The republican cycle. It's how they slowly plan to privatize as much as possible.

"This government thing sucks"

cuts funding

quality doesn't improve or more likely gets worse

"This government thing sucks"

[Repeat as many times as needed to make the majority of the public hate the thing in question]

"This is so bad we need to offload it"

Large company that most likely donates to Republicans takes over

You forgot:

Large company complains that costs are rising for the services they are providing.

“We need to give more money to large company because they cannot make a reasonable profit and the company is funding my reelection campaign.”

Large company sells personal data gathered from citizens to other private companies, homeland security, and whoever else wants to pay the toll.

“What a sweet deal! The citizens are paying out of their wallets and their personal privacy.”

I didn't forget that, I didn't mention it because we're discussing the government of Portugal, California, and government services being cut.

I can't tell if this is some weird whataboutism like "yeah maybe the republicans but how about them companies, since they're also bad that kinda shows that everyone is, really no point in getting mad at Republicans right?"

I guess your not used to people agreeing with you.

You're not agreeing with me, you're offering up another opinion unrelated to what I said.

I'm hoping this new court ruling that the Government can't go directly to companies and must go through the process if it involves civil rights (in the current case the Biden admin talking to social media sites about removing content is a violation of the first amendment) gos through and some lawyer get's it applied to all rights (in the case of your example to government going to companies to get around people's right to privacy).

I'm hoping that Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and every member of the Republican party elected to office who lied/is lying about election fraud faces justice.

18 U.S.C. § 2384 - U.S. Code - Unannotated Title 18. Crimes and Criminal Procedure § 2384. Seditious conspiracy

"If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to...or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States....

they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."

> They slashed funding to successful parts of the strategy and now claim the strategy failed.

Neoliberalism in a nutshell.

It's a bit like the matrix, wherever something good and helpful starts to develop anywhere, an agent in a green suit appears to put a stop to it.

Crabs in a bucket?

I don't think so. The crabs are peers who pull each other down. This is more like the industrial seafood conglomerate that dragnetted the seabed, put you in the bucket, and now wants to push the lid down tighter.

Portuguese politicians are doing the same with the public healthcare system there (deliberately underfunding it to be able to claim that it "failed").

They want to follow the "good" example of the US, like most other EU member states are now doing.

While public healthcare is still quite ok in Portugal, anyone that actually wants to be treated in time, and not be stuck in waiting lists actually goes to a private doctor, or clinic.

Hence why having private insurance as part of the job benefits is widely appreciated, unless one is a public employee with nice health packages like ADSE.

I am approaching 50 now, and seldom ever had a family doctor for example.

However in Germany it is much worse, where public healthcare is almost managed as the private one, and where many doctor offices differ their treatments depending on which kind of insurance one has, public vs private. You get different waiting rooms, different treatment proposals, different appointment flexibility,...

People with private insurance skip the line. You're literally condemning a poor person to suffer more. Congratulations.

Doctors triage based on medical needs not your social status or financial wealth in the Netherlands. It's one of those things that ethically sets this country above others and I hope it never changes.

Well, plenty of North Europeans like to come to Portugal for treatments as well, including Netherlands.

https://medicaltourisminportugal.com/

A lot of EU member states have high taxes too, there is not that much wiggle room to increase taxes to pay for ballooning health care costs. It is not surprising that they are trying to keep costs under control or privatize.

Healthcare will always be underfunded though. It costs too much to offer it to the extent we would like to and with the changing demographics and advancements in technology (more treatments that cost more $$$) it's going to only cost more.

For example, the UK's public healthcare funding has increased from below 3% of GDP to over 7% from the 1950s until 2018/2019 (so just before covid).[0] And yet the perception is that the NHS is always underfunded.

The UK's budget in 2018-19 was £842 billion and almost £160 billion went to essentially the NHS. I think that we will eventually have to settle into a reality of always underfunded public healthcare and it's going to get worse, because these problems plague essentially all European countries (and many others in the world).

[0] https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/full_wi...

most likely demographics willplay a huge role in this when we start having increased elder care.