i once heared something like this:

"the idea of having more than those who have nothing is the very only reason shareholders can ever imagine someone would work for at all, thus they also falsely believe they would do something good when enforcing this by removing everything from those who already are vulnerable and thus create a living example of how you would end when you don't help them rob even more."

Here in the states when we say "medical insurance shouldn't exist" what we mean is "the medical insurance industry shouldn't exist"

Basically the cluster fuck of insurance companies we have now shouldn't exist, we should just have a single payer type system where medical expenses are paid for through our tax dollars. In its current state it's a nightmare to deal with.

A lot of private insurance in the US amounts to paying a couple hundred monthly to have the insurance and then they deny payment for basically anything and everything. So you pay them to pay out of pocket anyway.

Just got state insurance which covers everything, but very few offices accept it.

So yeah. Insurance in the US is super fucked up and people go without healthcare, even if they have insurance because they simply can't afford it.

I do pay for my medical expenses out of pocket, because I can’t keep insurance long enough to ensure consistent cate.

I’ll give an example. Back in 21 I signed up for medicaid because I was poor enough to qualify. I get an email from my psychiatrist’s office “We can no longer treat you at this office because of your new medicaid status. We are not allowed to treat people on medicaid.” I asked, and they’re not even allowed to treat me if I pay out of pocket.

This is a new medicaid rule. Now if you’re on medicaid you can only see medicaid-approved providers.

So I canceled my medicaid. And I continue to pay out of pocket.

I’ve tried using other government-assisted programs before, with disastrous results. I’ve been kicked off the rolls before, at random, and I’ve had to go through the crash involved in stopping my medication, because while these government programs are helpful, they’re also buggy as fuck and can’t be relied upon.

Yeah I guess the kind of Single Payer model I prefer can be conceptualised as "insurance." But it feels more like health care is taxpayer funded. The similarity to insurance is just details for the detail nerds.

I agree with you 99%, and I’m only saying this incidentally: I think the world makes a lot more sense when we realize that change as such has real, ethically-valid costs associated with it.

We do want change, but change is a source of stress for a nervous system, so it’s always worth remembering that there’s a certain maximum rate of change we can follow while keeping people sane.

This was a key recognition, for instance, in finally succeeding at fixing various addictions of mine. I just slowed down the rate of the change and stopped trying to change overnight. And I’m not referring to dangerous withdrawal here. I’m talking about managing my own anxiety during the change to trigger snap-back.

I agree TSA’s gotta change, and stop doing their super invasive checks at the airports. But I just wanted to point out at a more global level there should be a little respect for such things as “We can’t just drop this all at once because we’ve been doing it for 25 years”.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I wouldn’t vote for a republican who got me a job, and I probably wouldn’t vote for anyone who got rid of my job (unless they were otherwise really great). So at least for me, getting rid of the job means you lose my vote and replacing it doesn’t necessarily gain my vote.

And people watching this exchange from the outside might vote against because they don’t like the idea of “minus a job for Bob, plus a job for Carl” as even-steven.