Operation Occupy Wall Street

Or we could base our reform on a better model and drop a lot more from government spending.

Christ, that’s still there? Fucking basketcase.

Or we could base it on what is apparently the best system.

Best based on what?

WHO rankings of Healthcare systems:

Singapore: Rank 6th Expenditure per capita 38th
Australia: Rank 32nd Expenditure per capita 17th

What do you got?

Huh, I was looking at a different metric, I guess; I can’t find the page I was on, but it was clearly the wrong one. So!

I don’t care if we go the Singaporan route or the Maltese route (higher rated than Singapore, woo!). The Republican Party opposes both.

“Data from 1997 was used in the report.”

Try using this; (smaller health system costs do NOT scale, especially essentially city-based ones to mixed environments!)

http://www.oecd.org/document/16/0,3746,en_2649_37407_2085200_1_1_1_37407,00.html

When your entire population is in one big, densely-populated city, healthcare costs are going to be lower. Duh. But even so, sure, Singapore’s system is better than America’s, and so is Australia’s and the UK’s. None of them will be implemented in the US because both of the major political parties have been captured by monied interests. A tiny cabal of wealthy individuals fund the enormously expensive political campaigns, and in exchange the people who are elected legislate in the interests of that cabal. The meme that “Republicans are evil, Dems are spineless” is convincing on the surface but actually wrong. The two parties are just the two sides of the same coin. In terms of the meaningless pandering they do to the public, the parties have different strategies; one says “we want to cut taxes more and unleash all the potential growth out there, but those meddling socialists won’t let us” while the other says “we want to spend more on giving you jobs and education, but those fascists won’t let us”. And to be fair, the parties aren’t quite equivalent, since the Dems are genuinely trying to run as a functional moderate centre-right party-of-government, alongside their work to entrench and enrich the ruling plutocracy. But those plutocrats are the explanation for the seeming intractability of what ought to be fairly straightforward problems of governance. You have a healthcare system which is monstrously expensive, inefficient, unjust, and ineffective. Reforming it based on any working model - Australia, Canada, Singapore, wherever - would be a huge step forward for the vast majority of Americans. But for the people who have purchased the loyalty of your political class, those systems would all be a step backwards - none of them deliver the kind of profits to corporate interests that the American system does. So, it stays, with the collusion of both parties. Obamacare’s design is predicated on the assumption that any reform would have to be designed in a way that didn’t interfere with the profitability of the current system - which is where most of its inefficiency derives from. Good on him for trying, I guess. It’s an attempt to make things a little better within the constraint of accepting a regime that’s fundamentally broken. OWS had the right idea; they just didn’t have the power to do anything about it. Shame.

Based on personal experience and more recent studies, that table is totally wtf wrong. The idea that British healthcare is better than German is laughable. I’ve also been in a Hungarian hospital, and to think I’d be better cared for in Egypt or Albania? Please. My son was born in a Hungarian hospital. I’ve been to Albania and I would airlift my wife out of the country before letting her go to a hospital there to give birth.

For Hungary healthcare isn’t even an issue worth mentioning, they just list some numbers. The US foreign advisory describes Hungarian healthcare as “adequate”.

Estonia is also ranked 77th, yet in a recent EU report they ranked Estonia ahead of the UK and Italy (ranked 2nd in your chart). The report described Estonia as a model of efficiency, getting better healthcare to its citizens for a fraction of the price paid by British people.

The WHO is not measuring efficiency.

Excellent post. This is in a nutshell exactly what is wrong with our current political system. Until and unless there is a sea change in how campaigns are financed, nothing will change, ever.

I assume I said this previously but I can’t be assed to search back: OWS needs a common theme and the best possible thrust for the movement that would still be accessible is this:

  1. Congressional term limits (2)
  2. Repeal Citizens United

That would do the most in a digestible chunk of information.

Hear, hear. And it makes me mad that people who want government to “be smaller” seem to be upset not by the fact that government is purchased by powerful, rich corporations, but by the fact that government helps out people among whom are some lazy, shiftless people.

My big #3 that could never happen would be to prevent anyone who gained a Congressional seat from being a lobbyist for the rest of their life or receiving money from lobbyists, but that’s so fuzzy and anti-freedom that it’s impossible. Long and short, we need to get back to where being a congressperson was a burden, not a fucking dorky-narcissist-pasty-white-guy NBA/NFL/MLB payoff.

Agreed, lesslucid kind of summed up nicely the flaw in our democracies when we allow power to corrupt the process. The small group of ultra rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer (through lack of healthcare etc).

Neither was the report I linked. It does have second “value adjusted” chart, which has Estonia in first place, but it describes this as “an academic exercise”. The real report is about quality.

Seems odd to see folks here embracing Singapore, of all places, as a model society.

Their system is authoritarian capitalism… Lots of their ideas, like zero capital gains taxes, don’t seem like they would appeal to folks here.

Their system is certainly not the one I would choose to adopt if I were Emperor of the United States, but it works out for them better than our system works for us.

I could live with zero capital gains taxes if their anti-corruption laws were put over here as well. Some of their other laws are crazy though.

In terms of healthcare, perhaps. But there are a lot of other things…like…

You are aware that moderate earners are lucky to be able to afford to retire at all there, right?

Not a single person I know in the “moderate earner” category in the US is in any shape to retire ever.