Re: We're all doomed! Doomed I say- the Corona virus thread for panicking in!

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ One angle on the US protests against lockdown I hadnt considered is the countires abysmal and evil lack of a real social security net.
According to the BBC over half of Americans rely on their job to also provide their health insurance, and as such given how many have lost jobs due to the lockdown they have also lost their health insurance- in the middle of a health crisis. What is wrong with Americans that they fight tooth and claw to hold onto this primitive, barbaric and cruel system?!!

To give a comparison I too have lost my job to the lockdown but the social security immediatly took over, yes its less than I was earning and means cutting back on small luxuries, but its enough to feed myself every month, provide heat, light and power and to pay my rent every month. And of course as the NHS is free at point of need to all there is no issue at all if I need to seek medical help of any sort, and no cost associated to it.

In these days of worry, stress and fear to also have the fear you cannot afford to seek medical help, or pay basic household bills is just not only unnecessary in an advanced wealthy country, its downright outrageous and disgraceful and evil.

Why Americans would want to hang onto this awful system, and with such ferocity has, and always will, utterly baffle me. }}

[Lancebloke]

Petty - having had a soft through some social media today again on top of what I have already seen over the years, from my point of view there is a very real and large portion of the country that thinks government intervention in anything is taking away their own constitutional rights, regardless of what it is for.

There seems to be a significant amount of people ready to go out and have a fight about it... like a proper fight about it.

While I imagine that most people are in the middle when it comes to politics etc, there are definitely enough on both the far right and left to cause a large amount of problems and they all seem to have itchy trigger fingers and access to triggers to itch them on!

[azriel]

[halfwise]

That's basically it. Given a choice between being left alone and potentially starving to death or having to fill out forms and do what you're told in exchange for security, many will choose to be left alone. They quote Ben Franklin's "those who choose to trade freedom for security deserve neither." It's a basic scrappiness that many Americans treasure. The connection to health care through work is that it's a choice and an honest trade.

I'm not saying I agree with it, just that you shouldn't mark it down to stupidity. I'd think a Scotsman could understand a basic sense of ornery independence.

Petty - having had a soft through some social media today again on top of what I have already seen over the years, from my point of view there is a very real and large portion of the country that thinks government intervention in anything is taking away their own constitutional rights, regardless of what it is for.

There seems to be a significant amount of people ready to go out and have a fight about it... like a proper fight about it.

While I imagine that most people are in the middle when it comes to politics etc, there are definitely enough on both the far right and left to cause a large amount of problems and they all seem to have itchy trigger fingers and access to triggers to itch them on!

[Lancebloke]

I mark some of it down to stupidity... you only have to read the nature and variety of the conspiracy comments for that.

The general premise of government vs freedom has been an ongoing debate forever.... i am sure there will never a 100% happy population.

For one person, maximum wellbeing is no government even if that means living every day living in fear of your life. On the other hand, maximum wellbeing is having experts have complete authority over their specific fields, with arbiters (politicians, judges or whatever) managing the conflicts between.

Most of us are somewhere in between but there are plenty of each end that are willing to fight and die over it all.

[halfwise]

There's definitely stupidity, but you'll see equal measures of that on both sides if you read any comments online. As you say, most people are in the middle - but one doesn't get worked up enough to post firestorms if you are in the sensible center.

[Mrs Figg]

I should imagine those who are most likely to revolt over government restrictions on movement are the ones who support Tommy Robinson and Farage, the far right populists, and the anti-vaxxer types who believe everything they listen to on Youtube and FB. They are generally as thick as mince.

[Pettytyrant101]

I'd think a Scotsman could understand a basic sense of ornery independence.- Halfy

{{ The Scottish would view would be there is no loss of freedom, neither personal nor in loss of honour in helping a neighbour at need. Nor is there any shame or less of freedoms in accepting help from your neighbour when you are in need. Life is hard and unfair and often brutal, but its made less so when shared, helped by and helping others through the same harshness. Freedom is never lost in acts of kindness or generosity, its where freedom resides in fact because freedom is impossible if you dont first have community based on the principles of kindness and acceptance of kindness.
Yes, it's idealist, but you never reach the Moon without first shooting for the stars.

I think the difference between here and the US is what we think government is for. In America a large chunk of your population seem to think that it is a corrupt agency only out to attack and remove their rights and freedoms, they want nothing from it because if they did then it would give the government more control over them, taking more of their freedoms and spreading the tentacles of government ever further. Government is the enemy of the people. To the point some even arm themselves up in preparation for a time when they might have to fight their own government for those freedoms.
Here govenment is seen more as a tool of the people, to administer mainly, stuff like the NHS, recycling rubbish, making the roads, protecting the nation that sort of thing, in return for the collective taxation we willingly give to them for that purpose. We might hate an individual government and its policies, but the underlying belief in the idea of shared democratic government is the core. Does it work?
More or less, not perectly, not without partisanism and political games, but the idea that the elected government in a democracy is there to try to improve the lives of its citizens by spending or money on the things we wish, thats more how most folk view government. Not as a hostile thingin itself. Its what government is for.
Choosing a welfare state therefore is an expression of the free will of the people through the ballot box, not a denial or curtailing of it and so can't be a loss of freedoms.
Its why we dont like having guns here too, its a sign of a failing in democracy. Its always better to have two groups of people shouting at each other in a big hall until they get fed up and realise they have to compromise if they want to go home again. Than to have two groups of people in a big field shooting and killing each other, until they get fed up and realise they have to compromise if they want to go home again.}}

[halfwise]

Liberals here see government as a tool of the people; conservatives nearly uniformly see it as a necessary evil. If we could convince conservatives to change this one thing in their thinking, politics would be far, far different over here.

Conservatives here are willing to see religious organizations as a tool of the people (assuming the religion is one of a hundred or so versions of christianity), while liberals are likely as not to see it as a tool of division.

So these are partisan divides that are not amenable to settlement via discussion, unfortunately.

[David H]

Here govenment is seen more as a tool of the people, to administer mainly, stuff like the NHS, recycling rubbish, making the roads, protecting the nation that sort of thing,

I'd say that's true here too, but mostly when speaking of the state government, not the federal government. There are far too many examples of the states implementing a well thought out program, only to have it torpedoed by federal legislation.  An example is the rubbish.

Back in the 1980's our state, working with the county and municipal governments, had worked out a very progressive program to remove recyclables from the waste stream and to set a uniform standard for local landfills which were tailored to each community's needs.

Then the federal government passed legislation that added many layers of paperwork that made it effectively impossible to process waste materials in an area with significant rainfall.

Now all the rubbish from the entire western half of the state is managed by a private corporation based in Texas. It's collected daily, loaded onto many long trains that take it hundreds of miles to a desert canyon to be dumped and buried.

Taking a load of rubbish to the dump used to be free, a human right, and home pickup used to be subsidized. But now because of the extra expenses, garbage service is often too expensive for many low income people, which means that their trash gets dumped in public places in the night where people know it will have to get picked up, or in out of the way corners off old logging roads where people hope it won't be seen.

It's terrible! I just wish the feds had stayed out of it and let the state and local governments handle what should have been local issues. Everybody {{{except the Texas corporation}}} would be so much better off!

And that's just ONE issue!

Once-Size-Fits-All regulation is just WRONG when it's forced to span the whole width of a continent.

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ Dave you are always going to get that back and forth pull in any democratic system. Yours has different names but it borrowed a lot from ours, so while the scale is very different the structure isnt that different.
Here its between Westminister (Federal) Devoloved Parliaments (State) and local council (not sure what US equivelent is called, but you probably have one).
Local Council does most of the actual day to day stuff, rubbish collection, road repairs, provide local services, and a couple of biggies like local schools. Theyre fundingis what they raise locally through taxation (Council and Small business taxes) and services chages (parking charges being a big contentious one) topped up by money proved by the devolved Parliaments, who give what they raise to Westminster who then give the devolved Parliament a block sum back based on various calculations.

So there are always different levels pulling at each other. And it seems largely the same in America only the scale is larger.
Where it gets puzzling from a UK perspective is on something like health care. Why would any state not want such a thing? Here the argument between right and left on health care is not should we have a nationalised health system or not, but who can convince the people more they are the right ones to safeguard the national health service.
The only real difference between the parties on this is that the right believe the private sector can play a larger role in providing a tax funded free at point of need service, and the left think government is best placed to do so.
Not having one is simply not a major part of the political discourse right or left, because voters on bothe right andleft majority think its a very good idea, as if you have one, the idea of getting rid of it is like the idea of getting rid of breathing, its hard to see the advantage in it.
So the idea that someone would consider taking up actual arms to defend their right not to have it, it seems very strange and worrying.

And thanks to that issue of scale, where such a group of people here theyd number in hundreds at most as a percent of our population, in the US scaled up thats a lot of angry people with guns who think a free at point of need health care system is the government taking their freedoms. Freedom has nothing to do with it.
Its just the best way within our joint systems to provide that necessary service of health care to the most people, just as single payer tax is the best way to fund a military to protect it. And one could argue that paying for a military through enforced taxation has much more to do with threatening freedoms that providing free health care does.
Yet you never here the American right complain that they have to pay for the military through their taxes.}}

[Lancebloke]

From the outside, this looks to have been a politically driven thing from people that want division so that they can get or stay in power. The same as gun rights, energy and the military.

It really amazes me that you can have hard-core, right wing anti government people chanting "USA, USA" when a couple of tax payer funded B2 bombers fly over which more often than not are used in places that do not have any direct impact on their day-to-day well being but then whack the AR-15s put when someone suggests they get access to some doctors should they need it and paid for using the same method.

The only common thread seems to be anti-socialism/communism/marxism (which are all quite different but seem to mean the same thing to a lot of people) so assume this is really a legacy of the Cold War.

In fact... I think in the 50s it was Republicans that were suggesting the first single payer health services for the US and the Democrats against it.

David - agree with that too. There have definitely been things I have seen where local councils and the national government have been at odds.

I can understand the struggle to an extent. I work for a global firm and in a global team. I have worked at country level too and have seen it from both points of view. It is a very difficult situation to manage when you have different needs and regulations to follow, yet you want to be able to run efficiently and at the very least be able to explain what and why things are different.

[David H]

And it seems largely the same in America only the scale is larger.
Where it gets puzzling from a UK perspective is on something like health care. Why would any state not want such a thing?

It's not that states don't want healthcare, in most cases it's that they feel they already have it. Back to the scale thing. So the state of California has a population of 40 million, an area of 164,000 square miles which is about 1.75 times the size of the UK, and they've worked out a heath care system over many decades that balances hundreds of factors unique to their state. Furthermore, some of that balance involves Medicare and Social Security, two federally run healthcare systems that are not without problems. So why would Californians want to give up a state healthcare system that they trust and have some local control over for one that they don't trust and don't have control over? It's not unlike asking Brits on the street back in in the EU days what they'd think about giving up their beloved NHS in favor of a EU system administered out of Brussels and tailored for the needs of the whole continent. Whether it's better or not is debatable, but being asked to give up a system you trust is rarely popular.

[Forest Shepherd]

Heck, I'd say I have distrust for all levels of my government, not just Federal. On the local you have this wealthy-ass coastal county I live in in central California: high taxes, prohibitive housing costs, high cost of living, and yet basic things like our roads are bad, even terrible in the southern, poorer part of the county: pitted and worn with "temporary" repairs that sit there for years. Their regulations and building codes, and the restrictive effect these have had on the housing market: a massive lack of housing, make it impossible for someone of my means to either own a home or legally build my own.
Which is why I'm illegally (shhh) building a cabin on my parent's land. I live with the threat of an upset neighbour or spiteful acquaintance reporting me to the authorities, who would then come and red-tag my hard-work and force me to destroy my own home. And yet, if I were homeless I could set up a tent in whatever local park is set aside for that purpose and they'd leave me alone. Of course I don't have respect or affection for my local government.
I mean, I do enjoy the public benefits that they provide: roads, infrastructure (just not electricity or water in my case), but the negative aspects are hard to ignore. Also the kooks on the city council over in Santa Cruz are idiots, just saying.

On the State level you have initiatives and agendas, some of which I agree with but many of which I do not; but all of which I feel powerless to affect because of the majority of voters who don't think like me. And ditto for the Federal, except that it's so big and remote that I usually just ignore what's going on. I'm not big on politics in general, especially with how divisive it gets. Perhaps I should vote more or something, idk. fuck it.

[Pettytyrant101]

It's not that states don't want healthcare, in most cases it's that they feel they already have it.- Dave

{{ But thats the thing, what this crisis has shown is that they don't have it. So many Americans health care is tied to their employer that when they find themselves, through no fault of their own, made unemployed their health care disappears with their job. Meaning they either go bankrupt if they have need of serious medical attention, or they have to rely on the governments programs, which seem delibretly underfunded and under prepared for such numbers as a dissentive to being unemployed.
The result could quickly be that the social medical programs are quickly overwhelmed and many more people will simply not be able to seek medical help at need whilst unemployed or afford the insurance payments.
A true health care system is there for everyone, at the same level of quality of treatment to anyone who needs it, paid for by everyone, rich and poor alike, for that purpose. Such a system would be very useful I'd say right now to all those Americans who have lost health care coverage with their job, or who face depleting their life savings to continue their health insurance themselves for as long as they remain unemployed.
The fear you cant afford to seek treament in the middle of a health crisis is not one someone should have on top of all the other concerns they already have with the situation.
Plus its just cheaper per head of population than paying insurance to private companies, especially if you include prescription costs in the US- we dont have any in Scotland- and compared to say the money it costs the government to fund a state of war, say like in Iraq, the costs are low, so in a crisis such as this the same sized war chest applied to the NHS will keep it running without further tax raising for a considerable time.}}

[azriel]

[David H]

Heck, I'd say I have distrust for all levels of my government, not just Federal. On the local you have this wealthy-ass coastal county I live in in central California: high taxes, prohibitive housing costs, high cost of living, and yet basic things like our roads are bad, even terrible in the southern, poorer part of the county: pitted and worn with "temporary" repairs that sit there for years. Their regulations and building codes, and the restrictive effect these have had on the housing market: a massive lack of housing, make it impossible for someone of my means to either own a home or legally build my own.

I can sympathize Forest!
Our county may be coastal but it's definitely not wealthy-ass, and I count myself lucky for that! I still live in a county where I occasionally bump into county commissioners at the grocery store or the gas pump and we can BS about farming, weather, erosion and such. We're all just trying to keep the lights turned on, and nobody's getting rich. Here an "out building" like yours would only be a problem if a neighbor complained, and even then there'd be ways to cut some slack to keep you housed.

[David H]

It's not that states don't want healthcare, in most cases it's that they feel they already have it.- Dave

{{...... or they have to rely on the governments programs, which seem delibretly underfunded and under prepared for such numbers as a dissentive to being unemployed.
The result could quickly be that the social medical programs are quickly overwhelmed......}}

I don't necessarily buy the "deliberately underfunded" argument. More likely incompetence and a bit of greed from everything I've seen. And remember these are the exact same agencies that would be expected to scale up to handle 300 million people's health in a timely manner with what you're proposing. I've dealt with them before, and frankly the idea scares the sh*t out of me!!

[Pettytyrant101]

remember these are the exact same agencies that would be expected to scale up to handle 300 million people's health - Dave

{{Ive never really got the argument America somehow cant do what every other advanced nation right and left in the world has done, including massive countries like China, provide health care for its citizens. America is on its own in the world in not having some form of sinlge payer health care free at point of need to its own citizens. And there are avariety of ways its done that include private insurers in part or are quasi-prvate, but free at point of need to user still.
I get the worry about administration- hell 99% of the fights over the NHS here are over if its been funded and run properly. But its still better than not having one at all and relying on private insurance and employers. As when the markets collapse, and the jobs vanish, as they have now, your screwed.
That during this health crisis people in America are worrying if they can afford medical bills or treatment, or even the notion you might have to file for bankrupty over it is unthinkable here.

'62.1% of bankruptcies were caused by medical issues'- Harvard University

So you have less access to health care in the US, especially for the poor with a staggering 44 million people with no health coverage at all, the cost of treatment when you do get it is largely reliant upon insurancers and employers and so the costs asscoiated with it are so high they are beyond the means of many people otherwise, and lead to over half of all the bankrupty in your country, and yu want to keep it for some reason.
Here everyone has equal access to health care, poor and rich alike (our PM just got treated on the NHS by same Doctors and nurses and in same facilities that would treat a homeless guy that was brought in), it has 100% coverage of the population, it is not reliant on employment or private insurance and as such costs are far lower, or often even nonexistant for medicication and treatment, and no one has ever had to go bankrupt paying medical bills. And we pay less per head of population for it. And in a crisis when employment is gone, and industry all but closed down it can still be funded and run for a considerable time without major disruption.
Even fear central govenrment would make an arse of running things doesnt change the fact its obviusly a far better, fairer, kinder and even cheaper system than the US model.
You trust your government to run the even larger, even more expensive and complex military orginisation yet have been convinced its somehow impossible for central government to run health care.
And out of all the developed countries who since the NHS began have implimented a health care system of their own, not a single one has ever looked at the US model and said, "yup thats the one for us."
There is a good reason for that- you'd have to be insane to adopt it over the obviously better alternatives.}}

[halfwise]

Actually Petty, Obamacare does a really good job of stepping in for people who lose their jobs, at least in states that support it.   So though it used to be as bleak as you paint it, it really hasn't been as bleak for the last 5 years in about half the nation (typically the more populous states).

If we could just get the conservatives on board to fix it, the patch of a government supplied system to supplement the private system does work fairly well.  And in fact Obamacare works mainly through private companies that are required to adhere to the framework, so it should be something conservatives can accept if they'd just take the time to stop reflexively hating it.

[David H]

{{You trust your government to run the even larger, even more expensive and complex military orginisation ... }}

yeah... ummm..... about that...... :

[David H]

It seems you're hearing the horror stories Petty. Halfy is right. I live in one of those states (actually a block of states that work together) and I've got really good healthcare for pennies through the State Healthcare Exchange (aka Obamacare). It's basically equivalent your devolved system, but with voluntary membership. The more states and the more individuals who join, the better it gets.

[halfwise]

[Pettytyrant101]

{{ Glad Obamacare is at least picking up some of the pieces in some states then, though even it was a fight to get as far as it did and the Republicans seem keen on kicking the funding out from under it at every opportunity though I have no idea still what they want to replace it with. }}

[David H]

{{ Glad Obamacare is at least picking up some of the pieces in some states then, though even it was a fight to get as far as it did and the Republicans seem keen on kicking the funding out from under it at every opportunity though I have no idea still what they want to replace it with. }}

Nor do they have a replacement plan as far as I can tell, but it's still a popular "rally the base" issue at election times in many areas. It's important to understand that not all Republicans are trying to undermine it. I know several who'd like to "fix" (improve) it. That's a reasonable thing to discuss. And I know others who are very glad to have it even with all its flaws, especially those with family members with "pre-existing conditions" (something most private insurance carriers didn't cover before the Affordable Care Act.)

Here's a map that shows about where we're at now. It's a bit out of date and of course there are many shades of grey, but it gives an idea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#/media/File:ACA_Medicaid_expansion_by_state.svg