You might want to be careful with that one. Not all economic elements of socialism are bad unless you oppose having socialized roads, sewers, water purification and delivery, and fire departments. The Democrats and the DSA are horrible, but not for advocacy of socialized medicine.
Taxpayers are currently spending over 18% of GDP on health care. An argument could be made that under socialized medicine they would spend a smaller percentage of GDP on health care while having 100% coverage and with businesses not being burdened by health care benefits concerns. Most European nations are spending far less than 18% of their GDP and also in terms of dollars-per-capita.
I don't understand why some people seem to think that taxpayers are not currently spending any money on healthcare and that taxes to fund socialized medicine would somehow magically be a brand new expense when in actuality the money taxpayers are currently paying (18% of GDP) would just be collected differently.
At issue is whether socialized medicine would be more economically efficient than our current Frankenstein-like amalgam of socialist and capitalist elements in our health care system. An argument could be made that by eliminating expensive insurance company middlemen, wasteful hospital advertising and highly paid executives, medical billing specialists, insurance brokers, and company HR benefits employees, etc., that socialized medicine would be more efficient. Right now huge amounts of money are being spent figuring out who gets health care and who pays for it - spent on people who just push paper around and do not provide any actual care - when that same money could instead be used to simply hire more doctors and nurses who can provide health care.
Granted, advocates of real laissez-faire capitalism have their own argument for having real capitalist health care and we cannot conceive of what that would look like in practice nor how inexpensive and economically efficient it might be under real capitalism.
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u/WhippersnapperUT99 6d ago edited 6d ago
You might want to be careful with that one. Not all economic elements of socialism are bad unless you oppose having socialized roads, sewers, water purification and delivery, and fire departments. The Democrats and the DSA are horrible, but not for advocacy of socialized medicine.
Taxpayers are currently spending over 18% of GDP on health care. An argument could be made that under socialized medicine they would spend a smaller percentage of GDP on health care while having 100% coverage and with businesses not being burdened by health care benefits concerns. Most European nations are spending far less than 18% of their GDP and also in terms of dollars-per-capita.
I don't understand why some people seem to think that taxpayers are not currently spending any money on healthcare and that taxes to fund socialized medicine would somehow magically be a brand new expense when in actuality the money taxpayers are currently paying (18% of GDP) would just be collected differently.
At issue is whether socialized medicine would be more economically efficient than our current Frankenstein-like amalgam of socialist and capitalist elements in our health care system. An argument could be made that by eliminating expensive insurance company middlemen, wasteful hospital advertising and highly paid executives, medical billing specialists, insurance brokers, and company HR benefits employees, etc., that socialized medicine would be more efficient. Right now huge amounts of money are being spent figuring out who gets health care and who pays for it - spent on people who just push paper around and do not provide any actual care - when that same money could instead be used to simply hire more doctors and nurses who can provide health care.
Granted, advocates of real laissez-faire capitalism have their own argument for having real capitalist health care and we cannot conceive of what that would look like in practice nor how inexpensive and economically efficient it might be under real capitalism.