We really just need to figure out the paying for healthcare thing, and then get money out of politics, then America is undeniably the best place in the world to live.

A few more trains would be nice too.

▲

MarkusQ 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The trick for paying for healthcare is simple, though no one likes it: we need to start paying for healthcare.

By building a huge byzantine bureaucracy around everyone trying to get someone else to pay for it, we've driven up the cost (now we're paying for the health care plus all sorts of insurance administration and all their lobbyists and so on). By hiding the costs we've deprived ourselves of the ability to comparison shop. By opening the door to third parties we've taken a simple transaction between doctor and patient and added lawyers, private equity, government and who knows who else, and each and every one of them is taking their cut of the money.

I agree trains are cool.

	▲	throwawayqqq11 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, trains are cool, until you realize, they cost money too instead of generating profit. Huge problem in some EU countries rn. > By hiding the costs It's also called externalization of cost(!) and a systemic problem under capitalism. Im afraid there is no quick fix to this like removing directly involved third parties from health care processes, because like in any economy, the upstream suppliers to the healthcare sector are as profit driven as your current adminstrational layer. You would just push the sympthom around. From a german perspective, the US has speedrun a process, most of the EU countries are in too, just boiling the frogs slower. You have increasing cost and/or degrading services while budget considerations are always at the front of it. (Behind that is imo top-down fiscal pressure coming from our monetary/banking systems more aligned with the profit seekers.) If germany would reinvent its health care system from scratch in todays neoliberal climate, we'd end up with something very similar to the US, if at all. But since the german public has adopted price expectations, our services get cut to death a million times instead of moon pricing. EDIT: The video is too shallow to touch broader systemic explanations, so it cant see similarities aswell.