One thing that's commonly forgotten is that the only countries where "socialism" hasn't gone completely down in flames are countries that were fairly wealthy and ethnically homogenous to begin with -- like Sweden. By definition, any socialist experiment larger than a communal farm requires delegation of authority to something resembling a government. The more diverse the governed become, the more impossible it becomes to get anything approaching a consensus, and the more completely detached those in government become from the wants of those who are being governed.
Case in point: somewhere in Ukraine, there was a factory cranking out Nixie Tubes up until about 10 years ago. Nixie tubes are basically a tube with 10 nichrome wires shaped like the digits 0 through 9 inside, with either a vacuum or noble gas (sorry, it's early, and I don't remember exactly). They were commonly used in the US up until the invention of vacuum fluorescent displays and LEDs sometime in the 1960s. They were obsolete in the Soviet Union, too... but nobody ever bothered to tell the factory. Year after year, they filled out the paperwork, received the supplies, manufactured millions of nixie tubes, boxed them up, and shipped them out... to a gigantic government warehouse, where they sat unsold until some guy bought their entire inventory for a pittance and started selling them on eBay to Americans who want to build retro Nixie Tube clocks, because nobody had any use for them. Nobody dared to challenge the factory's existence or what it produced, because it would have upset the Party, the unions, and just about everyone who worked in the town where the factory was. So it just kept making them, year after year. Stir, rinse, multiply by several hundred thousand other factories just like it, and you have a large part of the reason why the Soviet Union's economy could only collapse in the long run -- there was no market involved to serve as a high-level sanity check.
Healthcare is a complicated problem. Half the problem in the US is that we've created a f**ked up situation where the divergence between wholesale costs (what insurance companies REALLY pay for healthcare) and retail costs (what you'll pay if you get sick without insurance) is so outrageous, a visit to a doctor to get antibiotics for strep can easily end up costing $500 if you're paying the bill yourself without insurance. Worse, thanks to the way pre-existing conditions are handled, we've created a situation that turns employees with chronic conditions (like ADD, diabetes, etc) into healthcare vassals of their employers -- quit or get laid off, and you need new health insurance. Get new health insurance, and unless you're working for another large company, anything you've been treated for within the past 2 years is basically excluded forever going forward. And when they exclude it, they don't even have the decency to let you pay the much lower rate the health insurance company negotiated with the doctor/pharmacy/hospital -- you get f**ked for 100% of the full inflated retail cost.
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Your Aspie score: 170 of 200 · Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 34 of 200 · You are very likely an Aspie [ AQ=41, EQ=11, SQ=45, SQ-R=77; FQ=38 ]