Dilbert_X wrote:
So what is your argument? America can't have an NHS because constitution?
Jay wrote:
turning millions of people into government employees against the will
In order to create a NHS you would have to nationalize the hospitals
What the fuck are you on about?
Are not hospitals publicly owned? Did I not just read about a strike by junior doctors over pay and hours?
The two options for a NHS in the US would be publicly funded hospitals, which would require a few trillion dollars to build new hospitals to compete against existing, or nationalization of the existing hospital systems. The former is, aside from the cost, plausible, as we do have some state hospitals, university hospitals and the like. The latter is completely unconstitutional.
People who push for a NHS in the US don't understand how much things cost. Hospitals are very, very expensive to build (
about $1.5M per bed). They're also
massively expensive to staff and maintain. The whole point is lowering costs, right? So even if you do manage to build the hospital systems, you need to keep costs down, so you either
operate at a massive loss (most state hospitals do), or you force the staff to work for peanuts
like they do in the UK and you end up with second and third rate doctors staffing the public option. So we're talking about a massive tax increase to build a second rate hospital network that can't compete with the existing system without massive public subsidies.
Seems like a totally rad idea. We should do it immediately.
Last edited by Jay (2016-05-09 06:01:58)