Comments by "annoyed aussie" (@annoyedaussie3942) on "Strained hospitals in North Dakota call in Air Force to help" video.

Actually you are wrong on 2 accounts, the US governments state and Federal spend more money on healthcare than the average total amount of OECD countries as a proportion of GDP , so if in dollars even worse. Military spending although fairly large I believe would be less than the healthcare spend especially this year with all the Covid 19 costs with testing and higher hospital costs with ppe etc. etc. I am Australian and our government spends a bit less on publically funded healthcare than the US I believe , especially this year , but we prefer a universal healthcare system run by government. We do have private healthcare if you want to jump a queue for elective surgery for example in a private hospital.
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@yourlocalalexis4578 if you do a few internet searches if it is as per normal your state and federal government pays about 2 thirds of the healthcare bill. So not exactly a free market system and the services offered aren't universal.
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@vbin9081 you do realise in a free market emergency care is a monopoly right, if you say oh there's this great little hospital in Alabama when you are in New York having a heart attack but every hospital charges double the rate of the lowest cost hospital which hospital will you choose? You also realise that if you go through private healthcare they don't care if all hospitals charge more and in fact profit off it because insurance is a commission business.
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@vbin9081 I didn't say anything about Obamacare in fact I was criticising it because the conditions I describe are under Obama care. No country on the planet has managed to have cheap free market healthcare , it doesn't seem to be a possibility, just like you can't have free market roads because otherwise I could buy 5 metres of every road exiting a city and charge any vehicle $50 to pass and there would be nothing you can do about it. Some parts of healthcare can be free market but not emergency care and who pays for public health eg covid 19? With a free market system more deaths are more profitable and good for vaccine companies if the virus remains so no incentive for elimination.
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@vbin9081 You are already aware that your country is somewhat socialist. What Asian country are you talking about, they have universal healthcare. Are you referring to medical tourism hospitals? Yes that's free market for non urgent procedures. See the US rating on the economic freedom index while it can't be described as low it isn't that high, my country Australia rates above the US. As far as limited socialism Australia isn't a bad model. If every country achieved what Australia has achieved there would be no need for a vaccine so the US failures have just made some companies some big healthcare money and your government is paying, not the free market.
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@vbin9081 sounds like we actually agree, your a bit Utopian in what might be possible and on the other hand a bit of a conspiracy theorist on what you think will happen. The point about the US limited socialism model is it's directed more to corporations than it should be. As far as both of countries seeming to go down sort of an inevitable path of being more and more socialist , we only disagree in so far as I don't think it's inevitable but you seem to. We have to see over the next 10 years what happens, I am quietly confident Australia will generally stay on course but don't think it's a given. Some things do spill over from the US and UK to Australia but it's not always one direction, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia probably in that order are pushing a free trade agenda in our region and quite successfully actually, the TPP was most likely started by Singapore and or New Zealand as a trade grouping called P4 according to Wiki but with the US not wanting to join it still exists as CPTPP and Biden's apparently willing to consider it but will probably try to water it down a bit with too many conditions about workers and environment. It might be well meaning but truth is for poor countries to develop and get better incomes for their citizens the starting point by wealthy countries is very low but no trade they get nothing so even poorer. We will wait and see if the US joins and I hope it does. The approach our countries are taking is just keep putting more and more deals on top of each other, there are 4 different free trade deals with Australia and Singapore now as an example so it's really hard for any future government to get rid of 4 deals involving 20 countries give or take because 3 of the deals are multilateral. To give the US example Trump did threaten at one point to throw out our bilateral free trade agreement, however if we have a bilateral one and CPTPP it makes it twice as hard for the US to get out of Free trade with Australia.
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By US standards your state isn't doing too bad. Obesity is a direct and or indirect contribution to the likelihood of death which I would agree contributes to your country's death toll. I am Australian so a bit better but you check out the Japanese obesity rate , it will surprise you.
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