Just curious, and I’ll admit it’s too my discredit that I’m even engaging, but why are you behaving this way?

What?

Government funded and administered health care systems being a form of risk pooling and insurance are not controversial ideas. These are standard definitions.

I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. Why would taxpayer paid services not be a form of risk pooling? There are hundreds of countries around the world with government run health systems, or government funded and privately run systems, or private-public partnerships in various forms. Pooling taxpayer money to fund health care for those individuals unlucky enough to need it absolutely does make it insurance.

I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on “universal health care” and “health insurance” if you’d like to start learning about these topics.

I’m an academic statistician who discusses risk and related concepts with experts every day…

I mean, I agree with the first part fully, but I think what you mean is that we shouldn’t have for-profit corporate run insurance.

Any socialised health care is a form of insurance—a way for us to pool the risk of large bad events, so that everyone (or a lot of people) pays a little so that a few people aren’t totally destroyed by the catastrophe. The alternative to having insurance is that we let people die when rare but really bad things happen. We absolutely should have insurance, but we should all share the cost equally, or the rich should pay more, rather than a few people massively profiting from running the enterprise.

But, however we run it, we’ll need to treat dental differently from medical because of what I said in my first comment

This makes perfect sense from the supply side. Very few (younger) people need expensive medical care, so we can pool the risk. Almost everyone needs some, regular dental care, so it’s more like a savings account than insurance. I’m not claiming that the insurance systems in any given country aren’t exploitative, just that medical and dental insurance should be different.

How fast can this ship go? Depending on how far in time you go, you’ll need to spend a long time traveling through space to get to where Earth was…

The Earth is traveling along an elliptical orbit around the sun, the sun is orbiting the Milky Way, the Milky Way is traveling along a curved trajectory. Why, if you kept your momentum, would you end up on Earth?

Hey, thanks for taking the time to express a nuanced and complex viewpoint. You’re exactly the kind of person who gets lumped in with Nazis by the divisive, black-or-white stance championed in this post.

I’d hoped that Lemmy would have more mature discussion like this, but as you can see in this thread, it’s the same style of “join in the simplistic hatred or be considered the worst kind of enemy” bigotry here too.

There’re two claims being made here.

1. Nazis are bad, we don’t like them, and

2. anyone who expresses disagreement with the statement “fuck Nazis” must be a Nazi.

Most people agree with (1), but to many, me included, (2) is obviously false. There are many, many reasons people would disagree with “fuck Nazis or you are one”, besides being a Nazi and wanting to defend them. Some just dislike profanity. Some don’t want to generalize a historical term to today’s distinct political factions. Others, like you, recognise that reality is complex, that this finger pointing, name calling strategy is something Nazis do too, or simply that it’s not the way intelligent progressives should act.

I genuinely believe that this"call everyone a Nazi" bullshit is part of what’s fissioning our social network into antagonistic factions and causing us to waste our meagre collective political capital arguing about which bathroom a few people should use instead of solving our real, pressing global economic and environmental crises.

Now, queue someone replying to insist I must be a Nazi because I didn’t just jump on the hate bandwagon…

Please share if you set it up

Wait, how is “not equal to” a Nazi symbol?