Comment by verisimi
19 days ago
Perhaps, vitamins, micro doses of aspirin, and other low level medical treatments should also be added to water, for the benefit of the silent poor and sick.
19 days ago
Perhaps, vitamins, micro doses of aspirin, and other low level medical treatments should also be added to water, for the benefit of the silent poor and sick.
Or even crazier, hear me out, maybe we can just let people have healthcare without cost-gating it? Like oh idk, every other even semi-wealthy nation in the world except the one where measles is making a comeback?
What do you mean by "without cost-gating"?
Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done. Because of the cost.
I'm not saying they aren't better than America's, but the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true. Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive. Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
> except the one where measles is making a comeback?
Measles is growing globally. In the "European region" there were double the number of measles cases in 2024 as there were in 2023. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/european-region-report...
>what do you mean by that
I mean, raise taxes on businesses (wanna guess how many walmart employees are on government aid, i.e how much we tax payers are directly subsidizing their exorbitant profits while they pay their employees below a living wage?)Tax the rich, (3 individuals hoard more wealth than 50% of the country combined) + Cut some large percentage of insurance jobs, military spending, and use that money to provide healthcare to every american, without spending time and money making sure they're poor before we deign them able to receive help. really, it's quite simple.
>Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done.
Agreed there. Ever wonder why?
Taking your point earnestly for a moment, can you earnestly tell me that's not still miles better than America, with more expensive outcomes, worse care outcomes, lowering life expectancy compared to poorer nations, record maternal mortality rates, and tons of medical bankruptcies?[2]
Cmon, be serious. Go fund me is one of the bigger health insurance systems in the country.[3] Btw, medicare for all saves tremendous amounts of money vs our current system.[1] Much like ubi, the science is clear, but the rich and the naive are too brainwashed or dumb by the propaganda of the oligarchy owned media to think American's deserve healthcare, housing, a dignified life.
Seriously, Compare your "worst case" to america, where people simply can't afford to see the specialists, or get the procedures at ALL. I know which one I would have and my opinion is backed by the sentiment, and empirical data of, like I said, literally every even half developed nation in the world. Your can offer nothing against this. It's simply fact.
That's not even to speak about women dying from things like birth complications because their draconian state let the theocratic fascists dictate what a women and their doctor can and can't do with their own body.[0]
>because of the cost
Drastic, brazen or glib misunderstanding of history and politics. Throughout conservative governments, from reagan to thatcher to bush to trump, the objective of these ayn rand reading dummies, (read, austerity politicians) are as follows:
1. cut funding to vital social agency.
2. point to resulting difficulties as proof it's a silly system.
3. sell it off to private corporations and get hefty kickbacks.
THAT is what causes all of the (still lesser than ours) problems you lament.
>the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true
Where did I say that again?
Man, if only someone had thought of that. If only we had a 1% that controls almost 40% of the wealth in this country. We could raise taxes to pay for such a program. Btw, I reiterate, every study, (even from neocon think tanks) recognize it would save us hundreds of billions.) But austerity/conservative politicians don't want to improve the lives of us, they want to enrich their fellow oligarchs.
Even thinking about this for a second will validate the notion. Instead of hundreds and thousands of employees whose job it is to give the least care to the least people for profit, maybe spend that money oh, idk, giving people healthcare? How much healthcare could've been provided from Luigi's cough victim's salary? If instead of getting paid millions to use AI to deny healthcare to those in need, that money was oh idk, spent on healthcare?
>Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive.
Gee, I wonder what the cause of that is. Oh wait, I know this one too. Pretty common conservative talking point. Have you heard of the phrase "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?"
Do you think a system where people are afraid to go to the dr for economic reasons contribute at all to the drastic healthcare expenses? I know someone that works as an ER nurse, people do not come in til they're at deaths door, with an issue that would have been remedied for a 100th the cost had they simply been able to see a doctor when first troubled. And again, all studies point to medicare for all saving hundreds of billions vs our current system.[1]
>Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
Or we could idk, just stop wasting money on evil "who deserves help" jobs and just you know, give that money directly to the people our government is supposed to improve the lives of? This goes for welfare, healthcare, unemployment, etc, too. How much of our social safety nets' budgets are spent in bureaucrats meant to make it difficult to get those benefits? To subsidize billion $ corporations? To bail out banks who speculated on subprime mortgages? To fund a $9T war on terror that did nothing but make us more enemies?
[0] https://steady.substack.com/p/women-in-texas-are-dying
[1]https://www.commondreams.org/news/medicare-for-all-introduce...
[2] https://www.pnhp.org/docs/AJPHBankruptcy2019.pdf
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/02/gofundme-...
12 replies →
Here in the U.K. at least, vitamins are added to many of the basic foods: like breakfast cereal and bread.
Putting aspirin in the water would be incredibly dangerous: brain bleeds and stomach ulcers would quickly knock out any other health benefits.
Like the vitamins and minerals added to cereals/milk or the iodine added to salt?
Or the iron that I wish they wouldn't add as it means I can't eat them due to my medical condition.
Those don’t have a monopoly.
The trouble with slippery slopes is that they carry you away from productive discussion.
One man's slippery slope, is another man's exploration of an idea. I don't think exploring widely is unproductive.
I could also say, that discussing slippery slopes (a linguistic discussion) is itself what moves the discussion too far from the original topic. You protest too much.
The trouble with slippery slopes is that not all of them are fallacious, as you are suggesting. This is a reasonable point: if we are doing delivery of medicine through tap water, where's the line? A few people have seriously suggested putting low doses of lithium in the tap water as a societal antidepressant.
The line is where we've drawn it now - nothing has changed in decades. A few people suggest all kinds of things, that doesn't make them at imminent risk of happening.
The difference is that fluoride is effectively an industrial waste product and thus it benefits multiple parties to use it. If vitamins were also an industrial waste product, we would indeed be adding them to lots of things.
>The difference is that fluoride is effectively an industrial waste product and thus it benefits multiple parties to use it
Source? Moreover, how much of a market can municipal water fluoridation create that companies would bother lobbying for it?
Are they silent, or just not being represented by the American press?
Same question but for giardia. Natural water from the river doesn't pass through filters that Science built.
Should we not treat water at all? Should we instead all like off ground water or rivers and lakes?
Do you think there's a difference between a/ treating water to make it clean and b/ adding minerals and vitamins for the benefit of others, whether they want it or not?
Not really. I'm sure some people want distilled water to come out of their tap. You can't provide any service to a large group of people without giving some of them something they don't want in some way or another.
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I can't help but come away from this conversation with the impression that you people are talking about livestock and not human individuals with rights to their own body and bodily autonomy. This to me is straight out of the nazi/communist/fascist type of mindset.