As you say this can cut both ways. A good example would be the US where people constantly wonder whether $thing-that-29-out-of-30-developed-countries-do-since-decades could truly work. Yeah it works, we have seen it work, it is currently working.
Now imagine you are a software developer entering the offices of a group of bueraucratic clercs that keep an intricate fax-and-scanner-based system of bullshit just barely afloat. Of course as a person that is specialized on thinking about the storage, transformation, santitizarion, transmission and deletion of data you are going to probably have a slightly more sophisticated take on information processing than them. They might know the law better or which combinations of checkboxes a person is allowed to tick on a form, but they suck at the meta task of organizing the efficient, fast and error free flow, storage, deletion, etc of information. And sure now one could argue about the merrits of paper (and I routinely argue it's merrits for democratic elections, where correctness and traceability are more important than speed), but that would be like arguing for making doctors use medival hand tools in the age of the scalpel.
Now it is true that outsiders to a system won't see what reasons there are for a certain thing being shaped a certain way, but this can sometimes even happen to insiders if the information handover is bad enough.
The argument from what other countries have done can often be used simplistically. Yes, it’s important to learn from other countries. However, when you look into it, it sometimes turns out that the other 29 countries have all done things in somewhat different ways, that their solutions are somewhat path-dependent and culture-specific, that they have problems too, and your country has some unique problems of its own that are hard to overcome.
Yeah, sure. You cannot translate what works in Sweden one to one to the US and expect the same success. But here is what you could do: realize that the cultural differences between Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan, Finland, UK, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Belgium and so on are very likely not less than the difference between the US to all of these countries. And yet, some things US citizens claim can't ever work do so in very different cultures, under various right or left wing governments and in different climate zones.
But keep on telling yourself the story that the US is so exceptional that reasonable conservative policies that work everywhere else can't work. This is likely just going to work out great in the long run.
The difference between California, Texas, South Dakota, Maine, Ohio are as different as Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan... It's a really foolish opinion or disregard the immense diversity of 350,000,000 people, and (unfortunately) it's made all over the internet.
"Why don't you just do X", totally papers over the extent of what just needs to happen.
"Everyone should just do Y" is always bad policy. Just look at what happened with something as simple as wearing masks.
>The difference between California, Texas, South Dakota, Maine, Ohio are as different as Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan
This is just so obviously not true on the surface. We all speak the same language at the very least, which isn't true for a single one of those countries you listed.
Each government in the world is for the most part presented with the same set of puzzles. Then they spend good money trying to solve it in isolation as if they are all unique and special.
Some countries are just 1000 years behind in some areas, or 1000 years ahead. The US is no exception in both.
I am aware that the US is not one monolithic block. To assume otherwise is a very US-thing to do. The rest of the world literally drowns in news about the US internal conflicts.
But maybe I sould give an example: guns. I grew up in an European region where the percentage of gun owners is close to US levels, yet our last school rampage was a decade ago. The rural town I grew up in is famous for it's traditional gunsmiths and home of a Glock factory, so not what some in the US would call big city liberals.
The reason gun crime is low here is because we have commons sense gun laws of the type most gun owners in the US supporr as well. Yet you have US politicians claiming "it is a slippery slope" and it "can't possibly work".
Yeah, look at the numbers, it works, it also works in comparable regions to mine with totally different social and cultural circumstances. Of course if you'd like to you could also implement it in a way so it doesn't work, but that would be evil on a comic book villain level right?
The problem in the US is that corporations are really damn effective there to trick a sizable amount of the population into believing all kind of excuses that fall apart the second you look elsewhere.
E.g. given our gun laws many US citizens would say our freedom has been taken away, yet somehow 10 year old me managed to go shooting on empty cans with my hunter grandfather. We had a god damn shooting range in the cellar of our school. It is just that our guns are stored safely and people who shouldn't have guns don't have them. E.g. because they issue threats, have a history of violence, drug abuse, mental illness, or showed otherwise that they act irresponsible with the lives of their neighbours.
But maybe you know more about why the world I live in can't work and have a good explaination that for some reason keeps benefiting certain corporations, while it kills the kids of your population.
Spoken by a cretin disqualified by their own disability to add substantial points to a debate.
Pro-Tip: If you aim to critique the points someone made, a sure way to come across like a total fool is to call the person names instead of saying anything useful. This is one of the things that says more about you than the person you attacked ; )
while I agree we need some sort of nationalized health care and should learn from the countries that have implemented it, I'm not sure thats the strong success you think it is?
Just recently we had a bunch of comments here on HN about how bad candian health care can be if you live in the 'wrong' area. UK has had issues with NHS for decades at least (hell, they ALSO have 'private' insurance which seems to be almost a requirement). And several other EU countries have hit issues with healthcare lately (charge fat people/smokers more since they use more resources was fairly divisive recently.
Personally - I think it all boils down to scale. As these systems grow, it becomes harder to sustain them. That doesn't bode well for the US with 10x the population of Canada :-(
It sucks because I'd really like it, and I'd love not having my health care tied to my job ...
As a Canadian who has lived in the United States and in the United Kingdom, I can say without a doubt that both Canada and the UK beat the US "system" by a mile. While their universal healthcare can have problems, the problems in the US system are far worse.
Yeah - I have family in both countries (parents: mom & family from Leeds, dad and family from London cousins: I don't actually know where in Canada they are now)
Obviously, there is a lot of good stuff we can copy/learn from both countries. The thing is to make sure we can iron out as many issues as possible (large population and geographic area mostly) before we attempt something and having politicians claim it "doesn't work".
Seem my response to isleyaardvark above for my (stupid) idea to try to us the VA hospitals to test bed some of this.
Not too long ago I saw an article from a Canadian source about how bad Canadian healthcare was getting, and complaining Canada had or was about to drop out of the top 10 rankings.
It had a scatter chart showing the metrics, and while Canada was shown as lower than many of the other countries, the gap between all those countries and the US was enormous.
When other countries complain about their healthcare, they're complaining about complaining about sane systems not performing to their standards, and that doesn't make the US any less of a dumpster fire.
I agree, single payer/universal health should be a table stakes. And I wasn't picking on Canada - it seems to be a better system all around. But all systems can be improved (as you mentioned). If we're going to this from scratch, shouldn't we look at all the systems and try to follow the 'best practices' from all of them ?
One reason I look at Canada so much is the population is almost 1/10th of the U.S. population - so I would expect (naively) all issues would be magnified 10x. Also, the pain points with Canada's healthcare seems to be in scaling and funding as the population grows? Scaling up the number of doctors/hospitals available - to cut wait times, and providing consistent funding not based on where you live. Definitely solvable and much better then the issues the US healthcare system has.
For the US, I think good way to start might be to actually fund the VA Hospitals and see what it takes to properly run a national health organization in the US. How many doctors does it require? How many hospitals? What sort of budget? etc. If we can scale up the VA to provide quality healthcare without the under staffing, waits, long distances between facilities, etc across the entire country - then we can use those lessons to scale up to true universal healthcare? The last thing we want to do is introduce some half-assed 'designed to fail' system that lets politicians just say 'yeah, we tried that...Didn't work'
Now imagine you are a software developer entering the offices of a group of bueraucratic clercs that keep an intricate fax-and-scanner-based system of bullshit just barely afloat. Of course as a person that is specialized on thinking about the storage, transformation, santitizarion, transmission and deletion of data you are going to probably have a slightly more sophisticated take on information processing than them. They might know the law better or which combinations of checkboxes a person is allowed to tick on a form, but they suck at the meta task of organizing the efficient, fast and error free flow, storage, deletion, etc of information. And sure now one could argue about the merrits of paper (and I routinely argue it's merrits for democratic elections, where correctness and traceability are more important than speed), but that would be like arguing for making doctors use medival hand tools in the age of the scalpel.
Now it is true that outsiders to a system won't see what reasons there are for a certain thing being shaped a certain way, but this can sometimes even happen to insiders if the information handover is bad enough.