Yes, the government is more reliable in securing money for the poor. It also has far less motivation to give it out properly, has a standing army of bureaucrats involved in gathering aforementioned money, and creates a pile of unintentional problems along the way.
So ensure that the bureaucrats are reasonably seperated from the system? There are more than one way to fix potential problems other than "private".
Yet even those "efficient" programs are still pretty damn expensive, and they've got problems that even the US doesn't have to boot (eg. very long waiting lists for treatment).
It's fairly well documented that the bulk of American healthcare expense growth occurred following the times where the government tried to make it "more affordable". Remember, in 1964, when Medicare was introduced to deal with costs, the inflation adjusted yearly cost of healthcare was on average in the realm of $3,000. It sure didn't solve that problem!
Of course those programs are expensive, providing health care to everyone is going to be expensive, but it is more efficient then America's current "system". Efficient does not imply cheap in absolute terms.
The waiting lists do not (mostly) exist for for reasons that lead to similar effects. For example people who can not afford cover do not go into surgery, as opposed to someone in a country with Universal Health Care having to wait some time. The result is the people who can go into health care (more wealthy) have short lists and everyone else has lists of a length of infinite. The number of people who can get in are also reduced by waste-of-money procedures like plastic surgery encouraged by the private sector.
I have already agreed that America's Medicare is pretty shoddy, I am not disputing many of the problems it has caused. I have suggested an alternative solution (other than defaulting to privatisation), one which works quite well in many countries where it is implemented (with the NHS often ranked first in the world for health care) and can provide more balanced access to resources.
What you have stated is not evicence agains't government intervention in health care, just governmnet intervention in
that case.
This would apply to everyone who actually worked reliably over a long term. Employers generally tend to hire those with lots of work experience, even if they don't have many skills, because they know they'll come to work on time, do their job, etc rather than skip work or do a bad job and get fired. The number of people actually getting paid $2 an hour would be vanishingly small, and largely composed of people with no prior work experience.
Anyone who works hard and reliably will most like earn decent money (and anyone who does not get fired), I do not see how the minimum wage (very low in the USA compared to most other countries) would change this. I do not see how this will cause the number of people who get paid effectively nothing to shrink.
That is not speaking of the poverty cycle. Being born into a poor family may make it very hard to get any meaningful experience when you have to work a McJob just to pay for food.
A solution perhaps is public funding of education (helping avoid college students going broke for example)? It would help ensure that people are educated as America moves towards a service economy.
Yet the richest people aren't necessarily in that bracket, whereas the generally hardest working are. Again, it doesn't distinguish between how long you've been making over that, whether the money is actually going to your benefit, etc. If I work five years for next to nothing and then in one year my project works out and I make $500,000, do I actually have enough money? In actuality, I've been making $50,000 a year, yet the government treats this as though I'm "rich".
That is why I suggested we put them in this bracket (Robin Hood taxes, for example). If you manage to go 5 years and the sixth you ake $500,000 then you have made $500,000 in one year. You have survived those 5 years so I don't see how that money would end up going back in time to do anything. (if someone earned 50,000 a year, they would pay bills and not much else. If someone scraped by for 5 years (maby on welfare...), and earned 500,000 the next, they would go out and purchase a fast car etc, not improve the quality of their life for the years they have already lived). It would also suggest that the company has earned alot of money (sine that is not counted as personal income).
There is crowding out because the people most able to create such infrastructure in the first place end up hired by the government instead. The internet may not be the same as it is today without ARPANET, but it seems likely that something similar would have been created otherwise. Plus, private companies created just about everything the government needed to make the internet possible in the first place, AND were responsible for it being something actually worth using today. For example:
I never said anything about private corporations not contributing significantly to anything. Private corporations often do good research (which often still costs buttloads of money, and sometimes leads nowhere. But this is the nature of research). I do not dispute this.
"most useful inventions have a tendency to be outlandishly expensive for what they're worth", Is this an opinion?
Do you think trillions of dollars per noteworthy invention from the DoD are worth it, considering the fact that many of them may very well have been developed for less a bit later regardless?
So in other words yes. I do not know of any individual invention that cost trillions of dollars, yet alone "per" invention. That is absurd.
An invention is conceptualised, and costs butloads to bring into reality prematuraly. This is mostly the result of the Cold War, and the "look how much shinier our millitary technology is than yours" thing going on. Much money was wasted during the Cold War due to this.
Or people are paid to come up with inventions. In which you can't "develop" these inventions later at will without the ability to predict the future.
See above. It's worth noting that a lot of the reason European healthcare is cheaper is because they actually do look for cost cutting measures. In the US, there is a gigantic system of government imposed regulations that make costs go up by necessity. For example, a doctor will almost always recommend the "best" treatment, even when it costs 100x as much and is only 2x as effective, an insurance company will pay for it (insulating the consumer from the costs) because of various state mandates, the pharmaceutical companies will charge insane amounts because they're basically a cartel (due to high costs of entry imposed by the FDA among others) and because of patent law. If some new "wonder drug" comes out with significantly better results than older drugs but insanely high costs, the American doctor is obligated to recommend it regardless of cost whereas the European doctor will either wait for the generic version of it to come out at significantly cheaper cost or else recommend a cheaper treatment.
Any legislation causing this to happen is something that I agree is a poor idea, and should be fixed. But this is just a further example of the shambles that is the US health system is, and how looking to Europe may yield a better system (after some modifications to deal with the size of the country, the more "state" focused thing the US has going on, and irrational fear of socialism in the form of association fallacies).
Patents in regards to medicine are pretty busted up at the moment. This needs changing to allow generic medicine to enter the market sooner.
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