[ry0ohki]

But then I suppose you'd also need to compare the quality? Is the free healthcare paid for taxes as good as the paid healthcare after taxes? I'm not saying it is or it isn't, just makes it hard to compare. If someone doesn't take advantage of the free education what then?

Also so much of US taxes goes to military, which countries like Canada benefit from, in a sense our military spending subsidizes Canadian healthcare.

[vidarh]

The WHO tends to rank US healthcare quite poorly compared to most other developed countries. Last report I saw, it placed around 37th place worldwide, and pretty much all of the countries above the US have universal, government funded healthcare systems.

It's worth pointing out too, that the US government actually pays more per capita for healthcare than most governments that provide universal healthcare, so US taxpayers pay more and need private insurance..

[crusso]

WHO healthcare ratings were torn apart to no end because of poor methodology. Jeez, they used literacy rates and "income inequality" for some of their metrics on judging healthcare.

The WHO ratings were more about politics than healthcare.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125608054324397621?mg=...

When you drill down into specifics, like survival rates for cancer, the US healthcare system is the best in the world, BAR NONE:

http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurvei...

[nolok]

To quote myself from one of my comment on an older thread about cancer treatement difference between France and the USA for a rich family [1]

This quote and the study it talks about is relevant, because it directly aims at the access and quality of treatment for the poor and middle class.

>In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked the French health system as the best over all in the world. Do you agree?

>I question the W.H.O. methodology, which has serious problems with data reliability and the standards of comparison. A study I would take more seriously is one published last year by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee in the journal Health Affairs. They examined avoidable mortality — that is, deaths whose risk of occurrence would be far lower if the population had access to appropriate health care interventions. In that study, based on data for the year 2000, France was also ranked No. 1, with the lowest rate of avoidable deaths. The United States was last, in 19th place, with the highest rate of avoidable deaths. That’s a severe indictment of our health care system in my judgment and calls attention, quite justifiably, to the high performance of the French health care system. http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/health-car....

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7242788

[stdgy]

You should temper that 'best in the world' rhetoric.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-care-in-the-u-s-v...

[crusso]

Just in that first paragraph, the author goes way off course creating a straw man about what his opponents find objectionable about the ACA.

I'll bookmark it and read through it later, but from what I glanced at in the first half, it didn't get much better after that straw man. I especially like where it tried to say that government decisions are better because they're made on "evidence". Okay.

[terrywilcox]

"in a sense our military spending subsidizes Canadian healthcare"

In the nonsense sense, yes. Your military spending subsidizes American defence contractors, who subsidize American politicians.

"Free" healthcare beats no healthcare. In 2007, 33 million Canadians had "free" healthcare. In 2007, 45.7 million Americans had no healthcare. It's nice to see Obamacare getting people coverage.

Rather than try to spin the story to make America look good, it would be more constructive to consider why America is declining and what it can do to reverse that trend.

In the software world, we're better at fixing bugs when we stop calling them undocumented features. That philosophy can work in the real world too.

[happyscrappy]

As the article states, America is not declining in absolute terms, the world is catching up, which is a good thing.

[phillmv]

That argument might've held sway prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I don't think that's been true for the past 25 years :).

[jerf]

No, it's certainly been true. Many world economics have avoided military buildups by piggy-backing on the back of the US buildup. In fact I've seen credible arguments that it has actually contributed to world peace significantly to have the US building up the way it has, yes, even despite the wars the US sometimes engaged in, by making it not worth it for anybody else of significant size. The rule about "democracies not going to war" may in fact have been false... it may merely have been Pax Americana happening to coincide with a lot of democracies.

As America becomes "enlightened" (heavy scare quotes) and withdraws its military umbrella, a strange world is left behind... how does Europe feel about having effectively no military with which to counter Russia's growing imperial ambitions? It's officially all smiles (or forced grins) while they're stuck depending on Russia now, but I'm sure wheels are spinning behind closed doors even now. If the US elects another President with ambitions to back off the foreign involvement even more, or if the situation deteriorates enough more on this one's watch, what are the odds that Europe has to start building up? And how many other places will have to follow?

And how will a social-benefit-addicted continent react to having to fund a military again? They certainly won't be able to maintain the current level of social commitments everywhere.

Maybe the US shouldn't be enforcing Pax Americana depending on your own personal values, but don't think for one second it hasn't had its benefits even outside of the US, and don't think that the end of Pax Americana is somehow going to occur with a burst of rainbows and puppies, where we go from one dominantly-powerful military to zero. The number can only go up.

[arethuza]

"effectively no military"

That's a slight overstatement - the countries of the EU spend 38% of what the US spend on it's military - which given the arguable massive overspend of the US doesn't look completely unreasonable to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_European_Union

Now of course what Europe doesn't have is strong unified leadership in these areas - which, given our history, is probably no bad thing although not the greatest thing to have at the moment.

Russia spends less that the UK and France combined on defense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...

[jerf]

The real difference between militaries is projection power. The US can credibly project most of its power all over the world. The European military certainly exists, but it's projection capabilities are greatly less than the US', even on a per-dollar/per-Euro basis. It could defend itself against a straight-up Russian attack (which is precisely why that will not be happening anytime soon), but it leaves Europe without pieces when Russia is playing chess on the world stage [1]. If Europe would be starting to assert itself more thoroughly in the world, against credible threats, it would need to spend a great deal more money to do so.

[1]: Diplomacy is not chess, but it has chess-like elements (along with the poker-like elements). Trying to play diplomacy without the ability to threaten anything, even with no real intent or prospect of following through on the threat, leaves you with a proportionally much weaker portion.

[phillmv]

>No, it's certainly been true.

Pray tell, is your threat model a revanchist, bankrupt Russia from the 90s making a daring lunge across Alaska? Canada's only credible threat is, well, America.

>In fact I've seen credible arguments that it has actually contributed to world peace significantly to have the US building up the way it has,

Within the context of the Cold War, and say, NATO buildup in post war central Europe this may or may not be true. It was certainly a boost to West German/French economies that didn't have to invest quite so heavily in fending off the Warsaw pact.

Outside of the European theatre, that's a significantly weaker argument given the proxy wars the US/USSR engaged in throughout the third world.

[swalkergibson]

> In fact I've seen credible arguments that it has actually contributed to world peace significantly to have the US building up the way it has, yes, even despite the wars the US sometimes engaged in, by making it not worth it for anybody else of significant size.

Citation needed.

[Bahamut]

Military is about 1/6th of our budget as far as I can tell: http://nationalpriorities.org/media/uploads/spending_-_total...

I'm not sure how necessary it is to be that high, but I do know that there is a lot of waste in the military-industrial complex.

[yequalsx]

This claim is only true if Canadian military spending were to increase if the United States decreased its military spending and if such increase in Canadian military spending came at the expense of its healthcare spending. Do you have evidence that this is the case? In the 90s there was a downsizing of the U.S. military. Did Canada correspondingly increase it's military spending? I don't know but I doubt it.

Given that the U.S. healthcare system ranks behind many countries with public healthcare and that the U.S. spends way more as a percent of GDP on healthcare than any other country it's quite reasonable to believe that taxpayer healthcare is as good as paid healthcare after taxes and is cheaper.

[steve_benjamins]

Most Western countries (not Canada) have opposed the last few major American conflicts, so "subsidizing" is an awfully generous way of putting it.

[ry0ohki]

American offensive activity has no effect on that fact that Canada is still counting on the United States to defend them in the event of an invasion.

[dragonwriter]

Plus, short of maintaining the high cost of global force projection that no one but the US has been paying since the end of the Cold War, no country is positioned to invade Canada except the United States (which, you might note, has been the source of all previous invasions of Canada.) Defending against remote invaders without US-like projection capacity is fairly cheap.

[grifpete]

That's pretty funny. I truly doubt many if any Canadians are counting on that.

[ry0ohki]

I have no doubt they take it for granted