What do you think of the US?

The problem with that comparison is really how 1. The states see themselves as a unity far beyond Texas, which is exactly the point -> there´s a lot of fish in what you call one country, and that´s what impressed me 2. You all speak the same language which can still be a huge barrier, coming from someone who lives in Germany and has travled all over France, Italy, and in Austria, so the part that you circeled haha 3. As mentioned before, you mix a lot more, so the cities become big hubs of culture, whereas in Europe those cultures are still divided.
Yeah, If all of Europe was one Country, it would be very diverse, but it´s not, which is what I meant.
That was longer than expected. I hope you understand why the USA leaves a very diverse feelign to an outsider

They are far more risking the lives of people in other countries and if they risk their live, then to ensure oil reserves in developing countries.
But that´s what I mean by indoctrination, and not being able to look beyond your own horrizont (not neccesarily that this applies to you, but the answer sounds exactly like the generic text book answer that I have heard about a million times)

I have family members and friends who have gone out there and no they are not doing it "to ensure oil reserves." Maybe that's the reason our government officials are sending people out there, but that is in no way the reason the soldiers themselves are going out there. Some may be going for the money, some for the chance to get away from the lives here, maybe some because they want to defend something, others because they want more discipline, others because they want to live for something greater.

"Indoctrination" my ass. This was never drilled into me when I was younger. I lived a very peaceful life and had no idea of war or anything. The first time I learned about it was on Sept 11, when I was in 10th grade. What brought me to this conclusion of being respectful for those who risk their lives is because I came to know people who risk their lives. I gained respect for them seeing that they were doing something I could never imagine myself doing. I've held a gun - a small hand gun - once in my entire life. I can't imagine training with it. I can't imagine holding a larger gun. I can't imagine wearing the uniform, carrying a 50lb backpack, having someone screaming in my face, having to put my life in the hands of my comrades, driving through territories packed with mines, having to hide as someone shoots at me, having to not think about the person at the end of the scope of my gun, having to spend 10 months away from my family not knowing if I'll see them again, seeing my friends being blown up, killed.

But I know people who have experienced all that. Again, while I sit here typing peacefully at this computer. When I think back, I have none of those memories. I have memories of going to college, going on dates, eating good food whenever I want, sleeping without any worries.

This is not "indoctrination". It's "empathy".

There was a time where people had the mentality "oh the soldiers shouldn't be respected because they endanger people in other countries" and that was during the Vietnam war. You know, the war where million of Americans were drafted as in forcefully sent to war without consent and lots of Americans hated that war here at home. They hated the soldiers who came back from a war they never chose to be in. They ignored the fact those soldiers were practically victims, why?

it was because (among other things) "They are far more risking the lives of people in other countries "

apparently it wasn't just the politician's faults, apparently blaming politicians wasn't good enough for them to a point where they decided to use that mentality to justify pretty much outright discriminating these people, who may I remind you:

-suffered loss of limbs
-watched their friends get shot from people they couldn't see
-got shot at
-had to kill other people (the Vietnamese) and have to live with that fact the rest of their lives
-PTSD
...
and the list goes on

Imagine being that person in the hospital who's just had their limbs removed from amputation, just watched your friends die, there's a tube going into one of your intestines, and then after all that you're being sent home to:

Wowwk and other wounded servicemen felt excitement at being back on American soil. But looking out the window and seeing civilians stop to watch the small convoy of hospital-bound vehicles, his excitement turned to confusion. “I remember feeling like, what could I do to acknowledge them, and I just gave the peace signal,” Wowwk says. “And instead of getting return peace fingers, I got the middle finger...
...Celebrations aside, the government also failed to make good on its promises to those who served. Veterans returning from Vietnam were met with an institutional response marked by indifference...
...he developed symptoms of malaria—a tropical disease fairly uncommon in the concrete jungle—yet he was denied VA health care because he didn’t display those symptoms in Vietnam...
...And when it came to finding a job, he was met with thinly veiled disgust and discrimination from law firms upon learning he was a Vietnam infantry veteran.”

You give respect to those veterans, because they've seen absolute hell, and I'm not saying those they were fighting didn't see absolute hell either. I at least can also say that I dislike the Vietnam war, I wasn't born in that time so I find it hard to find the absolute hatred for it that Americans had at the time for it.

You don't ever blame the soldiers, you can only blame the politicians who forced them to act for the reasons you describe.

Don't get me started on health care. It's my day job, and I've never seen any evidence that our government controlled coverage options are any better than private insurance. I absolutely can't stand when companies or agencies full of people who wear business suits instead of scrubs tell me I'm not allowed to do my job, or think they're more qualified than my colleagues to judge if patients really need their prescriptions filled. (It's a fight almost every single time.) And if there are spending cuts, either our pay or reimbursements get cut (but the suits don't get a pay cut), or the services we are allowed to provide get cut.

And look at how many people die while waiting for treatment through the VA.

Indeed. Rural voters are the people who feed this nation, provide most of the raw materials to shelter this nation, provide the most energy (both fossil fuels and renewable resources), and are the most involved in wilderness conservation.

Also, since the President makes all Cabinet appointments, including some that have an overwhelmingly disproportionate impact on rural voters (think the heads of the Department of the Interior, Energy, Agriculture, and the Evironmental Protection Agency), rural voters have too much on the line to be drowned out by people who don't know what Russets, Holsteins, or Ponderosas are and think the Late Blight comes from oversleeping.

And I really do not think the (mostly rural) Native American vote deserves to be silenced.

Relax, I wasn't talking about firing doctors or nurses, but more like actually getting what quality is worth our spending out of it at the very least:

image.png605x616 239 KB

I have more stuff that shows how inefficient we are but I like this one the best because it gives more of a comprehending image. There isn't one single reason for this either, the whole system is kind of a disaster area.

One reason that we can't really do anything about is just the fact that we have a lot of old people, the boomers, they are also why social security is expensive as well it's because we have lots of old people who need it, and less workers to pay for it. Not much you can do about that other than just wait for them to die out in the next 10-30 years, in which I guarantee you that the price for both medicare and social security will plummet.

As of right now tho, there are economic inefficiencies that I just don't like.

Diabetic folks are supposedly expensive to take care of, or so you are told, but the reason why those folks are expensive isn't necessarily because of their diabetes, but the insulin they need is way over priced. It costs like 6 bucks to manufacture insulin for one person for one dose, which means it would realistically cost between $78-$133 per person per year, but big pharma decides to charge the US government $1251 per person per year. The diabetic population of America is a little over 30 million people, which adds up to over $37.5 billion per year for the diabetic population of the US. That cost could be 10 times cheaper, a little over 3 billion dollars if the US government had more control and told big pharma to not over charge. This would make insurance cheaper as well, we need a little more than obama care telling insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions such as that.

And mind you, this is JUST that particular medicine for that particular sort of person. I can't begin to imagine how much more we could save if the government had the ability to control those sorts of prices to more reasonable levels.

There's also this weird thing about hospitals that I don't really understand. Why is it that it costs someone $10,000 to walk into the building and be put in a bed?

If I rented an apartment here in Oregon with a rent cost of 11% I would only pay $2,000 per month, I can live in one of the more expensive Portland apartments for 5 months before it would ever get any close to as costly as being put in a hospital bed for what looks like is a little over a week:

I'm no doctor, nor do I work at a hospital, so I might be missing something here, but even if that money was being given to doctors for their labor, why charge it as being put in a room and not just have it charged as "labor" or something?

Speaking of labor, Administration costs. That's another money vampire in this charade of ours. For example, there'll be hospitals like Duke University Hospital, where they have hundreds more billing clerks than they do beds to put patients on. Paying workers is a companies biggest expense, the more people they need to pay, the more money they charge the government. If we had a system where we didn't need to have insurance companies and instead had a monopsony where the government just handles it all, we wouldn't have a need for all the administrative costs or even insurance costs because there wouldn't be people with multiple insurers that create varying demands for hospital administration to meet.

And when I say a monopsony, I say that baring in mind that it's not really free health care, but it's just jumbled with the tax dollar, but it at least still cuts the personal costs down by a lot.

Yes, that does mean job losses (especially considering the collapse of health insurance) but those people can find other insurance corporations to work for. This would also mean a greater good because it allows the government to cover everyone in the US.

Defensive medicine: Allow more legal protection for doctors like we do for companies who donate left over food to charities.

And of course the list goes on and on.

Regarding the Veteran's health care Association, that was more of a massive operator error event, it was mismanagement. I'm sure it can be fixed if the government was more organized about it and added reforms to make it better, like keeping an ER system that has the mentality of "Health now, money problems later" that hospitals should have by default as a functioning facility as well as better rationing.

Besides, maybe about 300,000 veterans died under that, and yes that is an ugly amount of deaths due to that system, but consider there's 18 million veterans in that system. If scaled up to all 320,000,000 Americans, you're looking at 5.333 million deaths over the course of maybe 10-20 years or so, that's at most 533,000 deaths per year and at least 266,000. Two to five times more people die from car accidents each year. This is also using numbers from a horribly extreme case that can be fixed to be better than what it is if the people running it were just more competent.

For this next point, I'm going to be using "human years". Just think of it like "man hours" where if I get 60 people to work on something for 2 hours, that'd be 120 man hours. Only instead of hours, it's years, and instead of working on something, it's living a full life.

Compare the health care we have now to the number of years that people could be living if the life expectancy was as high as, say, Japan's but the system we used killed as many people as the VA has.

Our life expectancy currently is about 78 years old while Japan's is 84 years old. To be more harsh on this system, I'm assuming those 5.333 million deaths I mentioned earlier were all infants when they died, and not 20-40 year olds. If 5.333 million infants die in 10 years, each year we lose about 22.3 million man years of life from the health care system. But we also gain 26.88 billion man years total from 84 years life expectancy. Subtracting losses in systemic deaths as well as the amount of man years we currently get, you're left with a net gain of 1.472 million more years worth of human life to live each year by using a government paid system that's as disastrous as the VA instead of our current system.

I know this is a clumsy argument, but I found it hard to get actual reliable statistics on other countries that weren't skewed by big pharma somehow.

Health care, just as a moral thing as well, shouldn't be a privatized corporate controlled asset, especially when you consider that it's the government's responsibility to give right to Life, Freedom and the pursuit of happiness. This in my view is more of a government's responsibility.

The only flaw in most people's arguments against "Big Pharma" is assuming all cost overages are a result of unbridled greed.

Developing drugs is very expensive and many nations do not protect those copyrights. So Company X can develop a drug then have it reverse engineered in a secondary country, (who can market it without lab/development/testing costs)... leaving their only markets to recoup developmental costs being ones with legal protections.

Now obviously, this isn't always the case for inflated pricing but unless all world markets agree to medicinal copyright protections... a movement to cut overall pricing will lead to a heavily reduction in emerging medicines.

it gets worse:

In the first months of this year, nearly 30 states introduced some form of an abortion ban in their legislature. Fifteen have specifically been working with these so-called "heartbeat bills", that would ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

I am soo happy to be Canadian right now - I can't imagine having that right taken away from me - especially at 6 weeks! Most women wouldn't even know they're pregnant yet!