John Green (of Crash Course fame) did a pretty good video on this.

In Australia we tax cigarettes and alcohol steeply, and there's moves to tax high sugar products for exactly this reason.

And you do realize that "who decides" is currently decided by your insurance company? Which, with a single payer system, will still exist but needs to offer a lot more service then they do currently to compete. In Australia, private insurers advertise on the basis of being able to cut your waiting time for an elective procedure, get a nicer hospital bed, or coverage for things which are assessed as untenable or unproven by the public system (our big blindspot is dental, and you can usually get a better selection of optics under coverage).

Funnily enough, if something severe happens to you though, you usually want to go into the public system anyway since the surgeons and doctors get more experience treating complicated cases then people who are solely private (also just more experience overall).

Of course the other thing is, notably, our public system does frequently pay for cutting-edge treatments for people who need them - the research is publicly funded, the patients have to be very specifically chosen, and usually viable candidates need to relocated to somewhere it can happen. The latest stem cell therapy isn't something you can usually buy anyway, and you specifically definitely can't afford it.

This will also include anyone who has an organ transplant (immunosuppressants for the rest of their life), or is presently being treated for cancer by virtually any means.

Yeah its a good thing that's the only way it spreads oh wai...

Yeah America should really get on and implement an Australian style public health system. Or...well pretty much anywhere in the modern world except America really. But I like our one.

Also because people in a position of power over others will use that power to also put them at risk - i.e. parents not vaccinating a child, as is the case here.

And then of course, because you can't trust anti-vaxxers to actually act sensibly - like say, not form groups and meet up with other anti-vaxxers.

Also because if a group of people does become unimmunized, they're unlikely to geographically dispersed such that herd immunity will be effective. In fact, schools and other social events concentrate vulnerable pretty easily contagious groups (like children) so you need a lot of dispersal in order for it to work. The recent case with the American megachurch is going to be the textbook example here.

It's also possible for immunized people to contract much less severe forms of a disease (you can still get measles if you're immunized - but it's a lot less severe). So an unimmunized person can contract a serious illness from someone who may not even realize what they have because it's scarcely symptomatic.

Which is all totally relevant when you're planning government policy and totally irrelevant when you find out you're in the less lucky percentiles where something could've been prevented.

No, when things happen in a hospital you are proximal to modern civilizations concentration of knowledge and applied technology which has made the single biggest difference to human health outcomes ever.

When you are not proximal, if something goes wrong, you're about 15 minutes away under ideal conditions. Too bad brain death can occur in 3 minutes.

And you're not including other factors - the hospital doesn't call the on-call ob-gyn's until they know there's a problem. Home births take an infrequent event (giving birth) and for no reason decide to bias the odds against the survival of the women and fetus.

If you have the vaccine you can still get the measles, but you get a milder form of it which does not have the same effects. I was vaccinated and did get a mild form in primary school.

I like that your concerned enough to ask the question as though its unanswered, but not concerned enough to actually spend 2 minutes to lookup wikipedia.

I've also found how much it hurts depends entirely on how much the person holding the syringe controls lateral movement - for me, the actual puncture is exceptionally mild, but what starts to ramp up the pain is the needle being flexed side to side.

Some nurses for blood donation are good about this, others seem to think that once the needle is in they really don't need to pay too much attention while taping that long spool of flexible plastic tubing in place.

The Taliban in Pakistan aren't at the negotiating table trying to get the drone attacks stopped because it's ineffective. They're their because, if you're a Taliban leader, you never know when you're about to be killed by a drone strike - and that kind of takes the edge of all the perks of being a warlord when you get promoted while they're still looking for the last guys smoking boots.

Frankly, the idea that the US would be less hated if they showed up in person with soldiers to kill people is just propaganda from the other side. The US is hated because they're killing a bunch of civilians when they carry out drone strikes. They'd be just as hated if they did it with tanks or commandos.

Or you know, they run out of fuel after a day and shutdown.

We've been firing hundreds of autonomous robots to kill things for a long time now - they're called missiles. Sometimes we also drop them, then we call them smart bombs.

The benefit of SteamOS is, strictly speaking they should be able to ship it as a bootable DVD/Blu-Ray that loads the OS and game, or runs straight off a USB key.

You don't have to heat shield things. If you're just recovering raw material and you have a lot of it, you can just write-off the mass you lose on re-entry as a cost of recovery.