.... (and Australia)

Your reply is anecdotal with a sample size of one.

You need to look at how healthcare works for everyone in a society. It's not OK when the mega rich have it great, the middle class OK and literally 30 million people have nothing.

[glaucon]

Not a USAian but from distant observation I wonder what proporation of the total spend would disappear if you had "socialised medicine". In an ideal world this would be counter-intuitive, because competition usually increases efficiency, but as far as I can tell the provision of medical care in the US suffers from the same legalised near monoplies that many other parts of the US economy do.

[malcolmgreaves]

The money will come from folk not paying for private health insurance and wildly expensive hospital bills. No money printer needed.