@Lash,
Lash wrote:
You are the conservative who wants Republicans like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton to push their conservative policies on the US. Waffling on abortion rights—saying Medicare for All will never happen. You want to protect the status quo that keeps healthcare unaffordable for average Americans. Why do you hate regular Americans?
If Medicare-for-All could work economically, it would be fine; but what you don't understand is that the US economy is set up to prevent affordable projects from benefiting everyone because the same people who want to create such projects are the ones who support raising wages and otherwise pumping up government expenditure to the max.
You can't simultaneously have a growth/investment economy like the US, which also takes care of everyone. Why? Because taking care of everyone would drive the growth through the roof and cause inflation.
Let's put it another way: Democrats are concerned about "the gap between rich and poor." Ok, let's say you try to close that gap by raising wages and creating more jobs. What happens as a result of that? Answer: consumer spending increases, health care spending increases, everyone buys new cars, infrastructure spending increases, land development increases, and the stock market grows, which floods banks the world over with money, which leads to investment throughout the world, and runaway growth overall.
Ok, so you like money and don't care about the environment or protecting land against development, so you are all for this level of growth. Well, guess what? Everyone else isn't. Rather, once they start making enough money to feel secure, they start worrying about protecting the planet and nature and, most of all, their little private backyards, nation-states, etc. So that's where you start getting all the business practices that drive up costs and prices and end up hurting all the people you were trying to help with all this growth.
Look at what happened in the wake of ACA: The Obama administration set up a system where poor people could get their health insurance subsidized, and as a result, poor people started utilizing health insurance (logical, right?) But the other side of that is overpriced pharmaceuticals and providers had no incentive to lower their prices instead of just billing the insurance at high prices. So basically you have a situation where you give poor people a platinum credit card and of course businesses are going to be happy to serve them, because they're making big money by doing so, but who is going to pay the bill, and what is going to happen to all that money as it circulates around the economy driving up prices and costs?
Now, what should have happened with ACA is that pharmaceuticals and providers should have accepted that they have to serve poor people and just provided the additional drugs and health care without billing the insurance companies more for it. That way, the insurance industry would have stayed pretty much unaffected and there would have been no changes in economic stability as a result of taking care of more people.
But are businesses ever going to do more work without wanting more money for it? No. And are these discount businesses that work for peanuts? No, they are the highest-billing businesses of any market that serves consumers directly. So without creating some discount health care and pharmaceutical business first, subsidizing healthcare for all, through medicare or otherwise is just going to be an economic pandoras box.
I think Democrats like the idea of creating an economic pandoras box because they figure it punishes everyone with money for making money in what they consider to be an unjust economy built on inequalities. They may be right, but the fact is that even among the poorest people, there are those that live frugally and save what little money they make, and there are those that spend irresponsibly and are always desperate for more money as a result. The kind of liberal socialist economy that Democrats want would punish the responsible, frugal/prudent people while rewarding those who spend liberally and irresponsibly, which in turn rewards those businesses that cater to irresponsible spending.
In short, Democrats economic model privileges those who party and cater to partying, while punishing those who work hard to live frugally, make prudent financial decisions, and gradually save up from what little they make.
Yes, of course it would be good to create health care and pharmaceutical support for those who need it but can't afford it; but to do that you first have to create a low-cost industry of health care and pharmaceutical providers. If you try to put the cart before the horse, you just end up making things worse.
