The claim that I am robbing someone and killing someone when I am in fact doing nothing at all to them is absurd. I am not even preventing anyone from setting up a co-operative in which all of the voluntary members of the co-operative will provide for their medical care on a freely agreed upon basis among them. In fact, you are welcome to set up a co-operative according to your own vision, you just do not get to use force to make people join up. Go ahead and demonstrate the superiority of your system for providing medical care. If it were superior, people would have already set up such co-operatives and there would be no need for you to advocate forcing people to contribute the hours of their lives (commonly transferred into their earnings) to your agenda.

A major cost to American health care is that a large fraction of our spending is really foreign aid to the rest of the world. The life expectancy for the people of Western Europe, Canada, and the USA are all very close to one another. Many of the small differences that do exist are not the result of the respective medical systems. For instance, Americans are much more likely to die in traffic accidents, since we drive much greater distances than Western Europeans do. Americans are also much more likely to die as teenagers, with gang killings playing a major role in this. We may also have a higher military suicide rate due to our much greater involvement in world conflicts than other nations. Black Americans tend to die earlier also due to diabetes and cycle cell anemia, which again is not a function of our medical system. So, do not think you are going to get away with this old canard that our life expectancy is 1 or 2 years shorter than that in some other country that has socialized medicine. Actually, we do have a largely socialized medicine system as it is, but the remains of our private, Capitalist health care system is the strength of our remaining system.

Go ahead and demonstrate the superiority of your system for providing medical care. If it were superior, people would have already set up such co-operatives and there would be no need for you to advocate forcing people to contribute the hours of their lives (commonly transferred into their earnings) to your agenda.

Again, the whole world has done the experiment. The superiority of socialized medicine is clear to anyone sane. That’s what socialized medicine is – a great big national co-op. What the USA has and what you support is a corrupt co-op that forces everyone to contribute MORE hours of their lives than a “socialized medicine” system – to get inferior care, to live shorter and sicker lives.

All so that a tiny few corrupt creeps running it – crooks like Rick Scott say – can get a little richer. While such creeps are hard at work damaging socialized medical systems, no country has ever abandoned it to return to capitalist inferiorcare. The superiority is blindingly obvious. Basically nobody in the world ever agrees with you once they can see the experiment done in front of them.

Again, amazing passion for a parasite that is obviously shortening your life and everyone else’s.

Amid the name-calling, I can only find one actual argument here. You say that no country with socialized medicine ever goes back. Since socialized medicine kills the institutions of private medicine and the medical entrepreneurs have to find other professions it is very hard to reconstitute a private medical system once it has been destroyed. What is more, a government-run medical system creates many special interests who are far more entrenched than any private medical institution could ever be, so there is a huge special interest lobby to keep socialized medicine in place. That lobby becomes very effective as propagandists and it is always remarkably easy to convince people that there is something wrong with the profit motive. Of course, in reality, the profit motive is just as much present in a government-run medical system, it just results in lots of high-paying jobs for government bureaucrats. And as mentioned before, the USA subsidizes the socialized medical systems around the world. So, the fact that socialized medical systems never, ever go back is actually a negative feature. It is like falling head first down a 100 foot long pipe straight into the Earth which is so narrow you can never turn around and climb back out. Socialized medicine not only deprives one of choices in medical care, it also deprives you of a reasonable path back to a patient-responsive private health care system.

We still have mandates to force the conversion of corn into ethanol, even though everyone now recognizes that the original arguments justifying that are all fallacious. This is an illustration of the power of government-created special interest groups and their lobbying ability.

Socialized medicine is a giant national co-op alright, but it is one in which everyone in a nation is forced to be a member. High quality medical care is eliminated and replaced by a lowest common denominator level of medical care. Choices are restricted. The system is not patient-responsive or even physician-responsive. Really good physicians stop practicing medicine. Care availability is restricted and wait times for care are extended, often with the result of deaths that would not have occurred in a market-based health care system. Not only do people come to the USA for quality care from all over the world, but they often have to come here to get timely care so they will not die. Yet you assert that socialized medicine shortens my life and everyone else’s. This makes no sense at all.

The private medical costs are driven upward by the fact that Medicare and Medicaid do not pay their fair share of the medical expenses of operating hospitals, clinics, and medical practices. Then there is the VA hospital system, which is a very good example of a totally government-run medical system. The VA system has well-recognized and major problems.

As I already pointed out above, people put more into anything that delivers value to them. Since our healthcare system gives us better outcomes for the leading causes of death, we are willing to spend more money for that advanced healthcare. The rest of the world takes our knowledge and technology and rations it out parsimoniously through socialized medical systems. You fail to address the long waits for medical care for illnesses that too often kill people before a socialized medical system gets around to providing the patient with medical care. You fail to address the common choices such socialized medical system make in calculating the value of individual lives in terms of their age before committing resources, so scarce in such systems, to their care. Babies and the elderly are ignored and left to die. Yes,l that is an effective way to reduce the fraction of GDP spent on medical care, but it is not a choice I will make for a grandchild or my parents. Apparently, you have no problem with letting a bureaucrat make the decision to ignore them. In addition, we subsidize the world from that part of our own medical system that is not yet socialized by providing drugs to other countries at a fraction of the price we charge Americans and with medical training and with medical technology. In fact, a good part of my scientific work is supporting biomedical companies by helping them to solve materials problems and quality control for the technology they sell around the world.

You assert that “The crazed war-monger U.S. ruling class” is a more likely candidate for the release of the Wuhan coronavirus than the Chinese Communist Party government that has killed more of its own people than any government has killed in all of world history. Meanwhile, the U.S. has rushed about the world bringing aid to people all over suffering from natural disasters and all too often wars that we clearly had nothing to do with. I view your overall perspective as incredibly warped and exceedingly ready to sacrifice human lives, apparently for the god of Socialism. I do not seek a world in which everyone shares an equal poverty of wealth, knowledge, security, and pleasure. I want a world in which individuals are free to manage their own lives according to their own values. Individuals have a right to pursue their values, including the pursuit of wealth, knowledge, security, and pleasure. The first thing the socialists do is to place ever-tightening restrictions on this freedom to pursue individual goals. Doing so, they kill the possibility of fulfilling dreams and they doom us to severe unhappiness. There is a reason why the men of the USSR and of the Russian Federation have such short lives. They drink themselves to death in their extreme sorrow. This is what happens when you make a man’s life pointless.

This post is so full of distortions and lies that it is difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with this doozy “There is a reason why the men of the USSR and of the Russian Federation have such short lives.” First you, probably intentionally, confuse the situation by mentioning the USSR and Russian Federation together, without discriminating between the two. The facts are, that the USSR had a life expectancy at birth for males and females, of 69.13 years in 1988, when U.S. combined life expectancy at birth was 74.77, China had a combined life expectancy at birth of 68.95 years, and the U.K. had a combined life expectancy at birth of 75.38 years.

It was after the collapse of the Soviet system, that the notable decline in life expectancy occurred. That was during the “shock therapy” period, when Neo-Liberals and Neo-Cons from the US swarmed into Russia to “advise” the Yeltsin Regime in its “transition to capitalism”; their role was to direct and lead the American Finance Capitalist looting of Russia. This process of looting and asset stripping was carried out in an alliance with internal Russian operatives, who seized control of most former state industries. It was this process that impoverished the middle classes and working class of Russia. The nadir of life expectancy was in the early 2000s, at 64.95 in 2003 according to one source I found and also at 64.95 in 2005 according to another. Both occurring during the “capitalist”, post Soviet Union period, of Russian history we might note. Putin’s rise to power, and his popularity among the majority of Russians, is based on his actions to ameliorate the horrific conditions that the American Neo-Con and Neo-Liberals managed to impose on Russia. (See, “Russia Life Expectancy 1950-2020”, MacroTrends, Graph of life expectancy 1950 – 2102, at : “Life expectancy (from birth) in Russia, from 1845 to 2020” Graph, Statistica, at : and “United States/Life expectancy (1988)”, Graph, at ). The absolute low point of Russian life expectancy since 1845, took place in 1945 at 23.6 years, that of course being the result of the Capitalist attack on the Soviet Union, carried outby Germany beginning in June of 1941. This figure was lower than even the dismal life expectancy figures from the 1800s, that were mostly around 29 years. Of course, the combined male and female life expectancy at birth figures for Russia, mask the massive decline in male life expectancy during the earl period of post-Soviet Capitalist Russia. That period registered the greatest fall ever measured, for a country not at war, down to something in the 55 year range.

Interestingly we now see a similar fall in life expectancy for working class White men in the U.S. now. The infamous “deaths of despair” effect, is largely found in the hollowed out and devastated formerly industrial regions of the U.S. Far more Americans now die of opiod overdoses, other health effects, and suicide annually, than died during the entire 10-year long S.E. Asian war period. Of course the pharmaceutical companies, that were well aware of the addictive nature of their formulation of Oxycontin, did not bother to change that formulation to a much less addictive one for several years, though they easily could have. The major company implicated so far, Purdue Pharma, has declared bankruptcy; it is still owned by a wealthy family, the Sacklers, who have already hidden their massive assets, This pertinent members of this wealthy family, and their minions in the high level managerial class at the company, should be prosecuted for hundreds of thousands of murder charges; and sentenced to serve their time in the worst and most violent institutions of our massive prison Gulag system. Of course, that is a grim fate that only awaits poor people in the U.S., the rich and well-connected are “above the law”. A poor person is sent to prison for trivial often victimless crimes, while the rich commit massive trillion dollar crimes and scams with impunity. (See, “The family behind OxyContin pocketed $10.7 billion from Purdue Pharma. Meet the Sacklers, who built their $13 billion fortune off the controversial opioid.”, Mar 23, 2020 Katie Warren and Taylor Nicole Rogers, Business Insider, at : and “Sacklers Withdrew Nearly $11 Billion From Purdue As Opioid Crisis Mounted”, Dec 17, 2019, Colin Byer, NPR, at : “Where did the Sacklers move cash from their opioid maker?”, September 2, 2019, Adam Geller, Times of israel, at )

And, of course, you state your personal version of the standard right-wing Capitalist disinformation meme that “… the Chinese Communist Party government that has killed more of its own people than any government has killed in all of world history.” This is s standard talking point of the right and is not supported by any serious scholarship, though of course there are U.S. scholars, with patrons among the most virulent far-right billionaires who write their screeds about China. I do not have any illusions about China, they are the emerging Global Hegemon, in the process of replacing the fading U.S. But let’s compare the trajectories of China, that emerged in 1949 from a century of subjugation to colonial powers, chaos, civil war, and rule by warlords. In the 71 years since the triumph of the Revolutionary forces, after a decades long civil war and invasion by Japan, China has become a modern nation. It now has the largest network of high-speed rail in the world and many other modern accoutrements; including the largest middle class on Earth. Greedy American and European capitalists moved their industrial operations to China to use the cheap labor making a fortune for themselves and their stockholders, while devastating the lives of working people in the U.S. and other western societies. The Chinese used this investment to move up the developmental ladder to become a modern high-tech society. I’ve visited China and it is a very impressive place, sort of like the U.S. was back when it was in the process of replacing the British Empire as the Global Hegemon. Faced with a choice between loans to finance Chinese built infrastructure, versus vicious terror attacks and bombing campaigns by the U.S. military, mercenary forces, allies, and proxy forces; the choice is clear for most developing countries. At least with the Chinese they get the infrastructure, whatever the terms of the loans.

For developing countries that interact with the U.S., they get their cities turned into rubble fields, their societies shattered, and their people slaughtered in complex and murky civil wars and religiously manipulated death squad campaigns. It is worth noting that the attack on Afghanistan was largely motivated by the desire to control the opium poppy fields there, that had replaced the previous operations in the “Golden Triangle” region of SE Asia. The U.S. has either attacked, or supported allies or proxies that attacked 6 other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), those being Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen; and there is growing hostility between the U.S. and both Iran in the MENA region, and closer to home Venezuela. Meanwhile, the American populace is left with Trillions of dollars of debt, a growing police state, and a shattered and ever more hollowed out socioeconomic order.

There are numerous reports of as many as 400 U.S. bioweapons labs, the majority of which have been established in various countries ringing Russia, Iran, and China. The U.S. used biological weapons against N. Korea and in various attacks on Cuba (the U.S. covert action agencies and their allies among the Cuban Gusanos in the U.S. have conducted some 7,000 attacks of various kinds on Cuba since 1959). Of course, the U.S. ruling class has a problem. After over 40 years, of attacking the prosperity of the working and middle classes here, the majority of hard science graduate students in the U.S. are foreigners, many of them Chinese. There was considerable movement of virologists between the U.S. and China in the years before this Covid-19 outbreak. Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, who wrote the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, is of the opinion that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He is also of the opinion that Lyme Disease and West Nile Virus leaked from the U.S. bioweapons research laboratory at Plum Island. Imagine the response of the U.S. rulers if China established dozens of bioweapons laboratories and production facilities in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Guatemala, the Virgin Islands, and the Bahamas. (See, “The Pentagon Bio-weapons”, June 14, 2019, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, Arms Watch, at : “Biological Weapons: A Useful and Timely Factual Overview: Part I”, February 07, 2020, Larry Romanoff, Global Research, at : “COVID-19 and the CIA’s Biological Warfare on Cuba”, March 15, 2020, Timothy Alexander Guzman, Silent Crow News, at : and “Francis Boyle: Wuhan Coronavirus is an Offensive…”, Interview of Francis Boyle, episode 131, Geopolitics and Empire, at ).

Finally, there is your absurd contention that “… we subsidize the world … by providing drugs to other countries at a fraction of the price we charge Americans and with medical training and with medical technology.”. The reason that American Big Pharma companies cannot charge the high prices they charge to Americans is that the various E.U. Countries and the E.U. itself have passed legislation controlling the prices that companies can charge for pharmaceuticals. Whatever its faults, the E.U., and its constituent states, refuse to allow the price gouging that Americans are saddled with. Certainly, the hollowed out and nearly disembowled U.S., was recently revealed as no longer being capable of producing the basic medical equipment needed in Covid-19 treatments. As for Medical training, Cuba provides absolutely free MD and other medical training for African-Americans who pledge to work in the disadvantaged minority communities in the U.S. And during the Ebola Crisis in 2014 the Cubans provided more help than did the immensely richer U.S. did. In addition Cuba “… after the devastating earthquake in impoverished Haiti (in 2010, dm), Cuba sent the largest medical contingent and cared for 40% of the victims. In the aftermath of the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, Cuba sent 2,400 medical workers to Pakistan and treated more than 70% of those affected; they also left behind 32 field hospitals and donated a thousand medical scholarships. … There are now 50,000 Cuban doctors and nurses working in 60 developing countries. … Cuban doctors have carried out 3m free eye operations in 33 countries, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and largely funded by revolutionary Venezuela. That’s how Mario Teran, the Bolivian sergeant who killed Che Guevara on CIA orders in 1967, had his sight restored 40 years later by Cuban doctors in an operation paid for by Venezuela in the radical Bolivia of Evo Morales.” (See, “Cuba’s extraordinary global medical record shames the US blockade”, Dec 3, 2014, Seumas Milne, The Guardian, at )