• bmdhacks@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      Its not OK and we need to nationalize healthcare now. But much of that above graph is also associated with the obesity epedemic and the nutritional collapse (or caloric inflation) of the western diet. Government definitely has a role in that, but its much trickier than obliterating the medical insurance industry (which of course is also tricky).

      • julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works
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        26 days ago

        Quick Google suggests healthcare costs for obese people are <50% higher than non-obese and the US has 15-30% more obesity than these countries. So maybe 15% at most of the 100% higher cost per capita of healthcare is obesity related. The killer for me for that hypothesis is that within the set of countries with normal healthcare costs, there’s huge variation in obesity (10% in France to 30%in ireland) with limited variation in cost.

        Maybe the life expectancy side does have more to do with obesity?

    • kreskin@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      Really USA, how does anyone pretend this is OK?

      We pretend a LOT of things are OK.

      • School shootings comes to mind.
      • laws around what women can do with their own bodies.
      • Sacrifice of the environment for industry, all in the name of “jobs”.
      • Starvation.
      • Politicians and presidents doing obviously illegal stuff and citizens unable to do anything about it.
      • American military killing with abandon all over the world.
      • Police brutality and systematic violations of our rights, with little to no accountability.
      • Our standards for clean food being less than everyone elses.
      • Religious supremacy being tolerated, even encouraged. (Fuck your moments of silence, fuck your thoughts and prayers, fuck your pledges of allegience too while we’re at it)
      • controlled media.
      • Book banning.
      • the “war” on drugs when other methods would have been much more effective.
      • whistleblower protections dismantled.
      • violence against protesters, and the existence of “protest zones” which disallows protests entirely in most areas.
      • continual threats of violence and domestic terrorism by the political right, never with any accountability.
      • oppression of anyone who says they are anti-fascist (antifa).
      • a political system complteely captured by bribery and foreign interests, with ~1% correlation to what citizens want. There is no representation in “representitive democracy” here. Its all a big joke. We’re barely even a “republic” anymore.

      And its not all republicans doing it-- although much more them than the dems-- although the dems are sliding really far rightward pretty quickly and its hard to see how it ever will be allowed to go back left.