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The federal government alone spends $1.9 trillion annually on healthcare. That's enough to buy almost a million Tomahawk missiles every year. The total producti
by rayiner 1y ago
The federal government alone spends $1.9 trillion annually on healthcare. That's enough to buy almost a million Tomahawk missiles every year. The total production will be around 9,000 missiles over 46 years, or less than 200 per year. We do not meaningfully choose between paying for healthcare domestically and blowing up foreigners. Even overthrowing Iraq's government and trying to make it a democracy only cost about $2.4 trillion over 10 years.
- hiddencost 1y agoUh I think you're missing the point. Your numbers are a mess and jump wildly between scales.
- tonyhart7 1y ago[flagged]
- rayiner 1y agoThe U.S. didn't even get the oil! The Chinese got the oil. The whole thing was because George W. Bush's heart was bigger than his brain: he thought the U.S. could create a functioning democracy from the Iraqi population.
- tonyhart7 1y ago[flagged]
- ViscountPenguin 1y agoTbh, there's a non zero chance it would've been successful if not for insane policies like de baathification.
- ido 1y agoIraq's current government is still siginficantly better than Saddam's regime, depsite being currupt and somewhat dysfunctional (and things have improved over the years in case you dig up an article from a decade ago about ISIS).
- ashoeafoot 1y agoIs it: a) a military dictatorship b) a fanatics hive c) a familyclan run mafia state. or a hybrid?
- ido 1y agoIt's a parliamentary democracy with free elections and independent media. It's also chaotic, corrupt, and violent. It's much worse than Sweden or Switzerland but better than many other Arab countries.
- dontlaugh 1y agoTalk to some Iraqis, they’ll tell you they preferred Saddam to the current US puppet government. And of course preferred that their families hadn’t been killed and homes destroyed.
- ido 1y agoDepends which Iraqis you talk to, plenty were killed and had their homes destroyed by Saddam.
- rayiner 1y agoFor the most part, those were the non-Arab minority, predominantly Kurds.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoYou can kill those, they ain't gods chosen masterrace.
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- actionfromafar 1y agoHear-hear! Complete own-goal. Let's take everything we learned from the rebuilding of Europe after WW2 and ... ignore it.
- volleyball 1y agoAs i mentioned in another post, if you measure success as creating a strong, prosperous, independent, viable democracy - then Iraq was an utter failure and so was Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. Which begs the question why does the US pursue the same failed policies over and over again. It turns out we were asking the wrong questions in 2005. If you measure success from the purview of the Yinon plan to establish Israeli hegemony over the entire middle-east then everything aforementioned - including all the death, terrorism, suffering, sectarian and religious strife, massacres and genocides, refugees crises, the rise of ISIS, the recent Al Qaeeda takeover of Syria - everything, was a resounding success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinon_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinon_Plan
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- d1sxeyes 1y agoYeah, all heart GWB.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoThe social cultural analysis people really left us hanging when it came to finding out what is it with middle eastern culture that makes it unable to build working states and socities. Anti imperialist and anti colonial babblepprotecting the status quo of a patriarchaical, imperialist and colonisl culture that just gets constantly defeated because its handicapped by itself. Like a doctor declaring your disease a lovely character trait instead of helping. The o so solidaric allies are the worst enemies you can get. Chances are when your ideology is bad at managing economies, it's even worser at managing societies . Its a special kind of evil to deny billions of people hope and participation in the worlds society so one can get high on ones own ideological supply. Bush at least tried . In this he and whatever the Israelis do to prevent the region blowing itself up is the lesser evil.
- rayiner 1y ago> The social cultural analysis people really left us hanging when it came to finding out what is it with middle eastern culture that makes it unable to build working states and socities Nobody said that. Iraq under Saddam and Syria under Assad were working states and societies. The trouble is with bottom up democracy, and that’s a shortcoming of virtually every non-european society. Singapore for example is wealthy, but is already having trouble after its benevolent quasi-authoritarian ruler died. > Its a special kind of evil to deny billions of people hope and participation in the worlds society so one can get high on ones own ideological supply To the contrary, it’s cruel to push democracy on societies that aren’t capable of sustaining them.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoThey were not. There is more to life than endless warring family clans, genocides, conquest hungry empires and insane fanatics.
- volleyball 1y agoedit : I forgot to mention that as of 2024, the US still controlled all oil revenue transactions in Iraq. - thecradle.co/articles-id/27007 >George W. Bush's heart was bigger than his brain: he thought the U.S. could create a functioning democracy from the Iraqi population. George Bush probably knew what he was doing in Iraq because his VP, Dick Cheney could have told him way back in 1994[1] what would happen if we overthrew Saddam : > "Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. > It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. > The other thing was casualties [...] was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right." "Spreading freedom and democracy" was just another propaganda spin like the "WMDs". The question still remains, why did America spend thousands of lives (tens of thousands, if one counts contracters, veteran suicides, chronic conditions, etc. ) and 2 trillion dollars and counting to overthrow Saddam. Why did they continue to make the same "mistake" in Syria, Libya, Yemen , Sudan, Somalia and Iran[2] causing millions of deaths, millions of refugees, spreading death and destruction across the entire region. By 2025 the picture has become a lot clearer as only theory continues to stand the test of time - that America invaded and intervened to overthrow and destabilize the entire region to clear a path for Israel to invade and expand into "Greater Israel"[3] and become the regional hegemon. How any of this actually serves America's strategic interest is an untenable case to make at which point one will have to consider the notion that when it comes to Israeli-American relations, the tail wags the dog. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY [2]- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNt7s_Wed_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNt7s_Wed_4 [3]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel#Proposed_inclusion_of_areas_beyond_the_borders_of_the_Mandate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel#Proposed_inclus...
- soulofmischief 1y agoWhew. Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in '98. Bush took over and then launched a ridiculously false campaign about WMDs stockpiled in Iraq. We never found a single one. It's extraordinarily naive and ignorant of basic facts to think Bush invaded Iraq out of the kindness of his heart and to support a true democracy, especially given Bush signed the extremely undemocratic, unconstitutional Patriot Act domestically right after 911 (a bill Biden claims to have originally written... noticing a pattern?) Let's back up even further. We were "liberating" Iraq from Saddam's government, right? After we tried teaching him a lesson in the Gulf War? Except declassified circumstantial evidence suggests that Saddam rose to power after a collaborative period between US and Egyptian intelligence agencies including a failed assassination of Qasim, and that he maintained alleged continued contact with US agencies through the 60's. But at some point the US decided it did not like Hussein's objectives and turned on him just like we'd intervened in Qasim's Iraqi government. This is literally just US military interventionism and you should not proscribe good intent when history shows us otherwise.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoOne of the justifications for 9/11 was that US troops were in Saudi Arabia. US troops were put in Saudi Arabia after Iraq went into Kuwait. Part of the reason for going into Iraq was to be able to remove these troops.
- terminalshort 1y agoIt would buy a lot more than 1 million. The reason they cost so much is because they only build 200 of them a year.
- Den_VR 1y agoThat’s the story anyway. They’ll be paid either as Cost Plus or on a Firm Fixed Price. Neither of which incentivize the supplier to give the USG a better deal.
- selcuka 1y agoSo you could have increased the healthcare spend by 12% for 10 years if you didn't overthrow Iraq's government?
- potato3732842 1y agoWhich in practice likely means that the C-suite and top people will be 4% richer, there will be 5% more unnecessary administrators, there will be 2% more line workers and the experience will be 1% better at the same or worse price point for all of us. I'm not defending spending the $$ on bombing brown people, but it's hard to overstate how divorced spending is from outcomes in US healthcare. It's as bad or worse than colleges.
- selcuka 1y agoSure, but it wasn't me who first used Tomahawks as a monetary unit to measure healthcare spend.
- globalnode 1y agois that why they overthrew saddam? to make iraq a democracy. thanks for the lols.
- bigfatkitten 1y agoThe U.S. Government spends more on health care per capita than most other nations, but it has relatively little to show for it. The American health industry is optimized to profit rent-seekers, and so it is very inefficient in terms of patient outcomes.
- klooney 1y agoThe US consumes way more health care than normal, and it's also super expensive. We do get stuff for the money.
- const_cast 1y agoWe don't, our healthcare outcomes are consistently worse. If that's in contradiction to us buying more healthcare, then we must admit that some of that healthcare isn't productive, it's rent seeking. IMO, this is what I actually see in the US, so it all adds up.
- maxerickson 1y agoThere certainly is rent seeking, but you also have a wealthy market where people are free to pay for treatments that have low returns. As an example, rich people getting lots of testing done increases spending, but it's driven by their wealth as much as it is by doctors enthusiastic to increase revenues. And if they are healthy, it isn't going to provide them much value. Couple this with the attempts to centrally plan capacity and you get a cost spiral.
- rayiner 1y agoIt’s not “rent seeking” necessarily. That’s just one kind of inefficiency. There’s also overly defensive medical practice. For example, my five year old boy had a run-in with a table and got a black eye. Our pediatrician physically inspected him, decided nothing was wrong, but sent him to get an X-ray and CAT scan anyway. It took just an hour and a half because the U.S. has expensive medical equipment just lying around. In a sanely administered system, you wouldn’t send every five year old that ran into some furniture to get a CAT scan. You’d just accept the infinitesimal risk of some hidden injury that couldn’t be caught with physical contact examination but could be caught with a CAT scan. In another example, my wife’s grandmother had a stroke at 87. They medevacced her out of her house in rural Oregon to Portland. Then the doctors wanted to do a bunch of expensive procedures until she passed away a few days later. She was a lovely lady, but no European country would’ve greenlit these procedures on an 87 year old woman who had a quarter of her long missing due to lung cancer in her 60s. The more you drill down into health indicators to distinguish the effect of medical care from other factors, the less it seems like US outcomes are worse. US overall indicators, like life expectancy, are worse. But those factor in many things that have nothing to do with the health system, such as homicide, car accidents, demographic, obesity, etc. For example, Americans eat a truly disgusting amount of food compared to europeans. I’m a relatively low resource consumption asian, and even I was always hungry when we visited Paris because the portion sizes were so small.
- adhamsalama 1y ago> Even overthrowing Iraq's government and trying to make it a democracy only cost about $2.4 trillion over 10 years. 2025 and some people still think the US invades other countries to give them "freedom".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- red-iron-pine 1y agothey spend 1.9T on healthcare because the largest F500 companies in the US are healthcare companies and they have utter regulatory and legislative control, and will never, ever drop prices. European countries pay far less and have as good or better overall outcomes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]