>>>>>>Jake, all these essays collapse once readers realize that most of the "welfare" is for Medicaid, meaning healthcare for the poor. It may be expensive, but there's *plenty* of evidence to show that it costs far MORE to manage the epidemics and poverty diseases that are inevitable if you have large concentrated underclasses without healthcare, both in direct and indirect costs. Once they appear, plagues and other sweeping illnesses have no respect for employment status. Strike down Medicaid and only the wealthy hermits will be safe from every sort of infectious disease including TB and even Polio if you're not careful, since most of the Polio survivors in iron lungs are no longer here to remind us and it's fashionable for affluent city folk to declare that vaccination is no longer needed. That sort of thinking is only safe if you have herd immunity and FWIW it's far cheaper for Americans to fund global Polio eradication programs to widen the herd than to manage it once it reaches your shores and cheerfully infects the middle classes and scions of the rich.
>>>>>
>>>>>What the study is showing is that despite the trillions spent on since the beginning of the "War on Poverty", poverty has never dipped below 10.5% and is rising once again despite a dramatic increase in spending recently. The point is that the programs do not work.
>>>>>
>>>>>Suggesting that such an expensive failure as Medicaid is the only option to avoid "epidemics and poverty diseases" is a false narrative. I would suggest that because Medicaid is such a large portion of the spending (which is not working) it needs to be the first item addressed.
>>>>
>>>>I agree.
>>>>
>>>>Put the US on a real healthcare system for all citizens (taxpayer funded) a la Canada.
>>>>
>>>>Then break welfare and other 'gimme's into workfare for any person of reasonably sound mind and body.
>>>>
>>>>Then see how that can be streamlined (weed out the cheats).
>>>
>>>So...your solution to the massive waste of money presently affecting 10-15% of the population is to force it on 100%?!?
>>
>>No. you should read what I wrote.
>>
>>>
>>>As an aside, where will Canadian Premier's get their heart surgery once US healthcare becomes worse than Canada's? (Note: I say worse because of the US government's abysmal track record at running anything).
>>
>>Why do Canadians like their health care system?
>
>Why do many Americans like their health care system?

There are several Americans that like the (non-existant) health care in the US. If you have the $$, you can buy health care up to what you can afford. If you don't, either you go completely on welfare and get crappy healthcare or you don't get healthcare.

The health care industry in the US is very much like the oil industry, The insurance companies own the providers and the drug companies, and the providers and the drug companies own the insurance companies. All own congressmen/women.

Oddly enough, they charge whatever they want and you have no say in it.

>When I lived in the USSR many there liked the soviet style health care system. You could get a lot of reading done while waiting for your doctor's appointment in the crowded receptions. So there you go :).