1547
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
1547 points (99.6% liked)
Work Reform
17353 readers
2619 users here now
A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
This is like 7 or 8 years old now but more importantly, it's just a statement of fact, not an argument
Wtf is wrong with you guys where you just assume every statement is some kind of personal dig?
The article asks Economists about the predicted impact of switching to universal healthcare (to every day people) beyond the treatment they get.
For example, what happens to all of the people who work for these private insurance companies? What about retirement plans? Lots of people have retirement plans based on stocks. How much of their retirement stock money is tied up in private insurance companies?
It's not an argument for, or against, anything. Just literally someone asking an Economist, lets pretend we made this change tomorrow, what would the impact be?
And the answer is, "we don't know because nothing like this has ever happened in the United States before"
Typically Economists can look at past events to predict what an upcoming event would look like. But there's literally nothing close to this that's ever taken place so while they can all guess it's literally just that, a guess. There's nothing in the past to compare it to
And this question gets more complicated when we ask what exactly the change would be. Should it be a slow, incremental change, or a sweeping set of legislation that makes massive changes seemingly overnight? Is the government ready to provide this coverage or would it find itself overwhelmed and unable to provide service fast enough and so needs time to build internal infrastructure?
It's just information.
The person who commented is a fucking idiot who clearly didn't read the article and you're all idiots for going along with her shit before reading the article yourselves too
Let's assume that everything you just said about the article is true, without any flaws. Why would that make her response idiotic?
If we mentioned the impact that cutting defense spending would have on Raytheon, Lockheed, and Boeing... "Oh no, not my military industrial complex..."
If we mentioned the impact that a new public housing program would have on the housing market... "Oh no, not the sector of the financial market profiting from the endlessly increasing price of a basic human need..."
I understand that these things would have major financial impacts. I also understand the value of NYT writing an article about the nuances of where it would have upsides and downsides. But also, the original commenter isn't criticizing that analysis. She's criticizing the business model of private insurance. Your response just leads me to ask,
It makes her response idiotic because it has nothing to do with the article
The article isn't pro, or anti, anything. It's 8 years old, probably around the time of the presidential election, and so, in context, it was a question of, "what if Biden wins and actually does get rid of privatized health care, what would that look like to everyday people and the economy?"
It's not a rebuttal of the article, no... but it IS definitely in the same topic as the article.
Twitter is a microblogging platform... not a debate platform. If you assume that she is trying to provide a counterargument in 140 characters or less, then yes, it would seem idiotic.
Are we making that assumption?
EDIT: Just to acknowledge that I read your response, and I don't wish to respond to it.
It's not on the same topic of the article as all
The article is about the potential impact on the economy, not if private health care is good or bad
There is no need to be coy, any well educated adult knows factual statements can be used for misleading purposes. Having an article title focused on the unprecedented nature of universal healthcare is a deliberate choice designed to negatively polarize the reader against it.
By 2019, we've known that universal healthcare would save hundreds of billions of dollars. As for the problems highlighted in the article, those are also easily addressed and have been many times by anyone seriously considering the topic. The new system that takes the place of private, for profit system will still need secretaries and logistical technicians. The main group that would be discarded is the useless middlemen who simply profit from the system. Retirement plans? A major concern of the elderly retirees is healthcare, which would be much cheaper with a universal plan. The money saved on healthcare can be used in other areas.
The article is focused mostly on the negative side effects the rich and wealthy beneficiaries would experience and tries to spread those fears to the common working person through needless fear mongering and a hyperfixation on the opinions of the wealthy. Of course the parasites would have negative opinions about being removed. This article is absolutely an argument against universal healthcare and it is absurd of you to claim otherwise. The US is the wealthiest country in the history of mankind and it is the only modern OECD nation without single payer healthcare.
Yes, there are simply no examples of countries with universal healthcare. It simply hasn’t been done.
You see how you’re using an intentionally obtuse and misleading premise now?
I'm just telling you what the article said. You still didn't try to look it up and read it through, and yet you responded anyway.
Incredible
had you looked it up you would have seen that they did indeed talk about other countries and tried to imagine how this all might play out depending on which model the US adapts or if we take some kind of hybrid approach
But I mean, who needs to listen to an expert in the field of economics when you can just pretend like you already know everything? Stay stupid
You’re directing your anger at the wrong person. You are being manipulated and used as a pawn/useful idiot. Giving any weight or credence at all to the idea that universal healthcare is complicated or exotic is just propaganda, plain and simple.
NYT opinion does this constantly. They will hem and haw about how the topic du jure is acccccccctually really complicated in order to sow doubt and give legitimacy to points that don’t just stand on their own merit. They also constantly try to distract from disastrous economic issues by trying to divide us with identity politics about race and queerness. It’s all the same tactic: some call it the “gish gallop” and some call it “flooding the zone”.
It's not an opinion piece on health care. Nobody said anything about if universal health care is complicated or not. It's an article about the economic impacts of a potential sweeping resolution that abolishes private health insurance. It's also almost 7 years old and no longer relevant.
Are you an economist?
Then why do you think you know more about this subject than the actual economists in the article? Are you a journalists who specializes in writing about the business of health care; particularly in how financial incentives affect the way medicine is delivered? Then why do you think you know more that then Journalist? Especially when we consider that the journalist in question has been doing this since the late 90s and specializes in, "scrutinizing the financial interests of insurance companies and hospitals".
And the NYT in general is rated, "Leans Left"
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times-news-media-bias
Funny how you know it's absurd to think you know more than the experts when it comes to things like medicine or science but when it comes to economics you and everybody else in this sub has it all figured out right?
Or do you also think vaccines cause autism and the world is flat?
Having past events to look at doesn’t inherently make analysis of a sufficiently complex issue any more certain, it’s just another data point. The title was specifically used to draw an emotional response and it achieved that goal by at least one person. Concluding the argument with ‘there’s no precedent so we can’t say’ is lazy at best but the reality is the title was chosen for the exact reason you blame the audience for delivering on. Tons of information can be broken down and analyzed in a way that even aspects of it would have comparable historical events. I doubt the economists that did the research would devolve their efforts into ‘eh, no clue, never happened before, we’re really only able to have ideas about things that have historical patterns which is really inconvenient’.
What the commenter was doing is expressing frustration over a failed system the article is covering. Calling someone stupid for expressing frustrations in an online comment over a failed system the article is about seems detached from reality or overly emotional and self centered. Stop jerking yourself off sometimes and recognize people will respond to things with emotions at times, especially on something with the barrier of entry being ‘can access the internet’.
Which is why you don't react to headlines
You hunt down the article, read it, understand the context, and then comment
You are stupid if you react to headlines and doubly so if you know headlines are designed to drawn an emotional response but still fall for it
Since you’re going to continue attacking random strangers based on almost no information about them, you come across as a miserable judgmental person. Not everyone cares to do a research project before making a comment on the internet and no amount of people with shit attitudes and a superiority complex is going to change that.
This show an astonishing lack of media literacy.
No, it's not. I actually read the article so I know what's it's actually about
They can still look at past events to predict the upcoming event; we have scores of examples and generations of data for other nations all over the world. It's been done, many times. It's not magic, there's absolutely no mystery.
They have to get three jobs like everybody else. This is happening constantly everywhere, why is that a concern now? What makes this the line? Get another job, prole, same as it ever was.
Invest in something else, done and done. Those who invested too much in health insurance companies will lose a lot of money. Standard operating procedure for everyone with everything in USA. No matter what, there will be winners and losers, someone always makes bank while others go broke.
Idiocy... you don't say?
Oh cool, so where did you get your degree in economics from?
You act like this is something I said when in reality it's what the economists in the article said.
Considering you didn't understand that I am leaning towards the idea that you're an idiot.