52-48 is a poor democracy. 48% of the demos ("half") didn't get a cracy. And the 52 were plainly lied to by the politicians who claimed to have a Leave plan but followed up with 4 years of mass confusion and a last minute rushed agreement 11 months after it was due.
A good democracy finds a compromise that gets a much larger majority vote.
Agreed. The EU is where countries go after empire, and is a solution to that problem (along with all of the lost wars and preventing more lost wars). It also deals with the populism problem far better than America, for example.
The UK is going to become a Russian and American playground when Brexit occurs. It will be a paradise for oligarchs to play the populace even more. Oligarchs thrive from the chaos of these sorts of situations and especially financially.
I understand why Americans want to come to the UK. A lot of them come for the sole purpose of having access to better and guaranteed healthcare (you can have good insurance and still owe tens of thousands to millions if you have either cancer or a rare disease and both are statistically common—-also the third leading cause of death is believed to be medical errors according to Johns Hopkins and others—-you can go to the best institutions and still very easily die unnecessarily in the US as that kind of statistic cannot be evaded), but the lifespan of the UK population is going to lag hardcore compared to other countries on the European continent, especially ones in or aligned with the EU.
Getting UK citizenship can be hard too. They are not immigration friendly at all, unless you were an EU citizen (at least in the past). There are some really esoteric rules, and there are people who have been denied citizenship for having a misdemeanor moving traffic violation, with no arrest or criminal record, who paid the fine on time.
If you really want to have access to the UK, become a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the EU. By being an EU citizen, you can live/work/retire in over 30 European countries, including all of the EU countries. It is far easier to become an Irish citizen too. They are also very pro-EU. Not only that, citizens of the Republic of Ireland have rights to live/work/retire in the UK due to a common agreement.
There is very little medical tourism from the US to the UK. In fact patients tend to go the other way. The US has higher 5 year survival rates for most types of cancer.
Americans frequently emigrate to the UK to eventually have guaranteed lifelong access to healthcare.
Tourism is a totally different matter. You go to the “eastern” EU countries in that case.
As for the cancer patient survival, in the US, 42% of patients lose their life savings within 2 years and the amount was typically around $92,000. That alone screws American cancer patients over long term, and it can cause them to die.
You can cherry pick data, but your logic does not add up.
Spend some time on HealthData.org examining the US versus other developed countries.
We may have better cancer survival rates, but when you look at deaths attributed to amenable and non-amenable medical errors (believed to be the US #3 leading cause of death by multiple studies), the average American life expectancy, and anticipated life expectancies in the future (in addition to disability free years of life), it is 100% clear that we fail as a system.
A lot of these patients probably had missed or late cancer diagnoses too, due to the lack of preventative care and also just the lack of public health regulations in the US.
Pretty much every developed country has a better healthcare system than the US.
We do not have a normal system, and many like to think of it as normal, but it is far from that.
You can cherry pick data all day, but you are not seeing the big picture here, and you do not realize how easy it is to become a statistic.
I nearly died from medical errors in the US healthcare system myself, and from sepsis at age 23.
I am a dual US|EU citizen (culturally American) living in the EU, and I never plan on working in the US or living there long term.
> As for the cancer patient survival, in the US, 42% of patients lose their life savings within 2 years and the amount was typically around $92,000. That alone screws American cancer patients over long term, and it can cause them to die.
If you have insurance, and 80-90%+ of Americans do (and probably more among cancer patients, as they are usually older so they often qualify for Medicare), it’s extremely rare to spend $92k in 2 year. Even in the plans with the highest out of pocket maximums, these are almost never more than $10k/year. That might drain people savings anyway, but a lot of people have very little savings.
I really don’t know where your data is from, but it doesn’t match the reality lived by most Americans. The US healthcare system has a lot of problems, so many that you don’t really need to make ones up.
The UK is hard to emigrate to. There are better options than the UK, especially now that they left the EU. But, the Americans who go to the UK and eventually do become UK citizens often do over healthcare.
While being an American expat is not as common due to worldwide liability on taxes, many of those who emigrate to developed countries and eventually become citizens do so for guaranteed access to healthcare and other benefits of a social welfare state that the US does not have.
The problem with Canada/Australia/New Zealand, where many Americans go, as we are more culturally aligned with them compared to other developed countries, is that they have medical inadmissability clauses in their immigration laws. You generally have to be pretty healthy to get a even get an approved work visa there, and stay relatively healthy to become a citizen. So, you really cannot effectively emigrate for healthcare to these countries. This is why you do not hear about Americans emigrating over healthcare as much.
Source for your contention that “Americans frequently emigrate to the UK?”
Do you have any comparison for what cancer does to the finances of people in the UK? Because there is more to it than the cost of medical care. The cost of medical care is a lot less than that in the US: https://healthpayerintelligence.com/news/cancer-patients-pai...
“In a case study, a patient with lymphoma paid out-of-pocket healthcare costs from $6,446 in a large employer-sponsored health plan to $12,931 in a health plan on the individual health insurance market. These were all Affordable Care Act (ACA)-compliant plans.”
Note that your survey covers 2000-2012, mostly before the ACA went into effect.
The resource above says Americans spent $5.6 billion on out of pocket cancer care annually. There’s 2 million cancer cases annually, so you’re talking about $2,500 in out of pocket costs on average.
While it cannot definitively be proven why somebody moves to X country and becomes a citizen, obviously it is for the benefits. In Europe, STEM workers typically get paid less, and often one needs an advanced degree (unless an internal company transfer occurs) due to the Bologna Process, which is a pan-European degree (education requirements) recognition agreement that applies to Americans too. So, one becomes a citizen for the values and the benefits.
It is clear that the article that you linked is talking about cost liability under contract, especially since it is coming from a "health payer organization". This includes the mentions of surprise billing, which are often classified as out-of-network, but under contract. Likewise, out-of-pocket costs in the article are being mentioned with respect to people insured and what was covered under contract.
You can get screwed financially as a cancer patient on Medicare. I personally have 2 rare immune mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system. One of them is very rare and I cannot go on a Medicare Advantage plan, as it would be an HMO with severe network restrictions. Once you go on a Medicare advantage plan, you effectively cannot go back to traditional Medicare (and also cannot get a Part B Medigap plan, because medical underwriting is allowed, even post ACA).
The problem is that traditional Medicare does not have out of pocket limits, and you can be subject to several tens of thousands of dollars in liability for prescription drugs once you hit the Medicare Part D prescription catastrophic coverage level, especially if you require an orphan drug.
For me, I require subcutaneous immunoglobulin and it is the only medication that has ever worked for me or put me in remission and I have tried about 10 different medications, plus combinations of them. It is literally my only option. Even intravenous immunoglobulin in the hospital (Medicare Part B), when optimized, was ineffective and never put me in remission.
I have Medicare due to disability and I am working now (I can keep Medicare for life technically if I pay the premiums every month). But, if I was living in the US, my yearly medical costs would be around $40,000-60,000/year on Medicare.
There are articles about this on the Kaiser Family Foundation website on Medicare Catastrophic Coverage liability. It happens to a lot of cancer patients and also people with rare diseases.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t live in the US, and the primary reason why I don’t live in the US is because of healthcare. Being able to work (with better protections--critical for me) and not having to worry about healthcare is worth living in Europe.
That's not obvious at all and you're just making things up. Most Americans who emigrate to the EU do so for family reasons like marriage, or because they got a better job offer. Very few do so for benefits. Serious medical conditions like yours are rare.
No they are not. Collectively, 7% of the general population has some sort of a rare disease, which can benefit from orphan drugs, which typically costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and in some cases--millions per year. No, I am not making this up.
Sweden joined EU with a 52.3-47.7 vote. Malta's vote was 53.6-46.4. Should those countries have another round of voting as well before they are admitted to EU?
As it turns out, Malta did just that - the referendum result was not accepted by the opposition party, and it was settled by an early general election.
I mean, you are technically correct, in that the alterations to TFEU etc known as lisbon were different from the constitution that was rejected in France and the Netherlands.
However, the text was almost the same, and it was a dodge to remove the need for referendums in many EU countries.
Additionally, the Irish people voted twice on Lisbon, so it's not true that nobody in the EU got a vote.
One of those countries, Scotland, had the opportunity to leave the UK two years prior. They chose not to (a result I personally was disappointed by). But having chosen to stay, that also meant they had chosen to be bound by national decisions, at the level of things like continued membership of the EU.
This is why the American system is superior. The representational nature of it allows minority voices. While sweeping changes, e.g., constitutional amendments, require a 3/5s majority of the states. The grid lock is by design.
It’s not a superior system when Americans’ votes carry an unequal weight or are outright suppressed. That is not a properly functioning democracy, and what you described above can be exploited to the extreme in such a case.
Ultimately, we got lucky this past election, as in “unicorn levels”. What is going on in America is far from over and is going to ultimately be a generational struggle.
No that is the literal design, as we are not a pure democratic system. The whole point is that states are sovereign except in a few specific areas, e.g., foreign relations, interstate commerce. The founders were terrified of a tyranny of the majority. So they designed a system that made it difficult.
When my vote != everyone else's vote that is not a democracy. Just because everyone gets a say but we listen to these people more doesn't mean you have a democratic system. If anything you can for sure say it's not democratic.
People are equal but their representation within the federal government is unequal because the states are sovereign. The federal government is supposed to do very little. Constitution gives it a few enumerated powers. Everything else is left to the states. However, beginning the the 20th century the feds began to vastly encroach on many areas by abusing the "interstate commerce" clause. For example, the court ruled the fed could limit an individual from growing "too much" wheat on his own property for his own consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn. Or perhaps a still existing federal law that prohibits a handgun from being pissed within 1000ft of a school.
No it isn’t. It’s about citizens of the largest metro areas in the country, ridiculously skewed to one party, wanting to rule over the rest of the country with no hope of being opposed. The Founders anticipated this thankfully and set up the electoral college and the sovereignty of the states.
It’s interesting that you would say that constitutional gridlock is by design, and that the US constitution being extremely difficult to amend is a good thing.
No less a conservative jurist than Antonin Scalia repeatedly pointed out that he believed the US constitution was too hard to amend...amendments could be blocked by 2% of the population.
To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal.
> To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal.
You’ve got it precisely backward. Liberals make the “philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justice” a “huge deal” because they rely on the courts to legislate policies they can’t get through Congress.
You talk about the difficulty of amending the constitution, but how does that relate to the controversy around judicial appointments? When France and Germany legalized abortion, same sex marriage, etc., they didn’t amend the constitution. They just passed a law. But liberals didn’t have the votes in Congress to pass those laws. So they got it done through the courts. And then they create a controversy around judicial appointments because conservative jurists foreclose that strategy.
With respect to hot-button judicial issues in the US, the courts in Europe is a lot more like the American conservatives than the American liberals. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights found that there was no fundamental right to same-sex marriage in the European Convention of Human Rights: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... That was the year after the United States Supreme Court found exactly the opposite.
> These decisions seem to reflect several possible solutions. At one end of the spectrum is the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which held that the U.S. Constitution prohibits abortion legislation designed to protect the life of the unborn prior to viability. At the other end of the spectrum is the decision of the West German Constitutional Court which held that the State has an affirmative duty to protect the unborn life at all stages of pregnancy.
To this day Roe remains an aberration in the developed world. Under it, the government can’t ban abortion (even with exceptions for emergencies) prior to viability, at the end of the second trimester. Under Roe the abortion laws of nearly every European country would be unconstitutional. (Only the UK’s would pass muster. Most prohibit elective abortion after the first trimester.)
Difficulty of amending the constitution is irrelevant, because the controversy is caused by things that can’t get enough support nationwide for ordinary legislation.
You’ve got it precisely backward. Liberals make the “philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justice” a “huge deal” because they rely on the courts to legislate policies they can’t get through Congress.
Objection. When we get laws passed the way the founders intended, conservatives use the courts to strike them down; for instance, state and local bans on handguns.
No, but it's an accident of fate and politics that we had a 5/4 decision establishing an individual right to keep and bear arms subject to almost no local regulation, just like many of the 5/4 decisions conservatives revile. There are decisions that have something approaching unanimity on the court, and I'm comfortable with the idea that we can take as decided the constitutionality of those issues. But Heller? No.
You take the good with the bad! Conservatives hated Obergefell.
My point is simply that the court is politically polarized in both directions.
Heller is an odd example to use for "political polarization" considering it cut across traditional political lines. It was built on the scholarship of the usual conservative/libertarian set, but also liberal professors like Sunstein, Tribe, and Amar: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/us/06firearms.html
> There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.
Heller also shows that, even if the court is "politically polarized in both directions" that polarization runs strongly in one particular direction. Deciding that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to bear arms, a position amply supported by the text and history (see: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/common.htm), requires a conservative majority plus buy-in from leading liberal academics.
Yet the decision that the Constitution protects a right to abortion, which concededly has no basis in the text or history of the document, survives despite decades of a conservative Supreme Court majority.
> The only arguments against it that I can see all rely on some sort of fetishization of the Constitution which assume the document to be infallible.
It's not a "fetishization of the Constitution." Its observing the governing ground rules of society--which society is empowered to change pursuant to those same rules if it wishes.
Conservatives have done it with the second amendment and economic regulation, but Janus isn’t the reason Supreme Court appointments are such a circus. In practice, the controversy with respect to judicial appointments is mainly over social and religious issues, and specifically Roe. That’s why Barrett evoked a much more visceral and base attack on her judicial philosophy than Kavanaugh or Gorsuch: https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/status/1320808025393868800?s=2...
Anyone who understands English grammar knows the second amendment protects the individuals right to keep and bear arms and that that right shall not be infringed. Local bans clearly violate this.
Originally yes, the constitutional amendments only applied to the federal government, but that changed with the 14th amendment.
> Originally yes, the constitutional amendments only applied to the federal government, but that changed with the 14th amendment.
No, it didn't. The Court has, since the Fourteenth Amendment, found that rights equivalent to some protections in the Bill of Rights are imposed on the States through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, but each of these rights was incorporated by separate decisions; blanket incorporation is neither in the text nor in the case law. And the Second Amendment wasn't held to be incorporated against the states until 2 years after Heller, in a case directly leveraging Heller, so arguing incorporation to justify the obviousness of Heller is...bizarre.
There may be particulars of Heller that can be disagreed about. But the central question of whether it protects an individual right should be uncontroversial. That part should have been a 9-0 decision.
It was not, and the notion that the result is so obvious that a reader should privilege opinions in a random comment on a message board over those of Supreme Court Justices is risible.
You can articulate why you think Heller was properly decided and you can of course disagree with any or all of the justices on the court. The specific thing I am calling you on is the idea that the result is so straightforward that anyone who can read the text of 2A would reach your conclusion. That's an unsupportable argument.
Gun control and the Second Amendment and Obamacare seem to be a clear examples where conservatives use the court to override the democratic will of the people overturning legislation. Campaign finance reform as well. There are numerous examples (FDR and the New Deal come to mind) where the court overrode the democratic will to favour more conservative positions. Of course I am just a casual observer, not an expert, so I may have missed some cases.
Regarding Roe v Wade (which I’ve read is widely seen as a bad decision) I agree that it’s unseemly. I also agree that in recent years too much social engineering has been routed through the Supreme Court.
I won’t dispute that most constitutional courts around the world are conservative or ideologically neutral, since they are aware that they can interpret the law as written, and not act as a pressure release valve against the dead hand of their “Founders” as they know that their populations can amend their constitutions if there is a pressing need.
> I won’t dispute that most constitutional courts around the world are conservative or ideologically neutral, since they are aware that they can interpret the law as written, and not act as a pressure release valve against the dead hand of their “Founders” as they know that their populations can amend their constitutions if there is a pressing need.
The difficulty of amending the constitution is a theoretical problem. It takes a 2/3 majority of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat in Germany to amend the Basic Law. And for most of the issues where there is a disconnect between what the people want and the constitution, there wouldn’t be sufficient public support for an amendment even under the lower standard. Take gun control: https://www.slowboring.com/p/national-democrats-misguided-re...
Could you get a 2/3 majority of the House and Senate to repeal the second amendment? No way. Maybe you could get a 2/3 majority of both houses to overturn Citizens United.
But note also that 2/3 of Americans still oppose the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. So it works both ways.
Obamacare is a bad example. The ACA case wasn’t a liberal versus conservative thing. It was simply a matter of the law as drafted failing to respect federalism. Courts in other countries aggressively enforce the structural protections of their constitutions, more so than the Supreme Court. Legislatures in those countries just deal with it. For example, Canada’s health system is largely administered by the provinces, with the federal government mainly setting standards and paying block grants to even out funding inequalities between the provinces. Has the ACA been modeled on Canada’s system (and in fact Medicaid is pretty similar) it would easily have passed muster in the Supreme Court.
The FDR era is the best example of where the Supreme Court really did strike down the will of the people to adhere to a conservative reading of the constitution. But the Supreme Court folded like a cheap suit when FDR threatened it, and now we have a nationwide minimum wage and executive administrative agencies that act like legislatures in issuing rules that have the force of law and like the judiciary in adjudicating regulatory violations before administrative judges. I don’t think say the German constitutional court would have allowed an entire new branch of government to be created without a constitutional amendment. While some conservatives might say the entire administrative state is unconstitutional, the public got its way ultimately. And you’re right I think it was the Supreme Court acting as a pressure release valve.
But overall I think it’s rare for conservatives on the Supreme Court to be out of step with the public on a legal issue where there is enough public consensus that an amendment would be possible under a lower 2/3 standard. Generally, conservatives are in the position of resisting change in areas where liberals might have a narrow majority or not even a majority.
Yes the administrative state is clearly unconstitutional. The legislature is the only body that has the power to pass law. Using executive agencies run by unelected bureaucrats to write regulation (laws) clearly violates the separation of powers.
A good democracy finds a compromise that gets a much larger majority vote.