Bhaskar Sunkara

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1,609 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2022 last heard Dec 2022

Bhaskar Sunkara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · 22 Dec 2022 podcast

and whatever.

This is for really the bottom 40% plus of the population.

They really don't have any options, so they prioritize other things.

And they end up with some sort of injury or health problem or whatever else.

And it's bad for everyone in society, but it's especially bad for the people at the bottom of the labor market.

So I will not argue with you on the numbers because you just threw out random numbers.

I do think universal health care, if done right, can be basically cost neutral.

I think it's an exception because we spend a tremendous amount of money on health care, a huge percentage of our GDP.

So I think it could be done in a way that's close to...

Class neutral.

There's a lot of bureaucracy and billing right now in our healthcare sector, for example, that would be eliminated.

There's a lot of costs that are spiraling upward of provider costs from both doctors, hospitals, but also pharmaceuticals to drug costs that insurance companies shoulder because their market share is too fragmented to really negotiate hard.

Medicare can sometimes negotiate better rates, but a Medicare for all would negotiate even better rates.

So I think there's a cost spiral that we can adjust with more government involvement.

And there's a reason why we spend a bigger share of our GDP on healthcare than other places.

But let me just accept the broad premise that social programs cost money.

Now, I think that one, for ordinary people, most of them,

Even hypothetically, if taxes on lower middle class and working class people in certain cases go up, the tradeoff would still be in their benefit because they're the ones who currently would be consuming more of those goods.

And also our tax system and whatnot is progressive.

So the rich will pay more.

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