The Opportunity Costs of Capitalism

The White House has released a booklet called “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” and it purports to show that wait times under socialist health care systems are far higher than they are in the good ol’ capitalist USA. However, as Sarah Kliff hilariously points out, the folks who put this together used data for senior citizens, all of whom are part of Medicare in the United States. And as we all know, Medicare is a socialist health care system:

This looks like a great case for Medicare for All! And while we’re on the subject, here are a couple of charts to show the opportunity costs of capitalism as well. First, our health care system kills an awful lot of people:

And we spend a helluva lot of money to kill them:

Since I am neither Donald Trump nor a Republican, I will add that there are lots of other measures of health care effectiveness, and the United States does very well on some of them. The truth is that all the health care systems in advanced countries have both good and bad points, and it’s actually pretty difficult to judge them on an overall basis. If you do, the US is usually in the top third or so, but not at the very top.

But there’s one thing we can say for sure: we really do spend a ton of money to maintain a health care system that’s (a) good but not great, (b) fantastically complicated, error-prone, and likely to overcharge, and (c) covers only about 90 percent of the country. I’m a capitalist, not a socialist, but like it or not, capitalism has its opportunity costs too.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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