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As an American, I've been reading these kinds of articles for decades: country X has awesome attribute Y, why can't we have it? Best I can figure, country X al

As an American, I've been reading these kinds of articles for decades: country X has awesome attribute Y, why can't we have it? Best I can figure, country X also has these undesirable attributes A, B, and C. The premise here is that you can pick and choose various best features of wildly divergent societies and then combine them, like eating at a buffet bar. I do not believe this premise is valid. If you want socialized French-style medicine, then you also get national strikes that shut everything down, Mediterranean time reckoning, really bad enviornments for startups, and so on. That doesn't make the effort worth abandoning. American healthcare is broken and it has remained broken through major political turmoil designed, presumably, to fix it. Just at some point, you have to decide for yourself whether or not you want to form political opinions based on how emotionally moved you can be from listening to just part of the story, or whether diving deeper is worth it for you. I applaud the French system's strengths and the efforts to improve our own. I'm just not sure how much here is useful. There's much more to this than "But if we could only just expand Medicaid!"

michaelochurch 13y ago
If you want socialized French-style medicine, then you also get national strikes that shut everything down, Mediterranean time reckoning, really bad enviornments for startups, and so on. That's ridiculous. All the European countries have healthcare systems that are far more civilized than ours. Not all of them have those problems. Also, it's not that Europe is a bad environment for startups. It's that Silicon Valley (for all its defects) is the best environment for startups in the world, and there's a power law distribution. (Whatever #2 is, it's not even close.) The US minus Silicon Valley is no better than Europe in terms of supporting entrepreneurs.

michaelochurch 13y ago

If you want socialized French-style medicine, then you also get national strikes that shut everything down, Mediterranean time reckoning, really bad enviornments for startups, and so on. That's ridiculous. All the European countries have healthcare systems that are far more civilized than ours. Not all of them have those problems. Also, it's not that Europe is a bad environment for startups. It's that Silicon Valley (for all its defects) is the best environment for startups in the world, and there's a power law distribution. (Whatever #2 is, it's not even close.) The US minus Silicon Valley is no better than Europe in terms of supporting entrepreneurs.