Republican Speaker Mike Johnson predicted Monday the federal government shutdown may become the longest in history, saying he “won’t negotiate” with Democrats until they hit pause on their health care demands and reopen.
Republican Speaker Mike Johnson predicted Monday the federal government shutdown may become the longest in history, saying he “won’t negotiate” with Democrats until they hit pause on their health care demands and reopen.
As a Canadian who has almost limitless free access to healthcare, I’ve never understood America’s decision to withhold the same from millions of people.
Instead the US spends $1 trillion on war machines.
Make it make sense.
Because the hierarchy of society that most politicians support demands employees who are terrified of leaving their exploitative jobs. Money is a powerful motivator, but even more powerful is the health of you and your family.
And at the same time, a very sick citizen does not generate economic benefits to them, so there’s no reason to make serious care available and/or not crushingly expensive. Better to drain as much as possible from them before the dead weight succumbs to those pressures than direct any revenue that could given back to “job creators” as tax breaks of subsidies.
It’s also why political and media personalities will brag about how quickly the county recovered from COVID. It wasn’t an economic miracle, it was sacrificing lives at the altar of capitalism. It went hand in hand with our absurdly disproportionate number of deaths.
Why we don’t storm their houses and string them up from lamp posts (or, I suppose, vote them out), I don’t know.
It doesn’t make any sense, it’s so fucking stupid. I can’t stand paying a middleman every month who is not a doctor and can just deny me coverage that I need if I go to the wrong hospital or if they don’t agree with something my doctor recommended. All because a significant portion of the populace is too fucking stupid to understand how this is an extremely inefficient system at best and they reduce any argument in favor of changing it to “communism!” which is a word they heard is bad generations ago and never bothered spending two seconds to look up the actual definition ever since.
They’ll also just say “muh waiting lists” like that’s somehow a worse problem than not getting care at all
Yeah, it’s not like we don’t have them too; if I want to make an appointment to see my primary care physician, it’s about a month out; cardiologist is about a month and a half. I’m failing to see the downside to socialized medicine that makes it so much worse than our current system.
You just answered your own question. Welcome to America. It isn’t getting smarter anytime soon.
Because the American theocracy is built around their most holy of books, “Atlas Shrugged.” Greed and selfishness are noble pursuits, and whoever is hurt by them deserves it because they weren’t strong enough to fight back and win.
I mean, yes but also extremely no. Rand’s influence ends about three feet away from those books. The Chicago School of Economics, The Cato Institute, and The Heritage Foundation are the real powerhouses here.
That, plus good ol’ racism and the oil crisis of the 70s are why we missed the bus on robust social safety nets. (Boomers were making actual societal change, but then the oil crisis turned a majority of them into conservatives)
The oil crisis will go down in history as the beginning of the end, where the story of the Late American Republic starts.
All that is left to decide is what chapter follows
Propaganda + Human Stupidity
We aren’t as evolved as people would like to think.
We pay more for healthcare than you do, per capita. It’s not that we don’t have free healthcare - it’s A) that the oligarchs have figured out how to build a money siphoning machine out of our healthcare system and B) that they can use it to enforce social classes.
No, it’s exactly that. We do not have free health care. I have what is considered “good” insurance (which I pay a monthly premium for), and I always have to pay some fee or copay whenever I see a doctor for anything other than a well visit. I pay hundreds of dollars a year out of pocket for glasses and contacts, devices I require to safely do things like operate a car, even though that stuff is supposedly “covered” by insurance. Heaven forbid I need any dental work beyond a cleaning, as that would cost me probably hundreds as well. So no. No, we don’t have free healthcare, and it’s honestly baffling that any American that isn’t an oligarch would suggest that we do.
Also, we pay more tax money per patient than any other country in the world on top of our monthly premiums, deductibles, and co-pays.
It doesn’t make sense but as long as they are given another person to look down on the Americans seem happy.
America is a nation filled with vile evil people.
I don’t think I’d say it’s filled with them. Surely there are only a small portion that actually wanted this to happen.
Not so small.