That's an intelligent five year old!

whispering at the top of my lungs

"You shut your flippin mouth, you dont tell me what to do!"

Having health insurance not tied to your job means you can quit your job if they screw you over and still have healthcare. In the USA, many people are stuck at their job for their healthcare. Also, the average country similar to the USA pays HALF of what the USA pays per person for healthcare. It would save us trillions of dollars per year to switch to Canada's system, or Australia, or UK, or Europe, or pretty much anything.

To expand on this . . . universal healthcare is funded by tax revenues. And the idea is to provide every citizen with the same level of ACCESS to treatment, regardless of income level, or other personal details.

That said, while ACCESS is universal, there is a certain level of "rationing" that will occur.

I am Canadian and, whether that rationing takes the form of certain treatments and/or procedures NOT being covered by the system, or having to wait an exceptionally long time for a procedure that IS covered, it does exist.

​

For example, it was determined my sister needed a knee replacement, as her joint was bone on bone. After a referral and consultation, her surgery was scheduled . . . almost a year later. So, she had to wait 11 months, while her knee was shot, and causing her no small amount of discomfort, in order to have the situation dealt with.

Now, granted, it WAS dealt with . . . but some feel these wait times aren't acceptable.

Be sure to read the fine print. For a while, Zoom offered end to end Encryption for their meetings with dial in numbers. There are many old school analog phone systems that don't support encrypted.

>if you're looking to have a discussion.

That presumes that I'm talking to a rational person. On that note...

>How do you define "gun nut" for the purpose of casually dismissing people?

Great question, shockingly! A gun nut is someone who values their own guns and/or access to guns above the lives of other people.

I've answered your question. Now you answer mine. How many school shootings has, say, Canada had this week?

Several gun nuts have outright refused to even consider this question. Let's see if you can do better.

Your right, it doesn’t, there’s a reason doctors don’t prescribe collagen supplements and it’s be cause your body just breaks them down into the amino acids, and your body can’t recognise where those amino acids originally came from and so when it turns them back into proteins, it’s just uses them for whatever it needs to make. Collage supplements and many stuff at the health stores are a load of bullrot

> I'm tempted to say something like "you can't possibly be that stupid," but clearly you can.

Again, a terrible opener if you're actually looking to have a discussion.

>How unsurprising it is to find that you're also a gun nut.

I'm not, unless you're really reaching with your definitions. How do you define "gun nut" for the purpose of casually dismissing people?

>You're the one listening to the same politicians who've literally told you they won't solve any problems.

And yet you want them to solve gun violence.

Would it require, no.

Would it be a good political move to do so, probably. Though attempting to cut down the US for-profit health insurance industry with its massive lobbying arm is already unhealthy for a political career so maybe the ire of thousands of unemployed middle managers and cubicle workers wont matter.

There would be a need for jobs, for sure. But there would be a lot of redundancy if your goal was to give everyone a job in the new system.

Let's say there are 10 insurance companies and we suddenly had to get down to one organization. So that's 10 CEOs down to 1 - what jobs do the other 9 get? The further down the chain of command the more redundancy you get. You could probably run the new administration with the headcount from two of those 10 companies, maybe even less since one system would allow for streamlined optimizations of policy and admin work.

A lot of good answers here, but perhaps some examples of "universal" services that Americans already enjoy would help:

• Firefighters
• Police
• Road maintenance
• Public schools
• Military protection

These are all services that are paid through taxes. They are then "freely" available to all citizens of the US, regardless of income or current employer.

Imagine if firefighters would only save your home if you had insurance provided through your current employer... otherwise, your house would burn down (or, more like the current healthcare situation, you would go bankrupt paying them back).

It basically means that only the sender and the intended recipient can actually read the message. This is in contrast to the usual encryption that is only used to secure message from the sender\receiver to\from the server.

It is important though that there are a lot of companies that don't use Cryptographic terms correctly. Though at least for the large direct messengers (e. G. WhatsApp) they usually do use the term end to end encryption correctly.

I mean, if you light a fire and heat water enough it evaporates, but I wouldn't have thought of that as "burning" the water, since the water isn't fuel for the fire

Very good point. There is a lot of complexity to the issue, but this is ELI5, so I thought it best to keep it simple.

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One small note, health insurance is not the same thing as health care. Having health insurance does not ensure that someone can get health care. Insurance usually makes it easier to get health care, but ideally universal health care goes beyond just what insurance provides.

So, would switching to a single payer system require a whole set of other programs to employ all these talented people? Like a New Deal? Seems like our gornment would have to do a lot of work to plan and administrate something so massive. Like, do their job.

It's not health insurance. It's healthcare.

I'm Australian. If I get sick, I can go to a GP and pay nothing for the consultation, then go to the pharmacist and pick up my prescription for a few bucks.

If I have a medical emergency, I can go to an ER and pay nothing for the consultation, medication, procedures, stay, even surgery and rehab.

If a woman gets pregnant, it's all paid for: prenatal care, birthing, hospital stay, lactation consultant, the works.

There are some out of pocket costs scattered through the system. You pay for ambulance trips for some reason, you pay for dentists (though there are some hospital-run clinics for low-income people, bit of a waitlist for these though), you pay for some scans and MRIs from external provider, you have some out of pocket costs from private specialist consults (generally on the order of a few hundred dollars), and a proportion of GPs are starting to charge out-of-pocket costs, because a decade of conservative governments have done their level best to starve the system out of existence.

And all of this is funded by a 1.5% income tax levy, which is waived for disadvantaged or low-income people.

It's not insurance, becasue there's no business front-ending it and trying to screw you out of payment. You don't have to submit a claim and hope it's accepted. The medical provider simply bills the government for service. An insurance model is designed around contingencies you assume never happen. The healthcare model assumes that there's an ongoing need, and simply pays for it straight up.

There's no insane million-dollar bills being issued, because hospitals know they're getting paid and don't have to high-ball in the hope of getting some of it. Nobody goes bankrupt or loses their home because they get sick. Nobody is strong-armed into staying at a shitty job in horrible conditions by the threat of losing access to healthcare.

It just works - better and cheaper for everyone.

I didn't say that it was the right system, only that this is one of the realities of doing away with healthcare for profit.

If the US government suddenly banned privatized communications, and everyone had to use a new national internet and cell phone network - wouldn't a lot of people doing redundant jobs at ATT, Verizon, TMobile and other telcoms be suddenly out of work?

Not acknowledging that aspect of making a change over to universal healthcare is to only see the forest for the trees.

None that we know of. However there are some standardised cryptographic algorithms that have weird, unclear design aspects and we are wondering if these could be back doors we just don't understand yet. In same cases these aspects have also been shown to be insecure but we have no proof that this was intentional.

> Universal healthcare is publicly provided ... healthcare

Not necessarily.

Australia's healthcare system incorporates a lot of private healthcare providers, on the lower level (GP's, dentists, etc) to my knowledge it is mostly private.

Private providers negotiate with the public insurer, Medicare, for how much they are paid per medical procedure and any extra they charge to the patient or any supplemental private insurance they might have. Some aim to charge entirely within what Medicare provides (called Bulk Billing services) while others charge more.

US Healthcare - every job offers some form of healthcare. No one has any leverage. The healthcare is shitty. It's a million stitched together independent hospitals, non-profits, doctors, etc.

Everywhere else - the government is the ONLY provider of healthcare, and it covers EVERYONE.

Therefore, the government sets the price points, there is no worrying about what plan you have or if your provider is "in network," you simply... have affordable healthcare covered for the most part by taxes.

The side benefit of this is that jobs become more competitive - in the US, you can't leave your job if you need the healthcare it provides, AND jobs have to provide good healthcare to lure good workers. Everywhere else, if you could find a better job, you can go take it without interrupting your healthcare plan, making the job market for employees better through increased competition.

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whispering is considered harmful for the voice because it creates a lot of tension and strain on the vocal cords. when you whisper, your vocal cords are brought close together tightly, and this can cause them to become inflamed and irritated. over time, this can lead to vocal cord damage, hoarseness, and other voice problems.