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The biggest gaslighting of this whole affair has been the political adherence to clearly insane propositions like forcing everyone to wear masks (questionable in any case) but allowing cloth masks (which do, at best, ~nothing, unlike actual rated masks, so definitely pointless) or quarantining billions of young people who accumulate less than 25 micromorts of mortality from covid contraction in the name of adding (on expectation) a few life-months for geriatrics who are not contributing to society and are about to keel over anyway.

The unnecessary manmade destruction of utility over the last year is nearly unprecedented, perhaps the most devastating since WW2.

Why would they have dumped billions into developing these vaccines in the first place if they expected to just lose the IP rights right away anyway? You might be able to save a small number of extra people this time by screwing over the vax manufacturers, but a lot more people will die next time when no one is willing to put up the R&D money.

Do you support the right of businesses to refuse business to homosexuals, for example, on religious grounds? If you come back with “homosexuals are legally a protected class”, that’s evading the question and functionally equivalent to “no I don’t actually support freedom of association”.

I ask because in my experience most people on HN only support freedom of association when it’s politically expedient for them.

My evidence is that I've lived in countries with market-based healthcare (Thailand, Mexico) and countries with socialized healthcare (Canada, UK), and the market-based healthcare is always infinitely better. My wife had to wait months to see a psychiatrist in Canada, before we moved away. WTF? In Thailand it's like $50 and you get in right away.

empirically do those things better than the US

Why are you bringing up the US? It's not market-based healthcare.

The factors that cause America to spend a lot of money on healthcare don't go away when you switch to a single payer. If anything, they get worse.

Reform needs to happen elsewhere; for example, we need to stop using taxpayer money for extremely cost-ineffective treatment of very old people (which is where most of our money goes).

This website is full of overconfident midwits - nothing new. I appreciate that you're still willing to put in the effort to show them the evidence. Unfortunately, I'm at the point where I don't think it's worth it; it's not like they developed their current opinion by looking at any evidence, so they're not going to change it on account of evidence.

More people are in favor of universal healthcare than against it.

In the US, you can get an answer in either direction depending on how you phrase the question. When you bring in the fact that this will cost money, people tend to flip. Most people in the US already have healthcare through the government or through their employer, so they don't actually really care enough for anyone to pull this off politically.

Therefore, we should change the system

I agree, the current system is sub-optimal.

given the success of universal healthcare schemes throughout the developed world

What success? Most countries with "universal healthcare" A) are poor relative to their demographic-imputed economic capacity B) have low-quality care compared to market-based healthcare systems, and even compared to the worst-of-both-worlds American healthcare system often have horrendous metrics on quality of doctors, procedure wait times, etc.

I cannot comprehend why anyone would be against health care for all?

Then you probably shouldn't voice an opinion on the issue. If a lot of people disagree with you can't come up with a coherent explanation for why, then you almost certainly don't understand the problem space.

Can someone help explain to me what the oppositions point of view is?

Government-run healthcare is not socially optimal.

Edit: The people downvoting me are salty because they realize that they can't form a coherent argument for an opposing opinion. Guess what - I already know all of your talking points. I would engage with you on them, but this shitty website won't let me post more than like 5 times an hour.

It is clearly more economically efficient to treat malignant cancers earlier.

This is not necessarily the case, because additional screening has costs - both direct costs of running the screening, but also hidden costs like costs associated with false positives (which represent the vast majority of cancer diagnoses). For example, we realized recently that for many years we had been too aggressively encouraging women to get breast cancer screenings, and it ended up not being socially optimal due to the high cost and false positive rate.

Gwern is great. One of a small number of people I support on patreon. Really high quality authorship on a huge range of topics, from drugs to cartoons to AI research.

I don't really object to the first 4 layers of the OSI model as applied to the current network stack - it's a pretty useful model of the separation-of-concerns between, say, Cat5, ethernet, IP, TCP.