[1letterunixname]

Oh my word.

2018, I was on Medi-Cal (Medic-aid) and had a stress ECG, right heart catheterization, and 12-lead EKG when admitted to their cardiac unit for 3 days. Cost $0.

Like a third-world country: in America, you're better off being either totally penniless or a billionaire. If you don't have a balance sheet of $5 megabucks, your life will be miserable.

The advantage most European and other countries have under socialism is it means there's a minimum average quality of life everyone. Pay more in taxes but get a lot more in terms of a more dignified, healthier, and longer life free from the slavery of "gotcha!" gangster capitalism.

[myth2018]

> Like a third-world country: in America, you're better off being either totally penniless or a billionaire. If you don't have a balance sheet of $5 megabucks, your life will be miserable.

I live in a "third-world" country. My family and I have insurance and only use private hospitals -- the capitalist portion of the system. Never had as bad an incident as the ones you guys are reporting here. Just some minor annoyances.

Not even the crappiest insurance companies do stuff like that, and they get terminated by the regulatory body if they start to mess up consistently.

Although I don't use it directly, I'm overall well-informed about the realities of the public health system. It's bad, but not even close to what I've seen posted here. One can even obtain overly expensive meds for rare diseases -- it requires some legal effort, but it eventually works.

Then I'd say that, when it comes to health systems, the USA is definitely way worse than some third-world countries -- and one of the main reasons I declined an invitation to work and live in there.

[seanmcdirmid]

When I was living in China working for Microsoft, our company provided insurance had a cap on claims paid ($100k), so while everything was cheap enough via the private system, I wondered if I was screwed if I ever got cancer or something really bad.

[dheera]

Yeah that doesn't sound like insurance to me at all.

[TheNewsIsHere]

It used to be common here in the US too, to have a cap on the amount an insurance policy would pay out.

My first “adult”/non-parental healthcare insurance policy had a yearly maximum and a lifetime maximum. This was pre-Affordable Care Act.

[piva00]

> The advantage most European and other countries have under socialism is it means there's a minimum average quality of life everyone. Pay more in taxes but get a lot more in terms of a more dignified, healthier, and longer life free from the slavery of "gotcha!" gangster capitalism.

It will sound like a nitpick but it's not: there's no socialism in Europe. Socialism is an economic system, not a synonym for "socially-focused policies" through societal-level welfare.

European countries are capitalists, completely. What we do have is a better support system for welfare, more labour protections and regulations to protect against the massive power imbalance that untamed capitalism creates but it's not socialism. Not even close.

[autoexec]

> It will sound like a nitpick but it's not: there's no socialism in Europe.

If Europe has no socialism they've still somehow managed to end up with a lot of European Socialists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_of_European_Socialists). Some words are basically meaningless because everybody has their own definition for them and socialism is certainly one of those words. It's probably better to avoid the term entirely and just describe what you mean because some people get so emotional just hearing it that they seem to lose the ability to think.

[piva00]

Words have meaning, socialism has a meaning:

> Socialism: a political philosophy and movement encompassing a wide range of economic and social systems, which are characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

That is the meaning, it's not meaningless. It becomes meaningless when people just accept that it can mean anything they want, it can't. Socialism has a very specific characteristic: social ownership of the means of production.

If people misuse the term they need to be corrected. At least until the meaning completely shifts to something else, like what Americans try to do with the term "liberal" which does not, at all, mean "progressive" as is the usage in the USA.

[autoexec]

Words do have meanings, the word socialism has so many meanings that using the term just makes things less clear. Even your preferred definition is so overbroad that it strains usefulness. Any definition that lumps together the political philosophy of Keir Starmer with that of Joseph Stalin is one of questionable utility.

[piva00]

That's the thing, it does not lump Keir Starmer's political philosophy and Stalin's. To be defined as socialism it needs to encompass the social ownership of the means of production, Keir Starmer's economic-political philosophy does not encompass that and hence it's not socialism...

It's the one of the most defining characteristics of socialism, if Keir Starmer is not defending that the ownership of the means of production should be socialised it is not socialism.