I've come to the conclusion that the state is very effective at only two things:
1. Increasing its own power at any cost
2. Murder
Discussion
Nailed it
Actually I forgot one.
Gotta give em full credit here.
They also mastered the art of theft.
It's actually more insidious, the the if leaves you alone when he takes your money. He doesn't demand continual ransom payments under threat of violence while demonizing those who resist to their peers.
And only the state grants itself the ability to steal half of your estate after death.
You can't even die without being taxed. Wen birth tax? Oh wait....they already tax medical, just creatively. Plus the cost of forced government identification and licensure just to function in society.
Yup. I get private healthcare as an employment benefit. Which is great because (and I'd be crucified if I said this out loud here, but it's true) the National Health Service (run by the state) is pretty much just shit.
Not because of the doctors and nurses. Virtually all of the docs and nurses working in private healthcare also work in the NHS or used to.
For the most part they are great.
But the NHS is a bureaucratic nightmare just like anything else state controlled. And for that reason you must wait a month for a GP appointment. Years to see a specialist. No choice of who you see - you're lucky to have any access to care at all.
And yet everyone must pay for it in taxes. Even if they don't use it.
Given the top 10% of earners are responsible for 90% of tax revenue, and top earners are certainly using private healthcare, effectively the vast majority of its funding comes from the very people who don't use it.
The left may argue this is good in a "Robin Hood" type way, except, again, the resulting system is total and utter shit. The average person in the UK is being taxed to shit for a shitty healthcare system. Doctors and nurses are overworked and underpaid.
State monopolies don't fucking work!!!
Never will you hear any politician address this ever. Because there is a cult around "protecting our NHS." Any criticism of it no matter how valid would be political suicide.
I've seen first hand what happens when a mostly private Healthcare system (which admittedly had major flaws, because my entire lifetime it's been run by monopolies) gets taken over by the state.
TLDR: Just like everything the government touches it becomes bloated, more expensive, quality goes to utter shit, and only the poorest benefit marginally while the rest suffer and the state gets richer.
Exactly.
And obviously the US healthcare system has its own set of very real issues, but in the majority of the western world, there is a private health insurance system that also has subsidies for the poor which ensure everyone has equal access.
And the state doesn't need to run anything.
These countries (Switzerland, Germany, pretty much all of Europe) have healthcare systems so superior that the number of people in the UK who go abroad for surgery etc grows annually.
The reason they don't use the private system here is usually cost. Because the NHS exists, private healthcare is a luxury good in the UK. In countries where it's necessary, naturally it's cheaper.
Notably if you go to any private hospital or clinic in the UK you will see a lot of Arabs and signs in Arabic etc. Rich Arabs come to London for private healthcare all the time.
As I said, the quality of the actual doctors and nurses is not the issue. When working privately they have much less stress and much more freedom.
Why freedom? On the NHS, doctors aren't allowed to use their own judgement. They must follow government guidelines to the letter. Often these are corrupt (Big Pharma pay the government regulators to change guidelines in their favour) but they must be followed or that doc is personally liable.
Privately, the guidelines are just guidelines. Docs can treat their patients however they feel is best.
Guess which approach ends in better care?
Final point: the crazy thing is lefties want to shut down private healthcare because it's "unfair." The state has brainwashed em against their own interests. If anything they should campaign to shut down the NHS so everyone has access to the quality of care provided by private healthcare.
As my own dad said to me: if you had to use the NHS you'd be dead.
Yup.
In the US the private insurance system needs to be non-profit. I think that would help the system in myriad ways.
You should look at the system they have in Europe. It's effectively a hybrid. It works across every European country. Which is notable considering they're entirely different economies and cultures.
The issue in the US is corruption by lobbyists and so on. That needs to be fixed before you have any progress.
Yep, the state doesn't need to be involved at all.
Sorry for the wall of text, as you can probably tell I have a lot of personal experience with both systems. I have friends who experienced both systems. And I literally would be dead if I had to rely on the NHS which most of the population do. It makes me angry and sad.
No need to apologize! The shit needs to be said, and the funny thing is whenever this topic comes up between folks here and the UK, there's so much defense of the NHS it's crazy. People feel like they have to justify that their corrupt government is doing the right thing smh
Yuuuuup it is literally a cult. There's no reasoning with them. So it'll never be fixed because no one can ever criticise it.
But I'm not a politician and I don't care about my views being popular so, ahem:
THE NHS IS UTTER FUCKING SHIT FOR BOTH DOCTORS AND PATIENTS AND BUPA IS 1000000X BETTER!
Your point about doctors being automatons who follow diagnostic flow charts is exactly correct. When I entered pre-med eduction the idea I had in my mind was a old school black bag doctor focussing on wellness. The AMA will have none of that. Wellness, do you think the pharmaceutical companies who have their money lobbying hands in everything want wellness? Hell no.
"How dare you actually use your brain? We paid good money to make you prescribe our meds!"
People think this is only a US issue but it happens here too because states are corrupt.
I was literally told by four different GPs that oxy is less addictive than morphine. They were happy to script me 40mg of IR oxy per day but not oral morphine (less than half as strong) because "it kicks in faster so it's more addictive."
The last doc I spoke to must have known it was bullshit because they sighed and pretty much said "yeah look it's the guidelines, I'm not allowed to prescribe anything else."
On what I'm certain is a totally unrelated note, Mundipharma, the international oxy pushing company still fully owned by the Sacklers, is based on the UK.