Today is the birthday of one of the most remarkable minds our species has ever produced. You won’t see him much on major media, so here is one quote to celebrate a great friend of humankind.
“The US healthcare system is an international scandal. It’s about twice the per capita cost of comparable countries, and there are relatively poor outcomes. And the reason traces mostly to the fact, not entirely, but mostly to the fact that it’s largely privatized and pretty much unregulated. And that leads to huge administrative expenses on other non-health expenses, like advertising profits, and so on; it leads to cherry picking, all kinds of things. So it’s a highly inefficient system, and it’s been [proved] – with pretty good evidence, some good economists worked on this, especially Dean Baker – that if we move to just the kind of healthcare system that other industrial countries have, it would wipe out the deficit. Now, that’s not discussed, and instead what is being discussed are ways to make the system worse! So, for example, one of the proposals about cutting down healthcare costs is to raise the eligibility age for Medicare in a couple of years. Well, what does that do? That shifts people from a fairly efficient government run program — Medicare – to a highly inefficient private program, much more expensive, namely, private insurance. So that’s a way of making the problem worse! Of course it makes it look a little better from the point of view of the power system, because it shifts the cost from government to individuals; individuals are still paying more, just themselves, but the total healthcare expenses go up. “ Noam Chomsky