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A comment on U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018). Parent comment

Re:U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) by vonmoltke on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @11:56AM (#20345422)
> The whole "capitalism will solve it" thing just isn't working. I cannot shop around for medical care, I cannot see prices, and insurance is $1300/month for essentially no benefit (except to turn prices from bonkers to incredibly high).

Considering that, for the services you mentioned, in the US it is often a government itself sending the rhetorical you those bills, I think it is a bit more complicated than merely blaming capitalism.

Edit: does someone mind telling me why I am wrong?

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Re:U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) by Reedx on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @12:33PM (#20345892)
You're certainly correct it's more complicated than that, so the downvotes aren't due to being wrong. shrug

Healthcare in the US is neither free market nor socialized. It's an absurd mess of both worlds combined into a singular nightmare.

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Re:U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) by vonmoltke on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @01:11PM (#20346309)
It's essentially the worst of both worlds. Just enough socialism for a selected class of businesses to capture the profits of necessary services. Made worse by the fact that sometimes those "businesses" include local governments.
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Re:U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) by mladenkovacevic on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @12:45PM (#20346048)
I didn't downvote you since legitimate opinions shouldn't be downvoted but the reason I think you're wrong is that US is a particularly chronic case of the government serving the needs of capitalism above and beyond the population at large.

It's like saying don't blame Catholicism, blame the Vatican. One is a direct expression of the other.

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Re:U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) by vonmoltke on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @01:09PM (#20346291)
> I didn't downvote you since legitimate opinions shouldn't be downvoted but the reason I think you're wrong is that US is a particularly chronic case of the government serving the needs of capitalism above and beyond the population at large.

I think it's more a problem of local governments often acting as quasi-capitalist entities themselves. If charging people $1000 for a ride in a fire department ambulance reduces property taxes, why not?

> It's like saying don't blame Catholicism, blame the Vatican. One is a direct expression of the other.

Eh, I don't think that is accurate because the Vatican is Catholicism, not merely an expression of it.

Also, my point was that you can't blame one idea or entity for the state of health care in the US. There are a number of sociological factors that need to be addressed, including but not limited to extreme capitalist beliefs, belief in "rugged individualism", moralism, and xenophobia.

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Re:U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) by xfde on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @12:48PM (#20346084)
You’re not wrong. However, given the facts that most of the people on HN are from the Bay Area and that Socialism is the soup du jour, the down votes shouldn’t be surprising.
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Re:U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) by dang on Thursday July 04, 2019 @02:57AM (#20352225)
About 10% of HN users are in the Bay Area.

Perceptions of ideological bias on HN are in the eye of the beholder. Opposite ideologues see opposite bias, I assure you.

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