Make America Singapore

Shhh. No one wants to acknowledge the happiest countries and countries with all these social programs have very small, homogeneous populations. They also don’t want to acknowledge that those people actually pay the tax rates you see. They aren’t like America where 42% aren’t paying income tax and everyone else is paying half the tax rate you see. They all think the rich people in those countries are paying for everything. The joke is on them, because those countries have far fewer rich people. It’s the middle class that’s paying for everything. We need to keep ignoring all the data though.

Around 60% :smile: of Singaporeans don’t pay any personal income tax.
sgforums

Sources of funds is not limited to tax :grin:, Singapore has GIC, Temasek Holdings, and GLCs.

What’s the major tax revenue source for Singapore? Its indirect tax is more significant. What’s their major indirect taxes? Is it corporate tax or government owned monopoly businesses?

Why push the race button on all issues, even something that seems to have nothing to do with race like healthcare?

If you want to blame all social problems on race, you should also credit all our accomplishments on our diversity too, just to be consistent.

Nobody. We are the only superpower in the world.

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There are tons of walk-in primary care clinics in Korea.
Major big surgery like cancer surgery wait time could be long but still comparable with US wait time.
One good example is the link I posted above.
It was about an ER visit in Korea as a foreigner.
S Korea was recently named as the country with the longest life expectancy.
One of the reason for such long life expectancy was “easy access to quality health care”.

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Lifestyle is a major contributor to life expectancy. No amount of healthcare can solve the issue of drug addiction.

What’s the comparison of drug addiction and mental disease between US, Korea and Songapore?

Specifically, how much of US healthcare spending is caused by drug abuse and healthcare and homelessness?

Healthcare is not an isolated issue. We need to consider cost and causes of demand. Lack of happiness in USA could be one reason for high healthcare cost as well. We should strive for better and more widespread happiness in America.

Korea, Singapore and Japan have one thing in common va USA: their people are generally happier, healthier, less drug addiction, less mental illness, less homelessness, more walking and less driving, less violence and less murder rate

Thesis: Taking away poor people’s health insurance will not make them happier.

LOL.

Actually rather then race, i would say look at the Urban/Rural mix. Korea, Taiwan, Singapore have most of their population (and in the case of Singapore all) concentrated in high density urban areas. This encouraged the use of public transportion, walking, etc. The health outcomes of an urban vs rural/suburban population is actually better because you are being forced to “exercise” from all the walking around. I know each time I am in Singapore, i probably walk as much in one day I might do in a week or two over here… :stuck_out_tongue:

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More walking / Less driving because of urban densification and pro-public infrastructure government policies
Less violence/murder because of strict gun control laws
The others are harder to quantify.
But they are because of government intervention and policies that would be hard to fly in the current political climate in the US. Goes to show it is hard to work on one aspect of well being (healthcare) without considering the implications of everything else that goes on

Force people to walk will be the best way to reduce healthcare spending. Automobile is the worst enemy for a healthy America

Politicians should make sweet talk and not divisive talk. Everyone should talk to make others and self happy

Will marijuana increase or decrease healthcare spending? This is a real question, not a rhetoric :sunglasses:

The real problem is cost… $78k vs $800 for the same procedure. .We need to import a lot more doctors and nurses…Or start a lot more medical schools…

How does the housing cost compare? How much will our $400k house sell there?

Also how much is the wage differential? All the you stuff you can buy in the store is pretty cheap here, but Americans are not cheap when they price their labor. So services are expensive. The scary thing is that hospitals don’t make that much money, nurses and doctors are making a lot of money, but not outrageous. Where did the money go?

A good chunk of the cost in the US healthcare system is the people pushing paper around while not contributing to patient outcomes. The US system was built around insurers which is not what you see in systems like Singapore where it was primarily a national (and private without insurance) healthcare system that was later supplemented by insurers. So there is significant cost savings by eliminating the constant negotiation between provider and insurer on what they would like to pay / need to pay.

Other areas where there are cost savings is:

  • Rationing of Health Care (there are limits on what procedures / drugs you have access to in the national health care system in Singapore)

  • Means testing - your charges in the Singapore system is dependent on what type of ward you want to stay in when hospitalized (shared vs private) as well as the type of primary residence

  • Fixed pricing in a nationalized health care system. The private market that supplements it is the wild west when it comes to pricing. here’s an example ($25M to treat one patient. yes $25 million):

  • Drug pricing. Negotiated at the national level (doesn’t that sound like Medicaid/Medicare), as well as a push for generics

btw having been in a number of US hospitals and Asian hospitals. The level of service, technology, patient care, etc is much higher in the US. You get close to it in the private hospitals in Singapore. but then you will be paying appropriately for it. Part of the reason for lower costs is the lower level of service and the expectation of a lower level of service. E.g. my friends in Korea supplement care for their parents with private nurses.

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Hospitals that I have talked to run at about 2% margin. Multiple reasons for it (including the large amounts of writeoffs they have to take for providing care for people unable to pay their bills). The ones making the money are the insurance companies and the drug companies. Not to say hospitals are efficient as there is a significant overheard and costs associated with having to work with insurance companies.

High cost in most things in USA is because of the legal (suing and defending against sues), insurance (enable those who can’t afford the service to enjoy it, instead of a lower service based on affordability) and the patent (result in extortion prices for a long time) system. Which politicians are capable of negotiating with those three groups?

You should look at obesity rates by race. Obesity rates are one of the biggest drivers of healthcare costs. Obesity is one of the few things the US is actually #1.

Yet we’re supposed to believe our poor are on the verge of starving to death if we don’t have more social programs.

US obesity rate demographics:

I’m going to start talking about Asian privilege. Statistically, Asians make more than white people and have lower obesity rates.

Did you control for poverty level? Education?

Instead of saying blacks are more obese because they are black, how about blacks are obese because they are poor? You think there is a black gene for obesity?

Are you always going to deflect and say other factors must be the reason? If you think it’s because of other factors, then find a study that shows it. The biggest factor in education, poverty, drug use, and crime is single parenthood. No one makes people make that decision except themselves. That decision is overwhelmingly more common in one specific group. They were just as poor decades ago but weren’t make that decision. They started making that decision and things have gotten worse ever since.

It used to be the poor were thin, now they are obese…And yet liberals are always worried about the poor being fed…Food stamps, child lunch programs…Obviously starvation is not the problem… In fact it is sedentary living, sugar and high carb diets promoted by the FDA…

Biggest cause of poverty and misery…having kids…lol

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/31/usda-dietary-guidelines-diabetes_n_5635554.html

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The poverty rate for single parents is 4-5x higher than married parents. Yet, we keep seeing more and more single parents. Then we wonder why the poverty rate isn’t budging despite spending on it growing far faster than inflation. It’s almost as if the more social programs we create, the more single parents we have.