[biocomputation]

<< I honestly think that there's something deeply damaged at the heart of the American psyche. You've no sense that you are “are all one and the same” to use Ford's words. You can't see why collectively paying taxes for healthcare (everyone's family has an illness at some point in time) and collectively bargaining for cheaper medicines from manufacturers might be overall a good thing.

More than half of Americans support single-payer. Some estimates are as high as 70%.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/most-americans-now-support-m...

I absolutely support single-payer and so do most of the people I know.

There isn't a HN thread long enough for the discussion of what it might take to actually get single-payer done.

[igravious]

70% ? If that's true then that's fantastic but also very worrying.

This shows that whereas the majority of the nation support some form of single-payer option the government (no matter who is in charge) resists it. This means that the government works for the few, not the many. This implies an oligarchy which turns out to be verifiable[0]. Out of interest I looked up all the countries that have neither free nor universal healthcare[1] and cross-ranked them according to their human development index[2]. The list is quite small. What we see is that the US is the only country with a _supposedly_ very high human development index (and the only one in the top 70 of countries) that has a healthcare system that is neither free nor fair. 8 out of the 10 least developed countries in the world are on this list. How Americans are not figuratively up in arms over this is beyond me. I think it is fair to say that the US political system is broken in a very real sense. This is worrying because traditionally only catastrophe curbs inequality this bad[3] and I'm not sure incrementalism works in a broken system. Oh well, time will tell.

   Country			Free?	All?	Level	Rank
   United States		No	No	V	13
   Saint Kitts and Nevis	No	No	H	72
   Grenada			No	No	H	75
   Lebanon			No	No	H	80
   Dominican Republic		No	No	H	94
   Jordan			No	No	H	95
   Suriname			No	No	H	100
   Dominica			No	No	H	103
   Marshall Islands		No	No	H	106
   Turkmenistan			No	No	H	108
   Indonesia			No	No	M	116
   Iraq				No	No	M	120
   Tajikistan			No	No	M	127
   Micronesia			No	No	M	131
   Kenya			No	No	M	142
   Cambodia			No	No	M	146
   Angola			No	No	M	147
   Cameroon			No	No	M	151
   Syrian Arab Republic		No	No	L	155
   Zimbabwe			No	No	L	156
   Nigeria			No	No	L	157
   Mauritania			No	No	L	159
   Senegal			No	No	L	164
   Comoros			No	No	L	165
   Sudan			No	No	L	167
   Haiti			No	No	L	168
   Afghanistan			No	No	L	168
   Gambia			No	No	L	174
   Guinea			No	No	L	175
   Guinea-Bissau		No	No	L	177
   Mozambique			No	No	L	180
   Liberia			No	No	L	181  
   Mali				No	No	L	182
   Sierra Leone			No	No	L	184
   Burundi			No	No	L	185
   Chad				No	No	L	186
   South Sudan			No	No	L	187
   Niger			No	No	L	189
   Somalia			No	No	-	---

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheide...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-u...