all the money on military, and not in investing in healthcare, improve public health responses, increasing financial reward for the front line workers that are sacrificing themselves for the greater society. In my opinion, this is sad. I would rather have this money being written as a check to every nurses and doctors served in COVID19.
I dont disagree that we spend too much on defense but the idea that we should stop all spending on science to help out some nurses is super strange.
Its akin to saying we should stop funding nasa be ause who needs space travel.
Also please stop glorifying a set profession as some kind of ulturistic calling. Theyre in it for the money and prestige, and frankly, wouldnt be there otherwise.
If you want to thank someone, thank the delivery guy, the supermarket clerks, the flight attendants, or the casual staff out of the job right now.
These people are feeling the brunt of this. These people are the front line.
Many of my in-laws are medical professionals: GPs, surgeons, physicians, anaesthetists, nurses, the list goes on.
Not a single one of them has done it for financial gain or prestige, and for the most part the driving force really does seem to be a genuine desire to help people. (I’m based in the UK, going into medicine for money or prestige would be a fool’s errand.)
Please don’t make assumptions about things with which you are clearly unfamiliar, and if you must do so please do not assert them as facts.
If you want a more fair system for everyone, in fact you need to remove about $1.5 trillion (~42%; equivalent to two copies of the US military) from annual US healthcare spending. That just gets you down to matching what most Western European nations are spending per capita.
$3.6 trillion goes into US healthcare, providing healthcare workers - including doctors and nurses - with among the highest salaries and benefits vs their peers globally. You have to go to Switzerland to find comparable industry pay.
That is five times more than what is spent on the military. You can't slash enough spending out of the military to make a dent in that gigantic expense problem.
It's not the healthcare workers suffering in the US system, it's the patients that are suffering from paying the wildly inflated salaries in the field.
If you want a more fair system, you'll need to start by reducing incomes in the industry to levels you see in Britain, France or Germany. That means slashing doctor and nurse pay across the board. You have to shift the system toward the benefit of patients and away from the workers in healthcare. You'll also need to smash the US education system for healthcare simultaneously and remove the guild protection racket that makes becoming a doctor so expensive (you can't normalize US healthcare pay without normalizing the education costs).
You have to get spending down to near $2 trillion to create a system comparable to what you see in Western Europe, so you need to slash $1.5 trillion in spending. That means you need to fire massive numbers of doctors and nurses, squeeze resources (ration service as in all universal systems), and slash pay for every single worker in the industry.
A hazard bonus as part of one of the stimulus programs for front-line workers? Sure why not. None of it is going to be paid back anyway, it's all going to be perpetually monetized by the Fed. They deserve it in my opinion. That's very different from discussing the cost problem in military vs healthcare however. We need to remove maybe $150-$200 billion from the military to get down to a more reasonable spending level for what the US should be doing. You don't fix the biggest problem in healthcare - the extreme spending per capita - by adding more spending.
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta... "U.S. health care spending grew 4.6 percent in 2018, reaching $3.6 trillion or $11,172 per person. As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 17.7 percent." The report itself finds Medicare spending is 21% of healthcare spending and Medicaid 16%, or about 1.3 trillion (with a "t") between them.
I genuinely believe that if Americans knew what the rest of the Developed world gets for it's tax dollars vs. what Americans have to put up with for their tax dollars, they would riot in the streets.
There's a very good reason the major news outlets in America never directly compare America to other Developed countries, and only ever compare it to undeveloped or "evil" countries (China, Sudan, Iran, Russia).
You're comparing it to nations that have little to no healthcare systems at all, the US has one of the largest healthcare systems with the main issue being the salaries of said doctors causing the imbalance of healthcare costs versus actual results. Our healthcare is among the best but at a cost. The compared countries are among the worst, and China is arguable a developed nation masquerading as a developing country. Our taxes for military also result in a lot of people having great knowledge for civilian jobs once out of the military if they plan correctly.
The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse & rate of prescription drug use
