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If this happened in any of the majour european countries we would have that news in the headlines of newspapers and newscasts for several days. How come that is

If this happened in any of the majour european countries we would have that news in the headlines of newspapers and newscasts for several days. How come that is not the same in the US even more so given that the health sector is mostly privatized and therefore "should be" more efficient ( when in fact is clear that it is a complete failure compared to European standards) ? .

snowpid 2y ago
I think it is worth pointing out that many European health systems do have strong private elements (e.g. most of them pay pharma companies for making medicine) and NHS in the UK as a goverment focused health system is still quiet bad compared to other European countries. But to your original question: As you are hanging around these website, I notice (and you too maybe), that even the most educated Americans have an "only American" world view. They consider it is the best country in the world anyway and don't care about other parts of the world. In German news on German problems (e.g. Digitalisation) journalist sometimes point other countries as a positive example or role model (here Estonia or rarely Ukraine). On American problems it does not happen and we (as a I assume you live on my site of the Atlantic) just nodding our head why it does not change. It would need to change a deeply entrenced attitude. On this discussion page here they dont discuss how other countries do it. Not a single example how to make it better. Because the US is on the top of the hill anyway.
- RoyalHenOil 2y ago
  I am an American and have lived most of my life in the US, but I have lived overseas for the last 12 years. My experience is that Americans are very insular and do not know much about other countries because American-owned new media focuses on US stories, most major social media sites are American-owned and overwhelmingly populated with other Americans, etc. Americans are insulated simply because the information sectors they have access to are dominated by American businesses. Hell, even the Internet itself is American. (This is the same reason that non-American countries are also overwhelmed by American issues/news/culture.) It is not because Americans think they are superior, and it does not cause Americans to think they are superior. Degree of insulation and sense of superiority are independent variables, and Americans (especially middle-aged and younger) are actually quite low on the sense-of-superiority scale — certainly way, way lower than most Europeans in my experience. (This is not intended as a slight against Europeans; you have very good reasons to prefer Europe to the US.) Every American I know has serious complaints about the US and is acutely aware that other countries leave the US in the dust in several of areas, including (though certainly not limited to) healthcare. There are of course some nationalist extremists out there who will argue otherwise, and they can be especially noisy on the internet because that is the nature of extremists, but these are not the average people you meet walking down an American street. Most Americans may not know the ins and outs of other countries' healthcare systems, and therefore may not speak in any detail about those systems on American media sites like this one, but that isn't because they think theirs is the best. They may not ponder the ways that Estonia or Germany has the better healthcare system, but that's because they would be over the moon for anything half as good as either of them. The USA's political flaws unfortunately run very deep and are in no way the fault of the modern American people. The US Constitution is a very old, very hard-to-change document that was designed primarily to make the US government as stable as possible — at the cost of responsiveness to democratic will. Basically all of the genuine democracies (I am not talking about dictatorships that larp as democracies) created after American democracy were designed to correct the flaws of the US Constitution: the first-past-the-post voting system, the extreme difficulty of adding amendments, etc. That's why they have nice things.

snowpid 2y ago

I think it is worth pointing out that many European health systems do have strong private elements (e.g. most of them pay pharma companies for making medicine) and NHS in the UK as a goverment focused health system is still quiet bad compared to other European countries. But to your original question: As you are hanging around these website, I notice (and you too maybe), that even the most educated Americans have an "only American" world view. They consider it is the best country in the world anyway and don't care about other parts of the world. In German news on German problems (e.g. Digitalisation) journalist sometimes point other countries as a positive example or role model (here Estonia or rarely Ukraine). On American problems it does not happen and we (as a I assume you live on my site of the Atlantic) just nodding our head why it does not change. It would need to change a deeply entrenced attitude. On this discussion page here they dont discuss how other countries do it. Not a single example how to make it better. Because the US is on the top of the hill anyway.

RoyalHenOil 2y ago
I am an American and have lived most of my life in the US, but I have lived overseas for the last 12 years. My experience is that Americans are very insular and do not know much about other countries because American-owned new media focuses on US stories, most major social media sites are American-owned and overwhelmingly populated with other Americans, etc. Americans are insulated simply because the information sectors they have access to are dominated by American businesses. Hell, even the Internet itself is American. (This is the same reason that non-American countries are also overwhelmed by American issues/news/culture.) It is not because Americans think they are superior, and it does not cause Americans to think they are superior. Degree of insulation and sense of superiority are independent variables, and Americans (especially middle-aged and younger) are actually quite low on the sense-of-superiority scale — certainly way, way lower than most Europeans in my experience. (This is not intended as a slight against Europeans; you have very good reasons to prefer Europe to the US.) Every American I know has serious complaints about the US and is acutely aware that other countries leave the US in the dust in several of areas, including (though certainly not limited to) healthcare. There are of course some nationalist extremists out there who will argue otherwise, and they can be especially noisy on the internet because that is the nature of extremists, but these are not the average people you meet walking down an American street. Most Americans may not know the ins and outs of other countries' healthcare systems, and therefore may not speak in any detail about those systems on American media sites like this one, but that isn't because they think theirs is the best. They may not ponder the ways that Estonia or Germany has the better healthcare system, but that's because they would be over the moon for anything half as good as either of them. The USA's political flaws unfortunately run very deep and are in no way the fault of the modern American people. The US Constitution is a very old, very hard-to-change document that was designed primarily to make the US government as stable as possible — at the cost of responsiveness to democratic will. Basically all of the genuine democracies (I am not talking about dictatorships that larp as democracies) created after American democracy were designed to correct the flaws of the US Constitution: the first-past-the-post voting system, the extreme difficulty of adding amendments, etc. That's why they have nice things.