[zrn900]

Keeping anybody alive is worth it. The human species became a civilization only because it kept its then-unproductive weaker members alive - which allowed it to develop learning, technology, and all the things that revolve around them.

Even before that, it was able to survive and exist as a physically weaker species by taking care of and keeping alive its sick and wounded.

This shows how destructive capitalism is: In its pursuit of maximizing the profits to increase the hoards of imaginary wealth, it even destroys the most fundamental tenets that made humans a successful civilization.

[nosefurhairdo]

Capitalism is the engine that has lifted more humans out of poverty than any other. Countries which have embraced that fact have been better places to live than others. Cost/benefit analysis of medical treatment for the terminally ill does not suggest capitalism is "destructive".

[hypeatei]

Ah yes, the engine that brought you a health insurance industry which treats humans as numbers on a spreadsheet. One where people don't seek medical treatment because the threat of being put into financial peril is too big. This really is a better place to live, I guess.

[zrn900]

> Capitalism is the engine that has lifted more humans out of poverty than any other. Countries which have embraced that fact have been better places to live than others

Capitalism didn't lift anyone out of sh*t. In its heyday people were living and dying in industrial slums at a ripe old age of 40. Only after the USSR won Ww2 instead of 'crumbling down like a house of cards' how the capitalist press was expecting before the war that the sociopaths in the West had to give concessions to their people to compete with the Eastern Bloc so that the people wouldn't overthrow them.

When the USSR dissolved, they declared 'We won', and they started taking back all of those concessions. As a result, there are countries where people are killed if they cant pay for healthcare now.

> Cost/benefit analysis of medical treatment for the terminally ill does not suggest capitalism is "destructive"

It does.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Keeping anybody alive is worth it.

This might be true on average. But if you need to spend $1 million keeping a death row inmate alive who tried to commit suicide, that money might be better spent on infants with heart defects. Money being finite (and being an abstraction of medical equipment/expertise/hours which are also finite), you ultimately have scenarios where you have to choose one or the other.

> This shows how destructive capitalism is: In its pursuit of maximizing the profits

If something costs more than you can afford, then it is unaffordable. This remains true even for those who despise capitalism. The great innovation of communism was the destruction of all the data that would allow one to have insight about whether or not something was unaffordable or not. In the United States, insurance companies are heavily regulated, and premiums must reflect how much it costs to pay out claims, plus some small percentage for overhead. Nor do the hospitals themselves strictly seek profit... their adversarial relationship with insurance companies compels them to overbill in the theory that if one claim fails, the next can succeed... so price it for both.

Profit-minimization isn't a very good strategy for long-term anything. If you want to be able to stay in business until next year so you can perform surgeries, you might have to, I dunno, at least break even.

[zrn900]

> But if you need to spend $1 million keeping a death row inmate alive who tried to commit suicide, that money might be better spent on infants with heart defects. Money being finite (and being an abstraction of medical equipment/expertise/hours which are also finite), you ultimately have scenarios where you have to choose one or the other.

These are fallacies of the capitalist ideology - it creates scarcities and then imposes these as truisms. There is more 'money' in the capitalist west than what's needed to treat every single person living there. Its just being hoarded.

> In the United States, insurance companies are heavily regulated, and premiums must reflect how much it costs to pay out claims, plus some small percentage for overhead. Nor do the hospitals themselves strictly seek profit... their adversarial relationship with insurance companies compels them to overbill in the theory that if one claim fails, the next can succeed... so price it for both.

You are talking literal nonsense. The most expensive healthcare with the worst results on the planet is in the US. Statistically. Every argument you made above is null and void.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> These are fallacies of the capitalist ideology - it creates scarcities

If capitalism causes scarcity, then surely socialism/communism is the true champion in this game. Scarcity of things that shouldn't be scarce in anyone's most wild imagination. Food, clothing, minor comforts like entertainment. Power, water, you name it.

>There is more 'money' in the capitalist west than what's needed to treat every single person living there.

Because the money is the abstraction of any valuable thing. Some billion-dollar-valuated company has an abstract value of a billion dollars... but that doesn't mean there is a billion dollars worth of food to feed the hungry, or a billion dollars worth of clothing to clothe the naked and ragged. Somehow though, this really drives the economically-illiterate into lunatic rages... the idea that there is a mechanism to measure the value of such things.

> You are talking literal nonsense. The most expensive healthcare with the worst results on the planet is in the US.

Sure, and you don't even understand why. If you wanted to make it cheap, you'd outlaw insurance and make everyone pay for their care out of pocket. Prices would crash within days, weeks at most. That sounds crazy to you though, because you don't understand economics very well.

[zrn900]

> If capitalism causes scarcity, then surely socialism/communism is the true champion in this game

Socialism/communism is the 'champion' of that game because whenever any country tried it, the entire 'free world' united first to sanction them, then to wage economic war on them, then to outright bomb and invade them to destroy them.

Its amazing how socialism/communism fails every time, but every time it fails, it requires blockade, sanctions, economic warfare or outright bombing and invasion to fail.

...

Despite that all those socialist/communist systems have lifted hundreds of millions, even billions out of actual poverty and in contrast with capitalism, the 'prosperity' that was brought to their people was not the privilege of working 14 hours in factories 7 days a week and living in industrial slums to die at a ripe old age of 40. Soviet Union rose their people from living barefoot in mud huts to apartments, from illiteracy to space age within the SAME generation. China's success is even more spectacular because its systematic - they do iterative development to raise the standards at every level for everyone.

And yet, on the other side, where the supposedly prosperous capitalism stands, we have people who are suffering hunger, without being able to feed their kids while working in multiple jobs, 99% not being able to own a house and dying when they cant pay for healthcare.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...

https://watcher.guru/news/us-housing-99-americans-cannot-aff....

Nobody is sanctioning the US. Nobody is waging economic warfare against them. Nobody bombed them. Nobody invaded them. This is what capitalism did to the US.

> Because the money is the abstraction of any valuable thing. Some billion-dollar-valuated company has an abstract value of a billion dollars... but that doesn't mean there is a billion dollars worth of food to feed the hungry, or a billion dollars worth of clothing to clothe the naked and ragged. Somehow though, this really drives the economically-illiterate into lunatic rages...

The only lunatics are those who don't understand that behind that billion dollar valuation, there exist the means of production to feed, clothe, house and educate everyone as all of those 'failed' socialist/communist systems demonstrated by lifting their people out of poverty within the same generation immediately after taking them over.

> Sure, and you don't even understand why. If you wanted to make it cheap, you'd outlaw insurance and make everyone pay for their care out of pocket. Prices would crash within days, weeks at most. That sounds crazy to you though, because you don't understand economics very well.

Yeah, this is what the rest of the world did. Because they don't 'understand economics' well. That's the reason why they have less expensive healthcare systems with better results. Because 'they don't understand economics'.

Being stubborn in defending an objectively worse result by declaring the entire world but yourself as 'lunatics' who don't understand something is the most lunatic thing someone can do.

[hollerith]

It is not true that China increased the standard of living of its people despite sanctions: they did it because the US removed the sanctions: restrictions on trade started to loosen in 1972 (after Nixon's famous trip to China). By 2000, China enjoyed what Washington calls "most favored nation" status, and its only been in the last 7 years or so that Washington has started to restrict Chinese trade again.

[zrn900]

I didnt specifically mean China in my argument, however it still stands:

China raised the standard of living of its people despite not only actual sanctions but even an actual grain blockade that was effected on them by the US via the UN, designed to starve them in the 1950s. The life standards rose in that decade too, not only after the 80s, and the US has nothing to do with it.

This is without saying that being able to trade with outside does not mean that the life standards of the people in a country will rise: The majority of the value from that trade would go to the minority capitalists in a capitalist country and a small percentage of white collars who do their bidding to run the companies owned by those, while the rest majority in the country can be living in knee-deep sh*t. We are seeing this today in various, formerly-prosperous countries even, including the US where a tiny minority takes the boon while the majority has to juggle multiple jobs to afford rent and food.