this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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No healthcare though.
or living wage, or affordable housing
or infrastructure or child care or
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 allocates $550 billion over the next five years. That's in addition to another $650 billion that was already allocated.
I know you and I have a habit of disagreeing on essentially all things, so feel free to not respond to this, but I did want to put an actual fact out for anyone else reading and thinking that we literally don't spend money on infrastructure while we throw tons of money at war, because that's simply not true, even if you think the proportions are off.
The infrastructure and jobs act was far less than what we need, because half the government wants to starve the poor and kill them with preventable diseases and enslave them in lifelong debt. Remember that.
Wow, I can just feel the rush of the goalposts flying by!
Eat my ass. It's a fact that the bill was whittled down by compromises because half the government thinks any form of government spending is too expensive. Yet that same half loves spending money on war. Where's the lie?
Sorry, I'd rather not. I'm afraid I'm not a furry.
The US government only disagrees on matters which support the average citizen. Other than that, both sides are in lockstep when it comes to voting on bills...
They already spend a ton of public dollars on health. The problem is that it goes to insurance companies, administrative staff, and the downstream health costs of inadequate early access to care.
You're kinda contradicting yourself.
They don't spend public dollars on health. They give it to insurance companies and administrative staff and pharmaceutical companies and other private moneyed interests, and then there's none left for us.
They actually do spend a lot of public dollars on health, it's just spent into a system that isn't efficient. Universal access to care drives down costs significantly across the board - instead they have piecemeal coverage and a system with overall costs inflated by administrative staff hired solely to manage insurance billing and delayed treatments.
It's an interesting area of policy where expanding coverage means lower costs overall.
A lot of the money they spend on "health" isn't actually spent on the labor or materials or research needed to provide healthcare, it's stolen as profit by private companies.
It's important to remember that this money isn't being spent on our healthcare. It's being handed to moneyed interests.
This is true for any health system (labour and technology costs are huge components to health care, even in systems with universal coverage). However, there are also huge and significant costs inherent to any system that doesn't provide universal coverage (e.g., people delaying care leading to more severe illness costlier to respond to). Private insurance systems also introduce significant cost pressures even for non-profit and publicly funded providers by driving up staffing costs and requiring more support staff to operate.
All this to say, the US doesn't have a budget problem when it comes to health care - the primary obstacle is the policy challenge of switching to a system that does a better job at delivering care for everyone based on need rather than ability/willingness to pay. Massive cost savings follow when people are kept healthier.
My point is the money isn't actually being spent on labor or technology - it's just going into shareholders pockets.
I assume that any military spending would be equally inefficient.
how do you think it has the biggest army in the world