I am from Latin America though and have a 0.025 USD / year tuition on my current math undergrad education, public healthcare, and a more robust social security net overall.
Is the education, healthcare and social security you’re getting at the same level you’d get in the US?
I live outside the US and I can assure you the universal healthcare here doesn’t not provide the same level of care that even Medicaid does in the US. Sure if I had a routine broken arm there would be little difference, but if I had a serious cancer I’d be dead here.
Sure. I'm a capitalist and free marketeer, but support social security systems and even public health care. I think the US goes too far, particularly it's health care system is appalling, but I have to admit it's thin employment protections do make it a lot more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe, it was a whole year ahead of us on the curve by the early 2010s including in terms of jobs growth. There are pros and cons both ways.
> Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe
I'm not EU or US, but the US printed a heck of a lot of magic monopoly money. And yet the dollar remained as strong as it ever was. Yes, some smartie pants will no doubt explain this away as "quantitative easing" which is the magnum opus of magic monopoly money.
EU central bank doesn't seem to like that very much being so risk averse. So we can say the EU is keeping financial wizardry in check because if left to the US, no one would know what is going on.
So the US bailed out the banks with a Trillion dollars, got it all back with a profit, used massive QE to successfully cushion their economy, without inflation. Which is bad.
Meanwhile the EU which at the time was crippled over Greece, lagged far behind in the recovery and still haven't properly addressed deep flaws in the Euro are our saviours?
Not sure this is particularly true, it took the US 6 years from 2008 to recover all the jobs lost in the recession [0]. I would assume the bulk of those were low-skilled, manufacturing roles, the ones ever more at risk of being rendered obsolete by automation.
Well given that the biggest looser of 2008 crash were the poorest slice of society that almost could afford a house.
They were tricked into loans they couldn't afford. And with all blue-collar jobs being exported at alarming rate to Asia, i would say that the recovery after that recession doesn't ring true to me.
Sure economy and gdp are higher up, but its not because poor recovered. They were left behind.
Trump won presidency mainly because he turned to those people and promised them the good old time, where the town had its steelworks and everyone had quite life.
Yes and we need to avoid the nirvana fallacy. I live in a country with public health care and every so ofter people are sent home to die from scheduled surgery because there aren't doctors or other staff available. My dad had 99% clogged heart arteries before he got treatment. My brother works in the US and prefer their system, but then he's got a good job - still a data point for the discussion.
Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die.
The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.
One problem is fixable.
EDIT: And also, unless your brother has had a major health event, then the reality is he has no idea whether his insurance is any good.
Perhaps there's another way to put this. In an ineffective public healthcare system, people are denied treatment because the public body has determined it is not worth the cost. In an ineffective private healthcare system, people are denied treatment because they cannot afford to pay.
> Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.
Is it? I am fortunate enough to not be in this position, but I'm not sure how much I would care about the reasons why if I were.
And it will matter just as little if you can't afford to pay. The problem is, you seem to think you'd be able to - but that is statistically improbable. The cost of heart bypass surgery in the US (literally the highest in the world) as of 2019 was USD$123,000 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/189966/cost-of-a-heart-b....
That's not including the costs of follow up treatment, the increased cost of your insurance after an event which changes your risk category, or the byzantine system by which your job will be gently encouraged to let go of a "significant risk factor" because it will reduce the cost of them providing health insurance.
And in reality - people in socialized healthcare systems aren't denied life saving treatment. The availability of treatment is a priority list for "elective" surgery - that is, surgery not immediately necessary to save one's life. And this also does not affect the availability of private care - in Australia you always have the option to pay for private treatment, but controversy over waiting times exists precisely because the vast majority cannot afford to pay. And our costs are cheaper then US to start with if you do.
Hence the original question of how rich the OP's father was: because the reality is, if he wanted surgery right away he most likely could have got it. That he didn't is telling - because he actually couldn't afford it. Couldn't afford to fly to the US and have it done either. The US would have "denied" them treatment just as assuredly. And they did eventually get it where they were.
I want to be clear that I do not think the US system is a good one.
However, we should not be blind to limitations of a UK style system. There are also in-between alternatives, such as in Germany or to a lesser extent Japan.
Well my point was to not compare with rainbows and unicorns but how it works in the real world. Also I'm not saying the US has a better system.
But just to entertain this discussion (big mistake), the problem is that you can't pay for surgery even if you're rich, which means that useful price signals for how to allocate resources are missing. You'll perhaps say: "Well it shouldn't be like that". I agree but there is a reason it ended up like this.
My brother doesn't need a serious health event to know (for a reasonable definition of "know") because he has a brain and people to talk to with direct and indirect experience of the system.
>the problem is that you can't pay for surgery even if you're rich, ...
Yes you absolutely can, here in the UK I've had private health insurance from my employers for the last 23 years of my career. I'm not aware of any country that outlaws paying for private treatment.
This is the case for some provinces in Canada, and is used as a healthcare boogie man in the USA. At the same time, US politicians for a single payer refuse to state whether private supplemental insurance would be allowed. This mixes up debate between universal coverage and eliminating private insurance entirely.
>Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die.
Not trying to be argumentative, but what is this based on? I’ve known people who received major heart surgeries without insurance and certainly didn’t have that kind of money.
How do you know that was because of their job market?
As far as I'm aware, that was because they printed tons of money. Money was printed in the EU too, but stopped much sooner - far too soon. As if people forgot about Keynes.
And actually I think you have some of this backwards. If you have a good social security net, you don't have to protect workers as much.
Likewise, health care is an investment in human capital. When people are ill, they can't produce.
Well the British recovery was almost certainly slowed by the introduction of austerity following the return of the Conservatives to power.
The European (i.e Eurozone/EU) recovery was knocked back by the raising of interest rates by the ECB in 2011.
And finally, the US did recover better because they put a lot more proportionally into stimulus (even though it wasn't enough, as later events showed).
I'm not sure that you can suggest that the flexible labour market was a cause of that (and indeed, one would have expected the UK to recover quicker than the rest of Europe then, as they have more flexible labour laws).
Nowhere near as flexible as the US though. The ability to hire and fire quickly without high costs has helped the USA recover from crises many times in the past as well. Employers in countries with high protections for workers are often reluctant to hire because it costs so much to slim down the work force once you employ them. It's not like the aftermath of 2008 was the first time this has ever been tested.
To be clear I'm not saying their system is superior, I think it goes too far. Poverty and what I consider labour exploitation are much more common over there. Also I think it's pretty clear now that significant increases in minimum wages don't seem to significantly increase unemployment, for example, but on severance pay particularly it's pretty clear this is a tradeoff.
The US did not "recover" from 2008. It retooled its economy even further towards precarious hiring, with predictably disastrous political consequences.
There are proven links between economic insecurity and the rise of political extremism, and it's manifestly incorrect to suggest that corporate economics operates in a moral and political vacuum with no political consequences.
The US system is truly the worst of a both worlds: a highly centralized, bureaucratic system, with a handful of winner capturing huge margins on the top. The level of regulation and corporatism means that free-market people should be as dissatisfied as those on the left.
