| Wiibaron said: We should now listen to the Koch Bros? I thought they were old greedy racist gun toting bible thumping homophobic child molesters who polute and pillage the middle class right up their ass? Oh, they lie a lot too. |
I don't like them, and I don't like money in politics, but they're old, greedy, and they pollute and pillage, but to my knowledge they are not child molesters, not bible thumping, and not racist (though they do help keep a party in power that is full of such people). Like some "conservatives" in this thread have said, they are in fact quite literally open borders in a way even Hillary and the Democratic party are not. Listening to this study isn't listening to the Koch Bros. It's listening to hardcore Libertarians, capital L, who are utterly and completely opposed to the government doing anything except funding law enforcement to protect life and property from specifically violence and larceny, and potentially funding a military as needed for defense against actual and immediate foreign threats. Yet even they, try as they may, with every motive in the world to succeed, could not prove that the American people would incur a net cost from the most expensive possible government healthcare program anyone has ever devised.
It essentially proved that even the most expensive government healthcare you could imagine would save trillions of dollars over time from what we're already projected to spend under the current system. The Kochs have no incentive to lie in this way, and in fact have every incentive to find a way to fudge the numbers higher by several trillion, but they just couldn't without it being obvious. The single payer system they analyzed just saves that much money. It shouldn't surprise anyone. Even Adam Smith, essentially the originating economist and philosopher behind capitalism, would have told you that our current system is horrifically inefficient due to the horrific amount of rent seeking (costs beyond what is required to create new wealth, like the price hikes from drug companies, or the entire health insurance industry, which adds no value to the system and is just a gatekeeper). The single payer system eliminates these sources of rent seeking by replacing health insurance with a government program that won't and inherently can't ask for more than necessary to pay for the health services, and prevents price hikes by drug companies by creating a monopsony, or the reverse of a monopoly where there are many sellers, one buyer, and thus the buyer gets to bully the sellers in the same way a seller bullies the buyers in a monopoly. Except in this case the "bully" is the entire American populace bullying the whole health care industry to give them cheaper healthcare.
But I mean, if you don't want to believe the Koch brothers, you can believe any of the European countries that do it, from social democracies like Norway and Sweden to places like Italy where a populist party that hates immigrants is the largest party now or Hungary that is currently ruled by an actual alt-right party that really hates immigrants. Or you could listen to the people in this thread that will tell you that we have better cancer care here even though other countries have better 5 year survival rates than us with their 'inferior" cancer care, or that other countries have longer waiting times even though the only reason we don't here is because millions can't afford to even stand in line, or that somehow private companies are going to "innovate" more even though all they do is innovate on how to make more money and most actual R&D could just be funded by the government too and would probably be better for us since we could research technologies that would actually heal us and thus lead to less people seeking healthcare, something a for profit company would never invest in because they need us to come back and keep spending money. And with that last point, that's not to mention at all that single payer wouldn't eliminate the "innovative" drug companies or health technology companies, just the health insurance companies that don't innovate at all or really add anything of value to the system. I don't know what your narrative is, but people from countries who subscribe to a variety of narratives have found a lot to love about universal healthcare. It seriously does not need to be a partisan issue.
