Australian here.
It's always astounding that no-one in the US mentions the elephant pooping in the living room - that the US spends more tax dollars than Australia and IIRC the UK, and Canada.
Per capita, or as a % of anything reasonable. The US is such bad value that Medicare and Medicaidel, VA, as well as othe government programs cost IIRC more than Canada's system. And Canada has a huge area with poor economies of scale.
Republicans don't want to admit that they're taxing as hard as the French (for healthcare), Democrats don't want to lose the gold plated Medicare system that old people vote for, and literally everyone from nurses to band aid makers to doctors to healthcare CEOs makes more than in other countries.
Maybe I have missed something, but universal single payer healthcare (especially with a hybrid system like Ausralia) seems cheaper than what the US does.
The confusion likely comes from assuming that the U.S. is targeting “cheaper cost of care” as a goal. The target here is “profit for business”. Usually that’s done by businesses withholding wage increases over decades, but occasionally some regulation is canceled or some private capture opportunity is found that jumps profits and prices rapidly. Australian healthcare generates a lower share of private business profit, both per AUD spent on healthcare and per total AUD spent, and so is seen as inferior to the U.S. model by our leaders.
Seen in that light, the increased prices are a universal winner for us: profits go up -> inflation goes up -> GDP goes up. Wages do not go up, and so as a whole we’ve surpassed 25% of all households unable to afford a one-bedroom home. Economists are taught to only model inflation in terms of price level: inflation = profit increases + wage increases, with no way to model their separate impacts. So our policies are economically sound, as long as one disregards the growing poverty.
Despair is, as Demotivators reminds us, highly profitable :-(™
It's basically about racism and control. One of the key reasons the US didn't get universal healthcare in the Social Security Act of 1935(!) was because FDR relied on Southern Democrats who thought it was a threat to segregation. That culture is still very much alive.
Conservatives in the US see the world as a power hierarchy and their most important job is to uphold it, like they are princes next in line to be King. See how hard they fight China and cut social services to funnel money up to billionaires. They will literally die for it.
Their inheritable privilege dies forever if they don’t fight to uphold it, and the one rule of all landed gentry is never to jeopardize the family’s privileges, under penalty of disinheritance and expulsion.
Yeah. This tribal territorial zero-sum perspective is the original form of politics. It doesn't work so well in a modern knowledge-based multicultural world, but the DNA hasn't caught up yet.