Quote:
Originally Posted by rubecube
That's fair. I'm certainly not saying any kind of universally accessible is going to cover everything and not have drawbacks, but there needs to be something in place to stem some of the major health problems we face as a society or it ends up costing us more in the long run.
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I definitely agree with you on two points here - first that I'm in favour of universal health care, and I actually think I'd have chosen the same option as you did (baseline health care for all as opposed to full health care for some). Second, I definitely agree that critics of health care programs only look at the direct costs of the programs and not the cost savings down the line, though to be fair those are impossible to accurately measure (which isn't to say they aren't 100% certain to arise to some extent).
But you have to pick your battles. There's no way the US federal government starts appropriating 2+ trillion dollars for health care. So even assuming you can get half of what you'd need to pay for everything you'd ideally want, what do you spend that half on? What's going to have the greatest effect? I feel like this is an area where the processes being used by people in the effective altruism community should be brought to bear - maybe you'd like to spend a bunch of money on cancer research because of people you know who have it or stories you've heard about people fighting it, but if you want to save lives, you're better off buying mosquito nets.
It's really just an application of the Pareto principle, but it leaves one in the uncomfortable position of accepting the reality that the care people receive is inevitably going to depend on their means, and not to a tiny degree, either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
Going to university is a liberalizing experience. People's measure of authoritarianism drops with each year of post secondary education.
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Have you actually seen the state of American campuses lately? Authoritarianism is en vogue at the moment.
Anyway, I was talking more about the tendency to be shaped by the opinions of those around you. University campuses are massively left-leaning. I started left wing because of my upbringing, but that ideology was developed significantly through the fact that all of my professors and other students in a liberal arts faculty shared those views or more extreme versions of them, and my views have only moderated themselves in the years since I entered the workforce.
Is it at all surprising that peoples' opinions will be influenced by having the vast majority of people who surround them and teach them during a period of development having a particular ideological view of the world? It shouldn't be. And as has been discussed before, groups of people that lack diversity in political belief grow more and more extreme over time, which does not lead to liberalization. Authoritarianism isn't a right wing trait exclusively by any stretch of the imagination.