I don't live in the US. We have a very different helthcare system where I live, and it's working well.

But again: providing universal healthcare is all about giving (poor) people more prosperity. It has nothing to do with inequality by itself.

If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.

> If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.

No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold

Anyway, I would argue that having guaranteed healthcare is 10293762397697x better than not having guaranteed healthcare

> Anyway, I would argue that having guaranteed healthcare is 10293762397697x better than not having guaranteed healthcare

Sure, healthcare is nice. I see no disagreement.

> > If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.

> No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold

Well, fix the numbers any way you feel like. Eg say Mr Zuckerberg gets better off by whatever amount the rest of us together get better (eg in terms of healthcare) plus 10% extra.

Mark Zuckerberg would in fact need to have 8 billion times better healthcare than me for your argument to matter

I don't know anyone who really thinks that absolute inequality is the problem. people need a high floor - there is no inherent reason to want to lower the ceiling of wealth/benefits. but since there's no such thing as free lunch, we need to calculate by how much each % of ceiling that is lowered raises the floor. If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile.

The hard part is calculating the benefits. There are non-linear effects when you try to predict the benefits of having a healthy and educated population, although the benefit should be enormous.

On the other hand it is very easy to calculate the downside of people not being wage-slaves: not needing to accept bottom wages, having time to understand what's actually going on in the world, organizing for or against particular causes, etc..

I'm saying that we need to be careful that our obsession to obstruct the rich doesn't leave the masses worse off.

> If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile.

I'm afraid that lowering the ceiling by 10% might lower the floor by 10%, too.