I've been the young immigrant who arrived to a foreign country with the clothes on his back and whatever fits in a suitcase; occasionally splurging by buying used clothes at a thrift shop and buying a slice of cake at the supermarket once a month. If anything, I was probably happier then: healthy and hopeful for a better future. Now I'm in significantly worse health and rather jaded.
Thank you for sharing your own experience.
Sure, they are just people like you and me. Doesn't mean their mere existence isn't evidence of a major flaw in our implementation of capitalism. Our society is becoming far too stratified. Healthcare should be a right at this point in our society's development, it's a stain on our country that we still carry on with a system that works for nobody except health insurance CEOs.
Besides, someone creating more wealth than you do does not hurt you.
And I wonder what's behind that rhetoric twist in your second sentence. Was that on purpose or do you not even notice?
Because no, somebody creating more wealth than me does not hurt me by itself (I might even benefit!). Somebody accumulating and being able to command more wealth than me can hurt me, among other reasons because it gives them political power, which they can wield to hurt me and others. Inequal wealth accumulation taken to its logical extreme is undemocratic because it violates the principle of one person one vote.
(Some wealth accumulation is okay. There's room for nuance here.)
Example, please.
The rich don't have to be eaten, just constrained from exercising their worst excesses.
A 'right' shouldn't depend on someone else's labor.
"it's a stain on our country that we still carry on with a system that works for nobody except health insurance CEOs"
I do agree that we need to get rid of the middleman. Replacing it with another one (the government) is a mistake and leads to the same inefficiencies.
Common procedures should be charge directly to the patient. These prices will be forced to go down as there will be actual competition. This won't work in cases where the surgery is rare, and insurance will work here. This will cut most of the bloat out of of health care and reduce the costs for everyone.
Lasik eye surgery is a good example of this. It's not covered by insurance. A decade ago, it was $10,000. My parents just got it a year ago and paid less than $1,000 out of pocket.
Greetings from europe where healthcare is free for everyone.
That said, a lot of people who get rich, because status is their real motivation, are shocked by how horrible society still is. At first they get hooked on the drug of high social status, but then they learn to see through the flattery and realize that nothing has truly changed, and they’re just as miserable as before. It tends to take about two years, in my observation, for the “new life energy” to wear off. Money teaches you that there isn’t some “better” society to aspire to. The people “up there” aren’t the supervillains Redditers imagine billionaires to be, but they’re not better either.
My daughter is autistic and when she started to learn how to read social cues she realized that her so-called friends didn’t actually like her, which I suspected myself but never had the chutzpah to say, and it made her angry. Getting rich has a similar “learn what people are really about” curse.