It's far better than pipedreams about how to become more democratic by spending more on election campaigns, or how to fix the economy by spending more than ever on very non-cost-effective weapons. Or 'helping' a country by giving them huge amounts of weapons to use on a powerful neighbor, and literally tons of money on pallets.
There is a country, a neighbor, which in 1999 had a drunkard for a President, was riddled with corruption, was losing money to other countries, and where a number of oligarchs ran much of the economy. Their military was badly decayed, many of the population were cold or starving, and life expectancy was declining. One man was promoted from relative obscurity into the second highest rank and the following year to President. 24 years later the country is doing very well, Our oligarchs claim it is still militarily weak, still run by a mafia, and oligarchs, and basically still the same, because they want to claim we are doing just fine under their control.
The last paragraph was confusing, I'll rewrite it: Our oligarchs claim Russia is still a disaster area, they claim Russia is losing in Ukraine against the side we and NATO are giving weapons and training. They claim Russia is a disaster to show that our oligarchs are doing a good job here. Maybe some of our oligarchs are the same as theirs, I don't know. That's even more confusing.
Countries with examples for our healthcare industry. Britain has the first and simplest National Health Service. It is totally government funded and everyone in it works on a salary, more or less. Care is provided free at point of delivery. As a percentage of GDP per person it costs half as much as our 'system'. The other advanced nations have healthcare systems somewhere between our for-profit system and the British single payer govt funded system, but there are plenty of more expert people on his very forum in the Health Care section, my only point is that instead of despair we should look at other countries' systems to see why they work, and they all do work better per dollar than ours does.
Confusion about Medicare For All Elizabeth Warren was obviously talking garbage when she claimed a change to single payer would cost 52 trillion dollars over the next ten years. She claimed to be supporting Medicare for all but actually torpedoed it. Intentionally or maybe she really is that stupid. My point is that, whatever difficult problem we have, rather than despair we should look around first, and only after that, despair.
