The Presidency of the Joes: more like INFRASTRUCTURE WEAK

Also, even just looking at the way Germany rebuilt after WWI should make one skeptical about the benefits of war as some sort of inherently beneficial fire.

Don’t have to take “burn it down” so literally. In 1961 and 1978 South Korea and China respectively reinvented their economies (in completely different ways - China expanded private enterprise and SK became more protectionist) to their great benefit.

Cuba and Nicaragua probably worth looking at also if you didn’t own a casino or a banana plantation.

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Maybe a better example is the American South. How did that work out after we burned it down and rebuilt it?

Thats entirely because we fucked it up. We could have done a much better job there, and it’s interesting to think of an America where we had.

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Does anyone have much experience in modern day SK? I have none, but it seems like everything that I hear about their society makes it sound pretty enviable. A functioning democracy, a government that isn’t completely captured by wealthy business interests and at least attempts to fight corruption. Like I said I have no idea if this is actually true.

SK was a brutal dictatorship that sent 350000 people to fight in our war in Vietnam basically because we paid them. They weren’t a good country by any means until the 80s, but they had successful economic reforms.

VD…they recently had a big corruption scandal and hundreds of thousands of people protesting for months forced the removal of the president. They have a functioning anarchy.

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This is quite different from the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 2021, where media keeps publishing things that Republicans say.

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I understand riding their trains can be problematic, especially if you have to go to Busan.

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Video game nerds are hailed as heroes and get all the chicks and jocks are losers and get picked on.

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Nearly everyone in Canada has supplemental insurance for dental, perscriptions etc. I think this is common to most UHC systems. No?

Do any cover 100% of everything?

It’s literally part of your job, so…okay?

In any case, that’s irrelevant to whether or not you support changes to the system that allows for “people who don’t have insurance”.

As far as the “vibe” goes, I may be misreading things, but I assure you I did not make it up.

To clarify, I’ll be direct: Do you agree with me that it is a disgrace that we don’t have universal health care in this country and believe that the whole system needs to be radically altered?

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https://mobile.twitter.com/NatSecCNN/status/1389162972715511810

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cool cool. Both parties will use this against leftists.

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On a similar topic I was just thinking how absurdly wrong I was about right wing violence after the election. I really expected a huge uptick in right wing violence but it seems like they’re just carrying on with their normal violence.

I hope I’m also wrong about how effective voter suppression is going to be and how without a voting rights bill democrats are effectively done for decades.

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Unfortunately even armed rebellion or armed takeover is not guaranteed to get the desired results.

The entire picture is frustrating / exasperating.

Designated Survivor could play out in the US and get worse, and stay the same would be the most likely outcome. Improvement would be a distant third.

Almost everything is subject to diminishing returns and the GOP had already taken the voter suppression and gerrymandering to a pretty crazy place.

I’m sure but I expect this to take it to the next level. Like you getting visited by the fbi for extremist posting.

The hospital I stayed in for a week when I lived in South Korea was awful.

Basically life is pretty kickass in Seoul and Busan. In rural South Korea it’s pretty shitty.

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That is something that I think, but is not widespread or even widely agreed on in my specialty. The job is ‘emergency’ medicine. Once we prove you don’t have an ‘emergency’, you get discharged.

But what constituents an emergency is nebulous. One of my more memorable patients was a 60 something year old woman with no insurance who came in to the ER complaining of breast pain. She had breast cancer that was growing through the skin. The tumor was so big that parts of it had outgrown it’s blood supply and started dying off. She hadn’t come in because of what seemed like a severe anxiety disorder regarding, well, everything. It took an hour or so to convince her to let me even take a look at it. She knew, deep down, it was bad.

She didn’t have insurance, but likely would have qualified medicaid and medicare. Our surgery clinic that was affiliated with us required insurance to be seen, otherwise she would have had to go to clinic in the bronx that would have taken a long time to get seen.

Technically, this wasn’t an emergency. She didn’t meet any admission criteria, so the hospital wouldn’t let me admit her. It was the right thing to do, so I made it happen. I called the necrotic tissue a potential source of infection, then turned her rapid heart rate (from anxiety) and a slightly elevated white blood cell count (meaningless in reality) into meeting sepsis criteria. I documented that it required IV abx, got my hospitalist on board, and got her admitted to get her staged properly. Did she get an extra dose or two of IV antibiotics? Yup, but we got her staged and setup with oncology in a few days instead of weeks… if she got the nerve to ever go to an appointment.

I believe in incrementalism. I believe that radical change is not possible for political reasons, and I’m deeply concerned that a radical transformation would fail miserably causing a conservative reaction leaving us worse than where we started.

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Let’s remember though that every nation that has UHC didn’t one day and then did the next. If the political will exists UHC could happen quick in the US. It won’t. But could.

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