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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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"It's not communism guys, it's just a complete government takeover of the entire healthcare industry!"

So it is the branding doing the sinking.

No, it's the reality that does the sinking. We saw this play out with Obamacare. "Do you want Saint Obama to make healthcare cheaper, more accessible, more available, faster and better?" "Hell yeah!" "Even if your taxes go up?" "Oh. No, nevermind." And then in the real world none of those good things ever happened and the entire industry got more expensive and more opaque and it's also burdened with insane amounts of fraud.

Yes, everyone would like medical care without worrying about bills. They'd also like that for housing, food, Netflix and every other good. If you ask them "Would you like [accurate description of the Canadian or British healthcare systems]?" then support would tank into the ground.

And those problems keep cropping up in universal healthcare systems for the exact same reasons communism fails - no price discovery, lacking information from markets, bureaucratization adding hurdles and corruption and nepotism to access, etc, etc.

"I just want all the theoretical good parts of a communist system, but without any of the bad parts" is literal five year old logic.

The Americans who have US style universal healthcare through Medicare and Medicaid are pretty willing to keep it. That's why Medicare for all became a slogan. There's other way to do it besides copying Canada and I think copying Canada would be bad for obvious reasons. Swiss healthcare is more universal and technically more private for example.

no price discovery, lacking information from markets, bureaucratization adding hurdles and corruption and nepotism to access, etc, etc.

This is basically a word for word description of the US insurance market which also used to function a lot better in the 80s. The ACA was a band aid on a the system and some bad a lot of good. The no pre-existing condition rules and Medicaid expansion it introduced were excellent.

"It's not communism guys, it's just a complete government takeover of the entire healthcare industry!"

So Margaret Thatcher was a Communist? The Gulf Monarchs who preside over national oil industries and healthcare systems all communists? The US has public education does that make Donald Trump a Communist? The government providing a service in an economy with private property and capatalist modes of production is not communist. By that definition every government on earth is communist.