alt Hacker NewsThere is a ton of ideology baked into naive-level analysis of this stuff.
I am constantly told how much less Europeans pay for better health outcomes and all I can think about was the obesity crisis I grew up around in Texas.
Socializing healthcare isn’t going to get an huge portion of the population out of their cars and get them walking as a primary or secondary mode of transportation. Not when it’s 100° and the grocery store is five miles away.
Americans, in no small part, have worse health outcomes because we have dramatically worse lifestyles. I support German-style universal healthcare, but I’m not going to pretend it will suddenly give us German health outcomes.
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>Socializing healthcare isn’t going to get an huge portion of the population out of their cars and get them walking as a primary or secondary mode of transportation
You would think so but once healthcare cost becomes a government policy issue people complain about its spending and they are forced to try and bring that cost down. One of the ways they did that in my country was to promote biking to work and build bike ways.
Europeans do pay much less (though: for roughly the same outcomes --- probably the same outcomes if you control for wild SES variance across the US).
One wonders what the lowered stress vis a vis healthcare concerns that a reformed system would take care of would do for our ability, as an electorate, to make better decisions in other arenas.