> In Tulsa and Oklahoma City, meanwhile, the government buys staffed unit-hours from an ambulance operator, while households can prepay a few dollars a month on their utility bill and owe nothing if the ambulance ever comes.
billed for buying unit-hours from an operator... that's very carefully worded to make it sound like a corporation<>customer relationship and not socialism.
Lots of policy in the US is hacking around the lizard brain idea of "We cannot have nice things because someone who doesn't deserve it might get it."
My favorite example is universal school breakfast and lunch. Without fail, someone will argue that some kids don't deserve it. It doesn't matter that all of the data shows it is more economically efficient and the benefits to kids is overwhelming.
You essentially described the Republican and Libertarian perspectives in the US.
The Republicans seem to see it as immoral to potentially give a few people support they don't need even if that means that most of the people who need the support actually get it. And, instead, they believe that having an inconsistent array of private interests will somehow be more able to service an enormous population than having an organization (like government...) that is large enough to match that population's needs.
The Libertarians seem to either genuinely not care about the rest of the world or, more often than not, seem to be naive about how life can be for the less privileged.
It's the lie of the "rugged individualist" in America. Most "successful" people come from successful families. Social mobility, in the US, is part of that lie. Here, we celebrate the person who rises from poverty to become wealthy as a member of a sports team, or as an actor, or similar, while disregarding that these massive successes are outliers.
It's interesting to note that very often these same Republicans have no issues at all with large tax-based incentives when they help their employers or knock some dollars off they yearly property tax bills.
It just boggles my mind how the poor are supposed to be continually punished just for being poor and should always be denied, almost by rote, any sort of government aid because, you know, did you hear that story about that fentanyl addict who was found with THREE active EBT cards in his wallet?
Yeah for sure...how dare some dirty addict should be able to eat!
> The Libertarians seem to either genuinely not care about the rest of the world or, more often than not, seem to be naive about how life can be for the less privileged
No, they just put boundaries on what services they want handled by the government. Government programs are the least efficient and most wasteful way of getting a job done, and there are endless examples of this.
Churches were historically the places people went to for assistance, and churches held people accountable and would push them to fix their underlying issues.
Government programs have none of this, you can keep making the same bad decisions and nobody will hold you accountable and the benefits will keep coming in.
The government is in a bad position to be that kind of paternal - any sort of large machine is the worst possible judge of the difference between "shit happened" and "I am systemically making incorrect life choices".
I agree that what you need here is someone(s) with leverage and respect in your life to interfere with systemic bad behaviors if they exist, but that takes community, government merely gets leverage, and churches are often not a welcoming place to many people's eyes, rightly or wrongly, around the US.
As I get older, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the best you can do is unconditional support from the government (because it's the only kind you can rely on no humans in the chain acting in bad faith to condition), and well funded local support structures for people to subsist while fucking up their lives and also help them get out of that spiral if they want to.
Not because I believe in some fundamental good in man or something, but because I think that's the only way you can design this that isn't subject to people's bad faith manipulation, and I've personally seen too many cases go wildly differently for "objective" criteria where the main difference seemed to be whether the person reading it went into it assuming you were lying or not.
Christianity died in my country because people got tired of the judgemental, hypocritical cunts. The child abuse scandals that hit later only confirmed it.
You’re attributing to government what is just the overwhelming population of perps in this context: predatory men. Sometimes teachers, very often religious institution participants; positions of power, trust, and/or authority used to control.
I am not.
School teachers are predominantly women (around 90%), single parent homes are primarily run by women, women play the largest roles in the raising of children in genetal, and also make up about 35% of domestic abuse reports (not accounting for all the cases where men are too ashamed to report the abuse).
Women commit just as much sexual abuse as men, it's just not talked about by society.
Sorry 'bub but the Democratic party is as much to blame as republicans. Neoliberalism has infected both parties and let us finally shed this fake reality that the democratic party is the party of labor and not corporations.
Good news is that if you want the democratic party to become the party of labor, now is the absolutely best time to have a real impact in your community.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
I will tar and feather the "right" constantly. The "left", here, is somewhat better. As you say, though, neoliberalism has infected both parties.
Personally, I'll take the DSA over both. However, the population is unlikely to accept Sam's. And both political parties would sooner collude than accept the DSA as a modern inheritor of American Liberalism.
Come on, across the world we prepay for the use of things regardless if we do or not. As described in the article it's an option, not a political system.
serious, go look at the F500 list and see how many of the largest, meanest companies in the US (and world) world also happen to be healthcare
if you wanna know why it's never gonna happen -- there is the list. they will spend more money than god on social media, bribes, and whatever else they need to keep the system the way it is
Why is Fortune the relevant list? Why not market cap, which also happens to correlate with net income, which means more cash to spend on political influence?
Mostly only pharmaceutical healthcare in the upper tiers of that, but these businesses still have market caps and net incomes literally one or two orders of magnitude separating them. Grouping top 10, 50, and 500 makes no sense.
Unable to be willing.
The combination of not knowing any better, political parties and media that don't care or exert a contrary pressure because they belong to billionaires, and powerful health sector businesses appears to be very effective.
The odds are stacked, but everyone still has free will and can choose to question what they’ve been told (especially what they’ve been told conflicts with what they can see with their own eyes).
Unwilling. It's absolutely feasible to find a solution, as seen everywhere else in the world.