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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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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