The Russians have - aside from Putin - that whole HIV-AIDS thing going on (not as bad as SSA, but still bad) plus world class alcoholism and suicide statistics. Suicide rates are lower now than in 2008 (which is when that graph refers to^) but still really bad.
^ For example, in 2006 there were 30 suicides/100,000 popn.
“Prisoners Dilemma” seems to be popular in the US; while “Psychotic Chauffeur” seems to get a lot of usage in Russia.
Maybe it’s the difference between a main population that just no longer engages with the state, versus one that engages with the state but with insane amounts of disinformation? Most people I know (like, 6 people bro. Take it with a large salt crystal) in Russia just don’t care, while many people in the US seem to be delusional.
what he forgets to tell you is, that there were loads of rules and most people spent their waking hours circumventing these in many subtle and intricate ways. E.g. the grey / black economy was well developed.
Presumably he is among the winners in the current system, which of course helps make sure he is safER than most.
This absolutely. It’s the self-destructive delusional nature of the US Trump voter which gets to me. But than again Steinbeck said it all, we are dealing with
Steinbeck did not say that. Look up the quote.
You are right. Apparently he said “temporarily embarrassed capitalists” rather than millionaires. Not sure there is a great difference, except that capitalist is rather an outdated term these days.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Quotes_about_Steinbeck
Quote according to WikiQuote
“I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
The conservative mindset confuses self-sufficiency and individual freedom with dependence upon employers, who will supposedly reward us for our hard work and obedience, if we just give them everything they ask for. If they’re not already part of the business elite, they feel that they’re supposed to be, and the only explanation for why they’re not is that someone else is sucking up the jobs/resources that were rightfully theirs. They don’t get that the free market, unchecked, is as much a threat to personal freedom as government unchecked. They see that the pie is shrinking and want to cling to what they have, rather than invest it in a country that is increasingly foreign to them.
It’s not the ACA that’s the hard sell, really; it’s asking people to question the positive self-image that comes packaged with the individualism they’ve been sold. Successful people want full credit for their success; they don’t want to admit that fortune and privilege might have played a role. People who spend decades chained to shitty jobs want to think of themselves as working class heroes, not hapless wage slaves. Without an exciting counterculture to go along with it, the leftist worldview can be a hard sell.
I’m afraid that they’re going to keep clinging to this ideology, sabotaging anything we do until the system simply collapses.
By crippling a well-written law and removing a lot of the things meant to keep healthcare affordable, the GOP ensured insurance costs would rise for many people, not drop. The problematic launch of the online exchange didn’t help the ACA’s image either. So even though costs are falling, it’s easy for Republicans to point at Obamacare and say “look, it’s a disaster!” (that they created).
It also didn’t help that the ACA was a bloody awful system, originally designed by the GOP and then tweaked by bent Democrats with a primary goal of maintaining insurance industry profits.
It’s better than what you had before, but compared to a real public health system it’s lousy. It maintains all of the bureaucratic hassle and expense of the private insurance industry, while adding a layer of government paperwork on top. Worst of both worlds.
You can’t properly fix US healthcare until you kill the parasitic insurance industry. Getting rid of those bastards is a major part of why socialised medicine gets better outcomes for less money.
The whole theory of “if we give the people socialised medicine, they’ll love it so much the opposition won’t dare take it away” only works if you actually give people socialised medicine.
People who’ve always had access to health insurance through steady employment see their premiums and deductibles continue to rise. That’s all that matters and Obamacare is the obvious scapegoat. The ACA didn’t visibly change anything for them and all they hear about is how many more people have insurance now. I don’t think that matters much when you’re going broke paying for your healthcare.
Not sure I agree with the need for socialised medicine. If you regulate insurance, killing most of its margins, then a purely capitalist medical care system could work very well.
The “conservative” movement has also outright turned its back to facts and the idea of objective truths. It’s all truthiness now, feelz over the realz, the triumph of bovel cognition.
I’m bitterly amused by how the same right-wingers who have been mocking the leftist academia and activists for overuse of naive postmodernism, moral relativism, etc., have taken up the exact same intellectual errors but gone a hundred times further.
So long as the profit margin is there, there will be an incentive for insurers to screw as much profit as possible out of the system.
You don’t have to socialise your healthcare system. But there is a mountain of evidence from around the world that, if you want to keep as many people as possible alive as long as possible for as little money as possible, a state-run non-profit universal healthcare system is the most effective way to do it.
My vote: shitbags.
It makes sense if they honestly don’t oppose abortions, they are mainly driven by the desire to punish uppity *hores.
How can it ever be cheaper? It requires hospitals to carry accountants and finance people for the uninsured, chase down insurance claims, and the cost of the insurers themselves. You can’t have a systems with layers and layers of inefficient jobs without adding a lot of cost even if you Perfect the cost of treatments and insurance itself.
And the first roadblock in even discussing single payer-expanded medicare-universal healthcare is the DNC. Neoliberalism is about doing anything it can to patch the cracks and soften the corners of the free-market, enabling it to keep churning away.
Even the concept of taxing the wealthy for welfare plans is of the trickle-down school of economics. Quit stacking the deck in their favor, full stop.
A berserker?
Socialised health care does wonders for affordability of private health insurance for those who wish it. These are some quotes for me - 45 year old male nonsmoker.
There are some of the 44 I had to chose from - these are the mid-price ones - the range being £16 to £160. Co-Pay is usually zero.
Here is Orange Hands gloating over the destruction he’s causing. Why is he in a position of responsibility?
