The great majority of health care is not emergency health care. Actually, the fact that emergency health is so expensive is quite the incentive for preventive medicine. And for the rest, insurance is necessary. Like for house fires or floods: I get the insurance but I also check my wires and pipes regularly.

Yep, loving my gesetzliche Krankenkasse (public health insurance, which is more like "highly regulated insurance"), even more than I liked the Privatkrankenversicherung (less highly regulated, but still with better guardrails than a lot of things I've seen in the States) I was on my first decade in the system here. Sure, there are some specialists who won't accept it, or who will give you a sooner appointment if you're private pay, but in that situation, you have the option of declaring that you're a self-payer that quarter, and your public insurance will reimburse in the amount they normally would have for that procedure or exam. For things like an MRI, the full retail cost in Germany is still much lower than in the US (it was about 600 EUR for my back a few years ago, while I was still privately insured, and I still had to wait for reimbursment).

Even once I do hit the income threshold to switch back to private (switching back to fulltime work), I'm pretty sure I won't.

As far as doctor choice goes, I feel like I have more on the public insurance here (like 90% of the population) than I did with UHC in the early 2000's back in the US. I certainly have fewer financial surprises.

No lists? Have you ever actually lived in Germany and had to interact with its’ healthcare system?

Healthcare in the US seems to cost about double per capita what it does in other developed countries with universial/social healthcare. Public spending in US is on-par with others, and then private spending is that much again. Standard of healthcare I've heard (and would hope) is world class if you can pay, but still something seems broken there to be sure.

But you have lists, queues, lotteries, whatever you call it. That's not a lie. The fact you think lists are a vast right wing conspiracy demonstrates your government is not really forthcoming about your healthcare system. There are lists everywhere. There are ambulance wait times, hospital emergency wait times, various levels of urgent and elective treatment wait times. There are procedures and medicines and tests that are simply not covered at all.

Now, obviously USA has queues and lists too. And I could be wrong but I'm sure I've heard that US private insurance companies are notorious for not covering certain treatments and drugs as well. I don't know what it is exactly these right wing people are saying about healthcare, I thought they did not like the American "Obamacare" though.

>And no, no lists

There definitely are lists. You don't just get the surgery or therapy you need the next day. You get the next free slot in the list of people queuing at the hospital/practice that still has free slots.

For example the first appointment you can get at my state funded therapist if you call today, will be in june. How is that "not a list"?

Or like, if you call most public GPs in my neighbourhood, they'll all tell you they're full and don't have slots to take on any new patients and you should "try somewhere else". How is that "not a list"?

Humans have tendency to become corrupt

the market / capitalism won’t correct itself, much people want to call it God/ perfect

Regulation, anti-trust laws try to correct somethings but many politicians are against those things because they limit the profit that can be made, profit first, that’s the corruption

>>In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries

>Evidence: the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine.

That evidence of socialism working well, only works as long as there are enough resources to cover the needs of most people, basically some of the wealthier European countries.

But when those resources become scarce due to poor economic conditions and/or mismanagement, then you'll see the endless queues, black margets and nepotism running the system.

Evidence: former European communist countries who experienced both systems and where in some, nepotism to bypass lists still work to this day.

> you also need to tax it, to deliver benefits to your population

The benefits were already delivered by that strong and prosperous economy in form of products and services.

Taxation is of course necessary to fund government spending but we need to keep in mind its drawbacks: from discouraging productive activity and slowing economic growth to giving politicians funds to buy votes with populist social policies.

Americans really gloss over that the 50s was a high-water mark for both the economy and tax rates.

Sure, capitalism isn't perfect. No economic system is, mainly because they're all composed of us semi-evolved chimps. Every economic system has that problem. Getting rid of or severely constraining economic freedoms isn't a solution, it makes it worse.

Yes, his personal economy is prosperous. Oh, the other one? /s

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/article/the-defini...

Most of his added wealth comes from "crypto" and name licensing.

the problem is your framing of the problem, not the questions you posed. it seems to me like you’re assuming that the only metrics for risk and reward are profit and cost. let me put it this way: do you find there to be any intrinsic value to the invention of antibiotics, or is such a development only worth the money that it can make for its inventor / discoverer? do you think that the cost of developing such technologies is worth it even if it does not gain any material income?

Let’s also imagine the other side of the equation. Can you not imagine any penalty or cost other than bankruptcy? Let’s say you are forced to allocate $1 million per year to research. is the only cost function you can imagine based on the risk of default?