Whether or not non-productive individuals who don't do any work can own the means of production and reap the majority of the economic surplus from it is somewhat tangential to the question of who pays for whose healthcare.
There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.
In terms of waiting times to see a doctor or specialist (the only cases where stats for the US seem to be available), the US looks a touch better than average in waiting times for healthcare within comparable countries: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025....
Ahead of Canada, sure (they come worst here in both scenarios) but behind countries like the UK, Germany & the Netherlands that do have universal health care.
I prefer that over people having to start a GoFundme whenever they get sick. My relatives in Germany get necessary treatment as needed. There is the myth of no wait times in the US but from my experience there are also of wait times here.
In the US, twenty day wait list for a broken toe, seven month wait list for a neurologist, five month wait list for a deviated septum surgery, and good luck finding a PCP taking new patients.
This quality of service costs me and my wife ~$23,000/year.
Sure, we can walk into urgent care and get seen. I've also never had a problem walking into a walk-in clinic in Canada, either. The clinic's lobby and the doctor's car in the parking lot isn't as nice over there, though.
If you think there aren't long waits for non-emergency treatment in the US, you are lucky or a moron.
I needed a sleep study. An inpatient sleep study is booked 3 years out here. Good insurance.
Seeing that sleep study doctor in the first place just to get sent a $150 gadget that listens to me sleep? I waited two months. The follow up appointment? 3 months.
Do you know why non-emergency care waits that long? Efficiency. Turns out, hospitals want to not spend extra money on doctors they don't need whether they get paid by the government or this weird industry called "insurance" we have developed.
Go head, tell me about how you can get any treatment or any scan in a week without fail in our wonderful overpriced system.
In capitalism it is easy and transparent: price, with the side effect of aligning society interests with those of the selfish individual.
Of course the strange and heavily regulated US health-care system is obviously far far away from a free market.
In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Case in point: the EU that started lagging the USA so much in growth that ended up having to beg for basic defense when a blood-thirsty neighbor came hungry for land.
Rather, crony capitalism with no real competition (cartelisation in the absence of strong regulation). This invariably leads to Imperialism ... We see this with BiGTech today and the phenomena of "digital imperialism".
Capitalism is the reason those treatments exist in the first place. I don't see many cutting-edge cancer treatments coming out of Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition.
Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argued to be well-functioning market economies, are is often stabilized by adding elements of communism to the system-- publicly funded education, healthcare etc. This is one of the reasons why I as a vaguely socialism-influenced whatever I can reasonably be said to be see communism, i.e. a system characterized by the distribution principle "to each according to his need" as less revolutionary than the socialism distribution principle "to each according to his contribution". Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
Even in a pure unadulterated market economy that doesn't publicly fund healthcare you would expect to be able to protect yourself from high-impact low-likelihood events by means of an insurance. I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
> I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
The market is just reacting to the regulatory environment and all the political patches and shortcuts of same done to appease voters over the last 100 years. Fix that and the market will sort itself out.
Basically the US has mixed the worst aspects of for profit healthcare with the worst aspects of socialized healthcare. It underperforms while still costing obscene amounts of money.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
Probably, but that isn't really something I say anything about in what I wrote. Instead, what I wrote is basically a terminology quibble with the use capitalism instead of market economy.
I don't think your statement is true absolutely, I think it's very possible to have pure market economies that are quite well-functioning, i.e. not monopolies etc., where many people are very rich but with some people being really poor, even to the point of not being able to afford healthcare or healthcare insurance, so I don't think it's guaranteed to be true, though I think it's mostly true.
> Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.
You literally have the communist distribution principle for education at the primary level in the US, and it's a stabilizing element that allows you to stabilize your system despite having one of the harshest market economies in the world.
So I don't understand how your comment really relates to mine. My comment is basically me quibbling about terminology with the terms capitalism and market economy.
"the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others"
This allows decentralised decision making for large grained resource allocation - for example should we build a factory for shoes, or for toothbrushes? - and is a good thing, as central planning has been demonstrated to not work if applied to the whole economy. (the converse, no central planning to any of the economy, has also been demonstrated to not work!)
However that accumulation can be (and nowadays usually is) orchestrated by a corporate entity, which in an ideal world would be almost entirely beneficially owned by retirees on an equitable basis.
What has gone wrong, is that the benefits of productivity enhancements (since 1970?) have flowed to capital more so than to workers - which not least prevents them from forming capital themselves (savings/pensions), hence rising wealth inequality.
Maybe, and you really believe that, then you do believe in capitalism as Louis Blanc defined it, even though he invented it as a way to characterize something which he regarded as bad.
But this kind of thing, i.e. capital accumulation by some to the exclusion of others, is, I think, objectively problematic in that it's not really compatible with free markets since capital ownership will be barrier to entry once capital has in fact been accumulated by some to the exclusion of others.
I agree that it is decentralized though, but sort of like how feudalism is decentralized.
What are you suggesting is the alternative? Please don't reference small homogenous countries the size of Minnesota as something that will work for the US.
Whether or not non-productive individuals who don't do any work can own the means of production and reap the majority of the economic surplus from it is somewhat tangential to the question of who pays for whose healthcare.
There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.
With 2 month long plus waits for basic scans in countries like Canada
In terms of waiting times to see a doctor or specialist (the only cases where stats for the US seem to be available), the US looks a touch better than average in waiting times for healthcare within comparable countries: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025....
Ahead of Canada, sure (they come worst here in both scenarios) but behind countries like the UK, Germany & the Netherlands that do have universal health care.
I prefer that over people having to start a GoFundme whenever they get sick. My relatives in Germany get necessary treatment as needed. There is the myth of no wait times in the US but from my experience there are also of wait times here.
Still better than months long fundraisers that aren't even certain to raise enough to cover the cost.
1 reply →
In the US, twenty day wait list for a broken toe, seven month wait list for a neurologist, five month wait list for a deviated septum surgery, and good luck finding a PCP taking new patients.
This quality of service costs me and my wife ~$23,000/year.
Sure, we can walk into urgent care and get seen. I've also never had a problem walking into a walk-in clinic in Canada, either. The clinic's lobby and the doctor's car in the parking lot isn't as nice over there, though.
If you think there aren't long waits for non-emergency treatment in the US, you are lucky or a moron.
I needed a sleep study. An inpatient sleep study is booked 3 years out here. Good insurance.
Seeing that sleep study doctor in the first place just to get sent a $150 gadget that listens to me sleep? I waited two months. The follow up appointment? 3 months.
Do you know why non-emergency care waits that long? Efficiency. Turns out, hospitals want to not spend extra money on doctors they don't need whether they get paid by the government or this weird industry called "insurance" we have developed.
Go head, tell me about how you can get any treatment or any scan in a week without fail in our wonderful overpriced system.
Any system needs a resource allocation algorithm.
In capitalism it is easy and transparent: price, with the side effect of aligning society interests with those of the selfish individual.
Of course the strange and heavily regulated US health-care system is obviously far far away from a free market.
In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Case in point: the EU that started lagging the USA so much in growth that ended up having to beg for basic defense when a blood-thirsty neighbor came hungry for land.
28 replies →
Rather, crony capitalism with no real competition (cartelisation in the absence of strong regulation). This invariably leads to Imperialism ... We see this with BiGTech today and the phenomena of "digital imperialism".
Capitalism is the reason those treatments exist in the first place. I don't see many cutting-edge cancer treatments coming out of Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Those cutting edge cancer treatments come usually out of universities from publicly funded research.
But don't worry your free market friends are killing it right now, for tax reductions
https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-killed-cancer-research...
[flagged]
11 replies →
Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition.
Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argued to be well-functioning market economies, are is often stabilized by adding elements of communism to the system-- publicly funded education, healthcare etc. This is one of the reasons why I as a vaguely socialism-influenced whatever I can reasonably be said to be see communism, i.e. a system characterized by the distribution principle "to each according to his need" as less revolutionary than the socialism distribution principle "to each according to his contribution". Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
Even in a pure unadulterated market economy that doesn't publicly fund healthcare you would expect to be able to protect yourself from high-impact low-likelihood events by means of an insurance. I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
> I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
The market is just reacting to the regulatory environment and all the political patches and shortcuts of same done to appease voters over the last 100 years. Fix that and the market will sort itself out.
Basically the US has mixed the worst aspects of for profit healthcare with the worst aspects of socialized healthcare. It underperforms while still costing obscene amounts of money.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm.
Probably, but that isn't really something I say anything about in what I wrote. Instead, what I wrote is basically a terminology quibble with the use capitalism instead of market economy.
I don't think your statement is true absolutely, I think it's very possible to have pure market economies that are quite well-functioning, i.e. not monopolies etc., where many people are very rich but with some people being really poor, even to the point of not being able to afford healthcare or healthcare insurance, so I don't think it's guaranteed to be true, though I think it's mostly true.
> Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.
I’m the farthest thing from a communist, but what makes you think public funding cannot be given to drug research?
3 replies →
You literally have the communist distribution principle for education at the primary level in the US, and it's a stabilizing element that allows you to stabilize your system despite having one of the harshest market economies in the world.
So I don't understand how your comment really relates to mine. My comment is basically me quibbling about terminology with the terms capitalism and market economy.
"the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others"
This allows decentralised decision making for large grained resource allocation - for example should we build a factory for shoes, or for toothbrushes? - and is a good thing, as central planning has been demonstrated to not work if applied to the whole economy. (the converse, no central planning to any of the economy, has also been demonstrated to not work!)
However that accumulation can be (and nowadays usually is) orchestrated by a corporate entity, which in an ideal world would be almost entirely beneficially owned by retirees on an equitable basis.
What has gone wrong, is that the benefits of productivity enhancements (since 1970?) have flowed to capital more so than to workers - which not least prevents them from forming capital themselves (savings/pensions), hence rising wealth inequality.
Maybe, and you really believe that, then you do believe in capitalism as Louis Blanc defined it, even though he invented it as a way to characterize something which he regarded as bad.
But this kind of thing, i.e. capital accumulation by some to the exclusion of others, is, I think, objectively problematic in that it's not really compatible with free markets since capital ownership will be barrier to entry once capital has in fact been accumulated by some to the exclusion of others.
I agree that it is decentralized though, but sort of like how feudalism is decentralized.
1 reply →
What are you suggesting is the alternative? Please don't reference small homogenous countries the size of Minnesota as something that will work for the US.