The reason the US can’t take the strait is that the war is unpopular and the American people don’t want it to happen. The US military could absolutely 100% invade and take the street, but it would be extremely unpopular and very expensive.

No, it's like saying "I can easily afford a ferrari but I won't be able to afford groceries for a year after that because I've emptied my savings account.

The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans?

There was never a path to victory that didn't involve ground troops. We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. Previous administrations did not do this because the cost was well understood.

There has never existed a military who could win this conflict without ground invasion. This was understood when this administration started it.

Right I think its only an interesting argument in separating existential vs non-existential threats to the country.

So it means we aren't fighting in Iran the way we would in defending a hypothetical invasion of the lower 48 states, great.

But does it mean we'd fight any differently in the South China Sea, a Russian incursion into Poland, etc. Unclear, and presidential whim based.

The distinction between political resolve and military might is relevant specifically to the "what has all this money gotten us?"

All the money in the military has gotten us, almost certainly, the ability to conquer virtually any plot of land anywhere on the planet at any time.

But that does not (thankfully) intrinsically generate the political resolve required to do so.

Democracy and markets are beautiful things. It's fantastic that it can constrain even a military as mighty as the US and a commander in chief as braindead as Trump.

I dont think it's fair to say it's from those defending US military might.

I've seen the same logical fallacy used everywhere; including people hyping Russia and China.

I think the most correct and probably most discouraging answer is that American healthcare costs about what it should.

Not to dismiss your point, but the US healthcare system has one meta problem.

Complexity.

There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.

That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').

But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.

Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.

There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.

That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Right, they don’t “profit” much because they pay themselves so much. The CEO of united healthcare total compensation is $60 million a year.

Where do you think that money comes from?

You could just delete united healthcare and save bucketloads of money. They don’t actually do anything anyone wants, other than extract money as a middleman.

US health insurance margins are thinner than European private insurance. Their administrative cost however are 9-10%, when in Europe (or really, France and Germany, I haven't looked elsewhere) they are 5-8%. The difference is probably in negotiating costs and audits. But that means that in total, for every 100 dollar paid, US insuree pay 4-10 dollar in efficiency+dividend that a European doesn't.

Dumb argument though when UHG owns the hospitals, pharmacy and the insurance company. They can make the "profit" of any one of them be anything they want really.

Wrong.

Health insurance company margins are meaningless. All the large insurers are actually "pay-viders", meaning they own huge (and growing) chunks of the physicians (providers) they pay out.

Go read STAT's Colossus investigative series on the myriad ways UnitedHealth Group abuses this structure. All the other pay-viders do the same.

Pay-viders can "generate x% profit" for any value of x. They control all the relevant levers, which also by coincidence eliminates any incentive in the entire system to reduce costs.

They are required by law to only make a certain value of x, and so, surprise surprise, they all make x!

"I don't see how they could manage that without a full-scale invasion and control of Iran" - that's precisely what they're saying, and that the domestic populace wouldn't put up with it.

I suppose "could" here is a bit of a stretch. Like technically, yes, you could if you whipped up your country into enough of a frenzy to support it. Hell, Iraq happened (twice), so I suppose it has historical precedent. And yes, a full-scale invasion of a fully committed US military should absolutely be able to conquer and hold Iran. But I can't imagine any circumstance where that's possibly going to happen in today's reality (outside of an Iranian terrorist event on USA soil, for instance).

You got me there.