Defense is not only auditable but is regularly audited; publicly by GAO and CBO, and internally by their OIG: https://www.dodig.mil

> they spend the most by far

This is not true and for some reason a common myth that is easily disproven; defense spending is only 13% of the budget, the 54% number people keep throwing around is discretionary spending and not relevant as we should be looking at the entire budget.

DOGE is literally just sorting by percent of budget; Medicaid is 22%, SSA is 20%, interest on our deficit by itself is 11% and on track to exceed our entire defense budget.

> The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.

I mean, the math does not check out at all. We can expect losses of revenue from cuts to be around the same as receipts from audits done by the IRS; we know this number to be only around ~50B$ a year. You are being gaslit into thinking the problem is your fellow citizens not paying more in taxes, when anyone going into government can tell you they are reckless with spending.

Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population. However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.

>Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population.

That's still a cool 70 million people.

>However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.

Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.

> That's still a cool 70 million people.

Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.

> Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.

The opposite right now! The US government is SO bad at managing healthcare, that they are somehow making the NHS look great.

We need to get our bureaucracy and spending under control. Then definitely yes, government funded healthcare, we can have a system closer to Australia in efficacy.

This is a tangent to this thread but I think in practice we will probably end up with something closer to the Swiss hybrid system.

> Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.

They might both cover ~70M, but the NHS population has a median age of ~41, for Medicare it's ~71. The US health system is expensive, but NHS vs Medicare cost is not really a valid comparison with such drastically different demographics.

The comparison was NHS vs Medicaid, not Medicare.

Doesn’t help the situation when you the very senators entrusted to run the legislative branch of government were the ones in charge of organizations that defrauded Medicaid and Medicare for billions of dollars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott

Perhaps we should be barking up the tree of the private medical-insurance complex which is the real problem when it comes to healthcare costs.

Yes Congress cannot be trusted, that is why I am not complaining like many in this thread about the methods of achieving cuts or executive overreach — this is the best chance we have had in years to get anything done.

The only real way you can reform the government purely from the confines of the system is turning over around 70% of the legislative branch, I do not see that happening in any future.

I have to respectfully disagree - turning over basically unlimited power to reshape the entire bureaucracy to an unelected person isn’t the way to do it either. It’s not a binary choice.

Australia or Switzerland? Can't argue with that.

I wish I was optimistic as you. Only problem is, I highly doubt any savings realized from spending cuts will materialize in the form of better healthcare.

Regulatory capture is rampant, and then there's that whole pesky issue of growing unchecked authoritarianism that has a good chance of not aligning with the will of the people.

Yeah I can understand the sentiment. I’m being optimistic primarily because the alternative is to accept that our economy is going to eventually go bust and turn us into a debtor society to foreign economies.

The building is on fire, closing your eyes or clinging to a bottle of water are both valid reactions!

Recently medicaid overtook defense. You're right, but medicaid shouldn't exist and is a symptom of the larger forced government inefficiency that is the health insurance system.

People also claim that social security is a great portion of spending, but it's fully funded through income tax and even more solvent since covid killed so many of it's recipients.