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Comment by Aunche

People talk about policies like they're something like can be picked up off the shelf at supermarket. If you could take the policies and Sweden copy-paste them to the US, then sure, we could save $1T and a hundred thousand lives. This would be a very difficult thing to replicate if you're a country without any existing healthcare system. It is impossible in a country with an extremely mature healthcare system, which accounts for nearly 20% of GDP.

No politician is going to want to deal with the fallout of massive layoffs or millions of people having their coverage changed (e.g. no free chiropractor appointments or GLP-1s for weight loss), especially since the Democrats suffered one of the worst Congressional losses in US history the year the ACA was passed. There are ways to make this transition less painful, but the only people interested in health policy are those who make money from healthcare, so you generally only see solutions that involve throwing money at the problem. We need regular people to develop an understanding of health policy or else we'll end up with a policy that merges the worst parts of a planned economy and capitalism even more than today.

parent Aunche 2 months ago

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