| > I don't quite understand this argument: nobody is obligated (federally) to purchase insurance, or otherwise participate in a particular health care plan. This isn't about "efficient markets"; this is about incentivizing healthy behavior for socially mandatory programs. Which is absurd since everyone will need healthcare in their lives, spreading the risk pool across the whole society and providing the service as an averaged out resource for the benefit of all is the most logical way of doing it. > In many cases, people simply don't want it because they feel government impacting behavior by mandatory taxes is worse than opt-in programs, but this may simply be American values. Yes, this is simply American values, which individualism is a paramount one. And probably the value which may bring down American society one day as you can see from the erosion of empathy in American society. > I'm going to be real: reading through your profile you hardly fit the definition of "young person" (you literally recall living through events before I was born) so I'll lay it out in plain terms: young people have zero guarantees, both in the US and EU nations. The elderly have benefitted from policies which have poorly invested the monies for social security in treasuries earning 3%. They have fought against building housing, resulting in inflated values. They vote themselves generous benefits, mortgaging the future to allow them to "age in place" -- which usually fails anyway -- rather than relocating to elder care communities for more efficient service delivery. So realistically, realize the youths' last benefit in society is their youth, and saying "sacrifice more" rings hollow. For all accounts in the society I live in I'm still in the "young" cohort, mid-30s is not old and if you are younger than that you haven't contributed much to society yet, you basically sucked up resources for growing up and now wants to deny resources for others who have contributed to the society they helped build and which you live in. > This is just a thin veneer over reality: at any given point in time there are finite resources. If there aren't enough resources to address the issue in its totality (as it is with healthcare, where we spend massive money on obesity and alcoholism) nothing we do will make "enough", even at 17% of GDP. In the us, this manifests as price rationing; those can can pay, receive. In the EU, this manifests as physician bedside rationing (see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1831659/). Nothing you have stated ameliorates the rationing: it simply ignores the fact that it is already happening, even in socialized health systems. There are finite resources but human ingenuity has found ways to make resource usage more and more efficient through technology. It's not because there's a public healthcare system that there aren't options in the private sector, a lot of European countries have a hybrid system (including in Sweden where I live). The public healthcare is available even if with deficiencies but it doesn't mean that you don't have access to treatment if you can pay for it... The system you live under is the worst of both worlds, extremely expensive, bureaucratic and selecting people's lives by how much money they have, I'm baffled you can't see that as anything other than absurd. > And -- as far as a "hyper-individualistic freak" -- I grew up in a "disadvantaged" school district (I just checked) to immigrant parents. I didn't qualify for disadvantaged grants to attend better ranked colleges because I wasn't a URM, so I just went to a state school and worked in research labs during the year and local engineering firms to pay my tuition. That's my life. In the US, you can absolutely claw your way up. Technical skills and entrepreneurship are absolutely the engine of social mobility Europe wishes it has, and why we can actually provide immigrants integration and social mobility. And I grew up in Brazil, with much worse schools than even your disadvantaged public school district. I didn't qualify for any disadvantaged program, the better ranked colleges in Brazil are public ones and only accessible through standardised entrance exams where the rich can go through a year or two of prep school to get into. I clawed my way up and moved to Sweden some 10 years ago after a brief sting living in the USA, all on my own, and I still believe in everything I said about hyper-individualism... The social mobility engine of the USA only benefits a few, it's a pipe dream sold to make the masses believe that they can make it if only they are good enough. It's never brought up as "you can make it if you work a lot and are lucky enough" because that would tear up the American Dream as a whole, the belief one is in complete control of their destiny is the big fat lie needed for such an individualistic society to not tear itself apart. > I 100% prefer this over the sirens song of socialized care which simply doesn't exist, even in Europe. You simply don't know how socialised care works, you said yourself that you are young so you lack any life experience on that, and you only lived in the USA so you can't really know what you prefer, you just have a feeling based on your own American Exceptionalism bias. |