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I had a health crisis in France

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Re: I had a health crisis in France

#291

Post by marcus_holmes »

brianwawok wrote: post #246
marcus_holmes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having some kind of health problem is a great way to suddenly not be wealthy in the US, too. I think this is the real benefit of socialised health care. Your wealth will survive a health problem. You will not lose your house because you got cancer. Health insurance works when it works (I have some), but when they decide they're not going to pay your bills, for whatever reason, and you have to pay the bills to keep th…

> Your wealth will survive a health problem. Really? Maybe a long duration but highly curable health problems. What happens to the blind or someone who loses both arms? Do they really have more wealth than their counterparts in the US?

yes, their existing wealth will survive (to allow them to adapt their life to their new condition, probably).

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#292

Post by snotrockets »

knz wrote: post #279
ZenoArrow wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The best way to move ACA in a progressive direction would be to have a large public player in both insurance and as a provider." One of the main reasons ACA is more expensive than it should be is because health insurance companies are jacking up the price. The insurance companies are surplus to requirements, once the US gets rid of them (and cuts down on price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry) the overall he…

To give some context to the cost - between my employer and I, a family plan (the options are single or family) was $14,400 for 2017. That's a high deductible plan that requires us to pay the first $6,000 before insurance pays anything. Back in my native New Zealand, the total income tax for an average household is about $6,000 USD. $14,000 just for insurance vs $6,000 for "free" healthcare and all of the other infras…

The $250 bill isn't for the 15 minutes you spent with the Dr, but for the 15+ years he spent in med school and residency.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#293

Post by candiodari »

PrimalDual wrote: post #227
candiodari wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia has exceptional demographics that make this possible - for the moment. It won't last, for the same reason it won't in Europe. But, you get to gloat for quite a while as an Australian, it'll last decades longer than in Europe, where unemployment makes the current situation untenable. To put it bluntly: Australia has a participation rate of 65%, dropping slowly (ie. pretty much perfectly stable for the past,…

I think the story of not having enough young people to pay for older people is missing a bit of evidence. Especially since if labor were scarce we would be seeing increases in wages, inflation and a tight labor market. Instead we have the exact opposite. Really the economy's limiting reactant for the past few years has been demand not labor especially considering that a 2x improvement on productivity is not that big…

Ever since the 2000 crisis labour has been abundant. So we can't even use the labour capacity we have (not enough jobs for everybody). But that is one perspective. It very much depends on viewpoint even here. On one hand Obama and the government are lying : there certainly aren't enough jobs to go around, and so many people are desperate for work. They do tend to "have work", so the government is not technically lying, but they have part-time jobs that they would very much like to replace with a full time job.

A simplification that has been valid for pretty much the entire 20th century has been that a given labourer has a given productivity. So I assume that if we have 2 young people for every 1 old person or child, for example, that the economy would work to make that actually happen. This is not guaranteed, of course, but historically this worked.

As for the productivity measure you mention, that's not what I've seen in the data. Productivity measurements rose for most of the 20th century, then flattened across the world starting around 1985 or so. There has been little to no productivity rise in the US since 2000, and most of the world is worse off, with the notable exception of China and some smaller parts of Asia.

Lack of inflation rises are masked more than a little bit by government fudging. By the inflation measures of the 1980s we've consistently seen 3-4% inflation in Europe (except in the south). The measure currently used in the US is called "PCE deflator". You should look up why it's called that.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#294

Post by walshemj »

zo1 wrote: post #285
walshemj wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so every month I see line on my pay check for National Insurance. I am now a net beneficiary but for the first 30+years of employment I wasn't that's how it works.

That's an argument for saving for a rainy day.

you do know that the vast majority have no or tiny savings 1 in 5 in the uk have NO savings at all

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#295

Post by jdietrich »

pjc50 wrote: post #273
ginko wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ironically, this hugely favours immigrants from EU countries with free or cheap education systems. You do know that there's (currently) literally nothing stopping you from getting your degree in those EU countries, right?

Well, I already have one - I was in the last generation to get an actual student grant and no tuition fees - but I suspect the main obstacle people will face is language skills and the difficulty of a course not taught in one's first language. Then there's the plausible scenario of having to apply for a visa in a hurry if the Brexit balloon goes up.

A lot of European universities now offer courses in English to attract cross-border students. British students are notoriously poor at learning second languages, but they have the advantage of being native speakers of the global lingua franca.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#296

Post by omginternets »

witty_username wrote: post #262
omginternets wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're equating money with freedom where the question is philosophical: can you be 'free' in any meaningful way if your life is burdened by a lack of education, the financial ruin of having been seriously ill, or the handicap of having been poorly treated for a disease? So yes, that's precisely the trade-off. We accept to lose a little bit of money in exchange for the ability to flourish.

But you can buy health insurance instead of public healthcare. But you lose the freedom to decide.

>So yes, that's precisely the trade-off. We accept to lose a little bit of s/money/freedom-of-decision in exchange for the ability to flourish.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#297

Post by knz »

snotrockets wrote: post #292
knz wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give some context to the cost - between my employer and I, a family plan (the options are single or family) was $14,400 for 2017. That's a high deductible plan that requires us to pay the first $6,000 before insurance pays anything. Back in my native New Zealand, the total income tax for an average household is about $6,000 USD. $14,000 just for insurance vs $6,000 for "free" healthcare and all of the other infras…

The $250 bill isn't for the 15 minutes you spent with the Dr, but for the 15+ years he spent in med school and residency.

$1,000/hour is over $2 million/year for a 40 hour work week. Google tells me that a GP makes about $200,000/year here in Minnesota.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#298

Post by ReallyAnonymous »

badminton1 wrote: post #290
ReallyAnonymous wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High charges of low cost items are because of the amount of free care hospitals provide. I'm a physician in South Carolina and I take care of a tremendous number of fully employed people with no health insurance. Those of us with insurance pay for those without by paying higher costs. This gentleman would have probably received the same treatment in the US (at least at my facility) and received a $300,000 bill, of wh…

Thanks for the explanation. How would you improve this system? Do you think universal healthcare would help?

I think universal healthcare would definitely improve the system. So in the US, healthy, employed by big corporation people, pay about $17k / year for family healthcare. Then, when they turn 65, they join medicare and the insurance companies laugh bc they received premiums for 40 years and then when people need services, they don't pay.

Imagine if medicare started receiving payment at age 20. By the time someone turned 60 the return on investment / interest would more than pay for their care. Insurance companies don't want the average american to know that. I think that either 1) offer medicare plan for anyone, regardless of age and discount based upon years of contributions or 2) make insurance companies allow individuals to pay medicare rates once they turn 65 if they've participated for, let's say, 15 years.

I'm almost 50 and have used less than $400/year since 21. Yet, I pay $4400 for a $6000/deductible plan. So I've given my insurance companyn $100k at least in my lifetime. But when I turn 65, all my care will be covered by medicare. Trust me, I know what symptoms to say and may have multiple bad symptoms from age 62-64 and undergo lots of tests, instead of medicare paying for preventive tests.

The system is broken, but so is politics, so nothing will change. Even Trump ran under the pretense of allowing us to buy pharmaceuticals overseas, allow purchase of insurance plans across state lines, make hospital costs transparent ---> all that would lower costs, but apparently, they won't happen.. Just like with the democrats. The US healthcare system is controlled by the pharmaceuticals, suppliers, and hospitals and nothing soon, other than a Bernie Sanders, will change it. The 3 competing hospitals in my area, serving less than 1million people have a CEO cost of more than $7 million! So across the US, I would imagine that total CEO cost is in the billions.

I don't have solutions, only depressing facts.........

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#299

Post by peteretep »

ward wrote: post #238
peteretep wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some facs seems to be > doing pretty good 3 in the top hundred for a country with France's intellectual and cultural pedigree is a disgrace.

30% of the ranking's rating is based on nobel laureate/fields medal in alumni or staff. 20% based just on amount of publications in Nature and Science. I never know why people rate these rankings so highly when there are such unimpressive metrics like these. Not to mention that this particular ranking does not seem to consider education at all anyway, which is what the GP was talking about.

France has a similarly poor showing in virtually every ranking.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#300

Post by geomark »

realusername wrote: post #220
geomark wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Thailand. Private healthcare is excellent here. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world come here every year to take advantage of it - Thailand is a huge medical tourism destination. There is also a public healcare system here which is quite terrible. Interestingly, some public hospitals offer "special clinic" hours where you can get treatment on a cash basis instead of using the publ…

I did not explain very well my thoughts on this. By "works", I mean healthcare as a commodity that everyone (including the poorest) can afford. In order to exist, the private system has to be better than the public one, which means better facilities, top doctors and therefore higher prices. The reason the public service is terrible is because the private system exists, top doctors are going private to get better sala…

Seems strange to say the public healthcare is bad because of the existence of private healthcare. It's bad due to the fundamentals. Things like: - it is "free" so it is grossly oversubscribed (basic market forces at work) - it is taxpayer funded and government run (spending other people's money on other people, the worst way to get value) - there is no incentive to improve since there is no competition (nobody loses their job and the public system does not go bankrupt and disappear regardless of how much worse it is than the private system)

And those fundamentals are why the private system is so much better. It's not free and consumers are spending their own money on themselves so seek out the best value they can. And the competition between private hospitals is pretty fierce so they are contantly upgrading, innovating, and advertising (including their prices) to attract customers.

It is common here for many of the best doctors to practice in both private and public sectors. My anecdote mentioned the fact that the doctor who did my foot surgery does that.

As for cost, those private hospitals, and there are lots of them, cater primarily to Thais. So plenty of Thais can afford private care. It's not a huge unknown cost going in that is potentially ruinous like in the U.S.

Like you said, in order to exist the private system must be better than the public system. That is the wonderful effect of markets when they are allowed to operate.

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