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0 pointsswores1y ago0 comments

> Explain to me how the US government spends twice as much as any other country on healthcare and you claim the corporations are _more_ in charge?

Total spending by government is an irrelevant metric for judging who is more "in charge".

Imagine two people, one of them spends X hours and $10 doing their own gardening to grow 100 tomatoes, someone else spends X hours driving to a shop and spends $50 to buy 100 tomatoes. You surely wouldn't argue that the second person has more control vs. companies over their tomatoes because they spent 5x as much, would you?

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toolz1y ago· 1 in thread

Of course I would, the second example represents some portion of a companies revenue. If that companies revenue is only $50 then that is their only customer and to continue existing they would need to keep that customer or they would have zero revenue. In that scenario many company's would change their entire operations to accommodate their single customer. That is control.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the first example. Are you suggesting the government would be 5x more cost efficient at producing tomatoes?! That's almost as outlandish to me as suggesting someone would spend the same amount of time driving to get tomatoes as someone else could spend growing them.

sworesOP1y ago

No, my numbers were randomly picked and mean nothing other than one being greater than the other.

My point is that the person growing tomatoes themselves has much more control over the tomatoes than someone who buys them from a shop, even if it costs them more money to buy from the shop.

Me being the shop's only buyer of tomatoes means I have greater control over the shop than if there were 100 buyers, it doesn't mean I have more control over the tomatoes than growing my own. And what we care about is control over healthcare, not control over registered companies related to healthcare (that's just a proxy for control over healthcare - aka tomatoes).

Or imagine these two examples (again, hypothetical):

Government A builds their own hospital and runs it using government employees, their budget is $10M/year.

Government B contracts Company Y to build and run a hospital, they sign a contract saying "we will pay you $20M/year to run it, and no oversight needed - good luck, have fun".

You clearly couldn't call Gov B the one with more control over their hospital, could you? Even though they spent twice as much on it.

Sure, no government signs a contract that simple, I'm not trying to describe a nation's situation, just pointing out that "spending more money" does not equal "having more control".

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