I'm not putting down a serious revision of how we do health-care here. After all, our aggressively capitalistic attitudes don't get in the way of a government-backed promise that nobody will starve to death.
But the US has always had a strong streak of "I've got mine!" A typical quote is
America, [the immigrant peasant] learned, was not the land of the good peasant. It was the first of many sad disillusionments to observe that in this new homeland the ruthless fellow, the mean, tight-fisted man who grabbed what he could and shared nothing, made out best. Much of the sense of status was lost. The ex-peasant could not keep his place because he could not find it. He had to go out and fight to find whatever place he could. -- William V. Shannon, The American Irish
And we've always attracted people who are comfortable with that, so the national personality continues in that vein. (I'm not surprised that one of our most egalitarian and socialist-leaning eras was precisely the period of very restricted immigration, about 1920 to 1965.)
Some of these attitudes get in the way of health-care reform. We do have a strong understanding of medical care as prestige goods, which directly fights against cost control. Similarly, 90% of us think that if we think a treatment would help and we can drum up the money for it, we should be able to get it, which makes cost-control essentially impossible.
Regarding the more humane social-democratic countries of Europe, people should give serious consideration as to why they haven't moved there already. Yes, this is the noxious "Love it or leave it!" meme, but I'm also asking people to face up to what the tradeoffs really are. As far as I can tell, you get government healthcare, but you lose 25% to 50% of your material standard of living.
Those countries are also rather hard to immigrate into (unless you're an EU citizen). And it's easier to run a generous welfare system if you don't let in a lot of immigrants from poor countries.
Hmmm... I'm not trying to be jingoistic there. But societies do make choices, and the US leans particularly hard toward supporting "opportunity" (which reduces "security"), and it emphasizes giving people full measure in their roles as consumers, which undermines getting treated well as producers.
But the US has always had a strong streak of "I've got mine!" A typical quote is
America, [the immigrant peasant] learned, was not the land of the good peasant. It was the first of many sad disillusionments to observe that in this new homeland the ruthless fellow, the mean, tight-fisted man who grabbed what he could and shared nothing, made out best. Much of the sense of status was lost. The ex-peasant could not keep his place because he could not find it. He had to go out and fight to find whatever place he could. -- William V. Shannon, The American Irish
And we've always attracted people who are comfortable with that, so the national personality continues in that vein. (I'm not surprised that one of our most egalitarian and socialist-leaning eras was precisely the period of very restricted immigration, about 1920 to 1965.)
Some of these attitudes get in the way of health-care reform. We do have a strong understanding of medical care as prestige goods, which directly fights against cost control. Similarly, 90% of us think that if we think a treatment would help and we can drum up the money for it, we should be able to get it, which makes cost-control essentially impossible.
Regarding the more humane social-democratic countries of Europe, people should give serious consideration as to why they haven't moved there already. Yes, this is the noxious "Love it or leave it!" meme, but I'm also asking people to face up to what the tradeoffs really are. As far as I can tell, you get government healthcare, but you lose 25% to 50% of your material standard of living.
Those countries are also rather hard to immigrate into (unless you're an EU citizen). And it's easier to run a generous welfare system if you don't let in a lot of immigrants from poor countries.
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