It’s easy not to trust a system associated with charging you $500 for Tylenol. Much easier (and occasionally even safer) to just smell some lavender and hope that helps. Go to an ED and you could just die of a stroke or heart attack in the waiting room or even get run over by somebody who died of a heart attack while driving and just plowed through the waiting room because they couldn’t afford an ambulance. And the Healthcare system is largely failing because of insurance companies. Burn inhumana and united quacks to the ground 2k24.
Edit: also housing. Fix the housing crisis and the Healthcare system could probably pull through despite the odds. There’s a huge number of homeless people that just live in hospitals, especially psych wards and I’m not even kidding.
From a non-American’s perspective, I think part of the mistrust comes from Americans have been through high-profile lies perpetrated by government agencies.
For example, a more recent one in the last few decades is the Food Pyramid/MyPlate that was/is promoted by the US government’s agriculture department. This has led to Americans in the late '70s/early '80s to start a war on saturated fat and cholesterol, and the rapid adoption of carbohydrates in the average diet. What has happened in the decades following is a rapid increase in metabolic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and mental illnesses — all of which were rare in human history prior to the '70s. While I’m glad Americans are waking up to the realisation of the mass brainwashing of what constitutes “healthy” food, I’m still upset that — due to the influence of America on the global stage — my own country has followed suit in adopting the US’s dietary guidelines to the detriment of our own health.
And that’s just one example.
The most glaring generator of mistrust for decades now is the thing citizens discuss all the time but is never addressed: our out of control military budget.
We could solve every one of our country’s financial issues multiple times over by reducing the military budget, and not even drastically so.
Our military was tasked with an audit to reign in waste and spending. They couldn’t pass an audit so they were just given a free pass, no penalties or repercussions. The first audit was 2017 and they failed to pass. They failed two more since then. Senator Sanders intoruduced a bill in 2021 and again in 2023 which required an audit and was supposed to impose penalties for failure, it’s been introduced so we’ll see how that goes.
Tbh I wouldn’t mind it if it wasn’t purely combat focused, one of very few paths out of poverty, and if most of that budget wasn’t going straight to Boeing Lockheed and Northrup.
Having an option for young adults to live in a structured environment, maybe learn some trade skills, and most importantly have to learn to deal with other humans would give a lot of people a much needed leg up on their psychosocial development during that early adulthood. I also think it would do it better than the current college experience (especially for little shit rich kids but I’ll get to that).
I say this because I firmly believe a lot of people need a terrible first job as a young adult to finish calibrating their sense of adversity and problem solving. Something that’s not going to injure them or abuse them, but that’s juuust vaguely unpleasant enough to teach some distress tolerance without major physical or psychological trauma.
My first real adult job was awful (unfortunately also extremely unsafe, so not good for these purposes) but it really taught me a LOT about… a lot of things really. Conflict management. Situational awareness. Teamwork. How to lead other people in unsafe/crisis situations. Probably more I’m not thinking of. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone but I can’t deny that the job made me who I am in a lot of ways that I’m actually really proud of. I still just about piss myself when talking to HR but a little wariness there isn’t exactly unwarranted. It also really hammered home how little management types care about your safety. That translated nicely into the teamwork- I learned quickly that admin can’t be trusted any farther than their lazy asses can walk and at 2:30 AM it’s you and your coworkers and that’s it so you better figure out how to get along with them.
The other thing about it is that it’s not really the poor kids who need it! They’ve probably been working some shit job since they were old enough to legally (and maybe a little before that)! I didn’t really grow up “rich” (especially since the wealth my parents enjoy now is due to them being hella stingy) but I definitely grew up sheltered, and that job definitely fixed my stupid ass.
Thank you for that.
I’ve long thought we need a non-military service branch much like you describe and for much the same resson.
In my experience it isn’t just “rich” kids but anyone that grows up with minimal adversity and exposure to people outside their immediate (sheltered) bubble that are really hard to work alongside. Anyone who hasn’t been told “no” enough to understand the world doesn’t cater to them, really.