How does that have anything to do with what I said? We pay more for medical care than other nations, and we pay more for the military than other nations, but not because.

I wanted to make it clear that the unspoken implication of your statement that this must mean health care is readily available for U.S. citizens at large is most certainly not the case. That was the main topic of the discussion.

And the fact that Medicare and Medicaid have considerable restrictions does not say anything about the basic problem: our public spending on healthcare, per capita, is higher than almost any other nation

Because other First World nations need spend such a tremendous amount on health care, because the have single-payer systems without all the bloat that comes with the system we have here.

- and then we have to pay that much again in private spending. The problem is not that we don't spend enough, but that we have a severely dysfunctional healthcare cartel that has been enabled by our government.

Enabled by the government for insisting on dealing with private health care insurers and Big Pharma companies that you agree have the implicit right to bleed us dry. That is what "Obamacare" was essentially all about; it was a huge giveaway to the HMOs and Big Pharma, which is partly why other nations save in health care expenditures compared to us. The point is, the amount of money spent by the government on health care that is actually used to cover treatments for patients rather than taking care of all the attendant paperwork and overhead going with that is small.

Yes, just as with healthcare, we spend more public money on education than other countries ... and then we have to pay for it again privately if we want to get a good education. Once again, government intervention has increased prices, and what is worse may have even decreased quality.

The government is doubtlessly part of the blame, but certainly not entirely. It has worked hand-in-hand with Wall Street to bleed students dry on higher education, with another part of the blame going to the common citizens for letting it get out of hand long before any protests started. That's because contrary to libertarian belief, the government far more often works in collusion with the capitalists who established it than as an obstruction to their supposed good will and intended progress for all (read: ability to do as they please with no restraints, which is just as bad for the long-range stability for their system overall as it is for workers and the environment, which is why their government tries to rein them in to start with). As a result of that, private companies like Sallie Mae, who are essentially legal loan sharks, have moved in to rake in a fortune off of students' backs thanks to the guaranteed government loans, as have numerous private investors and banks. This is a partnership of complicity between private industry, the government they control, and typical citizen apathy.

Saying this has nothing whatever to do with capitalist greed and everything to do with government mismanagement and/or corruption is to entirely ignore the very purpose of for profit production, as well as the readily available facts, as noted here, and here and here.

Not all workers are foolish enough to believe that college tuition would suddenly become "affordable" (a subjective term, to be sure) and debt forgiveness would be a common feature if the system suddenly became completely (or almost completely) unregulated. You can instead count on Sallie Mae and the many copycat businesses "she" inspired to thrive as never before in a system of capitalism unleashed, especially with no "evil" government around to regulate interest rates at the banks.

You might also note that the countries that fully fund higher education don't let everyone attend college. They have a much smaller portion of their population attend college, so it should not be surprising that they can pay the full cost of those few students who attend.

They let people attend college who are able to maintain good grades, which is as it should be. They do not give out guaranteed loans to virtually everyone who applies for one, and then work together with private investors and legal loan shark industries to crush all of these students in debt. This keeps their costs lower, and it's a good thing that benefits students who worked hard and did well in college, as opposed to benefiting the likes of Albert Lord, the founder of Sallie Mae.

Your links do not address the issue. They show overall stats rather than stats adjusted for ethnicity. I was specific about adjusting for ethnicity - you even quoted that part!

America has many different ethnic groups, and these ethnicities have different qualities. It is a simple fact that, even after adjustments for class, education, and income, some ethnic groups live longer than others.

Overall is what counts for overall spending. That was what I was addressing. Ethnic groups who live in certain countries will not necessarily live longer or as long as their counterparts in other nations who are receiving better health care, better access to food, etc. These factors always count more than ethnicity and genetics alone do.

This leads to some great ways to lie with statistics. Swedish-Americans live longer and enjoy higher incomes than Swedes living in Sweden; Nigerian-Americans live longer and enjoy higher incomes than Nigerians living in Nigeria; Japanese-Americans live longer and enjoy higher incomes than Japanese living in Japan - and the list goes on;

I'm sorry, my good friend, but those stats you're quoting is untrue. For instance, it's well known that people who live in Japan live longer Japanese people in America, and it's the result of not only universal healthcare, but also the better diet available to Japanese citizens (in contrast with America) and better social cohesion. Also note how the government of Japan complains because of the mounting age of Japanese citizens, the health care may not be able to be universal forever, which is a problem that would only happen in a capitalist system since fiscal funds are required to do everything.

As for Europeans, it's also well known they live longer in Europe, as is made clear here. Two notable excerpts: "“The U.S. is doing worse than these others countries both in terms of life expectancy and health throughout their entire lives. This is a pervasive problem from birth to old age; it affects everyone and has been a long standing problem,” Dr. Steven H. Woolf, chair of the committee that wrote the report, told PBS NewsHour", and

"The U.S. has the largest percentage of people uninsured or without access to primary care. Americans consume more calories per person, have a higher rate of drug abuse, and are less safe on the road compared to their global peers. Social and physical environments such as income inequality and discouraging physical activity are also contributors.

Matthias Rumpf of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a group that conducts similar research — agreed with the findings, though he added that lack of primary care access also directly affects the U.S. life expectancy rate.

“Our research shows the U.S. is doing well when it comes to complicated surgeries or conditions such as cancer, but if you don’t provide affordable primary care to everyone, then patients end up in a hospital with their avoidable condition too far deteriorated to be saved,” Rumpf said. “This directly affects the life expectancy rate in America.”

Clearly there are many doctors providing many statements that life expectancy in the U.S. for everyone isn't great, and people of Japanese and European descent certainly aren't living longer here on average than in their native countries. The lack of adequate dispersal of health care due to the highly privatized nature of it in America has been quoted by many doctors as being one of the major reasons for this, as is noted in these excerpts.

but persons of European descent live longer than persons of African descent, and persons of Asian descent live longer than persons of European descent, regardless of where they live in the world - and America has a much larger population of persons of African descent than any other developed nation. This will always bring down overall stats regardless of the stats by ethnicity which show a very different picture.

African nations tend to be largely Third World, with worse conditions overall than First World nations. So this is to be expected. And this is a capitalist issue at heart, because a global socially owned system would have have class divisions and artificial fiscal limits on who could receive needed care based on individual ability to pay.

The same holds true within the United States: white Texans have better educational outcomes than white Wisconsites; black Texans have better educational outcomes than black Wisconsites; Latino Texans have better educational outcomes than Latino Wisconsites - but Texas has much larger proportions of blacks and Hispanics than Wisconsin, so Wisconsites as a whole have better educational outcomes than Texans as a whole and progressives thumb their noses at the Texans for being backwards and racist and not as cool as progressive Wisconsin which does worse by its citizens.

Disparities in educational spendings from state to state will obviously impact its residents differently, especially since black people tend to suffer greater impoverishment and concentration in inner city slum areas than white people in general. How great these conditions are from a state to state basis will obviously result in black people in one state being better off overall than in another state. But this is all still the rest of fiscal spending and the lack of funding resulting in an inequality of resource dispersal.

Another example is healthcare in Hawaii. Hawaii has the nation's largest population of Asian descent, and Asians live longer than whites and blacks. What's more, almost all the whites living in Hawaii have relatively high incomes, which correlates with better healthcare and longer lives. So progressives like to point out that reliably progressive Hawaii has the greatest longevity in the United States!

You said it yourself: higher incomes, which do definitely correlate with more longevity and better health, much more regularly than simple genetics. And in a moneyless system based on social ownership of the industries, there would be no "income disparity," as everyone would receive the full fruit of their labor. This means equal access to the social store in exchange for what amounts to a modest share of the useful work compared to under capitalism, where every worker is struggling to get as many hours of work in as possible because that is what is required for the biggest possible paycheck that will still not entitle them to even a fraction of the full value of their labor.

And that is my main point.

When it comes to income there are several ways to lie with statistics; for example, a small proportion of high income residents can obscure the picture (as you rightly noted in another post about Chile). It is also necessary to adjust for what is called purchasing power parity (PPP).

You just like saying "purchasing power parity" because of its alliterative quality.