281–290 of 305 posts
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These sort of stories I usually use to explain to non-US people how is to live there.
If I’m a foreigner and I’m breaking my arm while being in San Francisco, do I have to pay for the 5k bill coming my way, too ?
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You can't disown capitalism from its problems that easily. It's not hard to see that it is in short-term self interest to form cartels, lobby for regulation, crush competition and treat their (now captive) customers with contempt. This is a pattern we have seen time and again. Describing this as "about as far away as you can get from capitalism" is the no true Scotsman fallacy. Perhaps it doesn't match how you believ…
> It's not hard to see that it is in short-term self interest to form cartels Cartels are only a problem if no new suppliers can enter the market. > lobby for regulation This is a problem of any representative system. Convince them and you're set. No capitalism involved. > crush competition Just a consequence of the abovementioned. Summary: step 2 is the crucial problem, it's usually corruption or idiocy and a govern…
It seems pretty obvious that, if your aim is to accumulate capital, regulatory capture is a pretty damn efficient strategy as compared to marketing or product development. It's also efficient for the government official, who gets to sell access to regulation processes (an otherwise difficult-to-sell service!) at market rates.
(Not that libertarian-style "OK, let's get rid of governments!" approaches are a good solution here. In that case, the optimal strategy becomes force, which in effect establishes a government of sorts.)
The rich?
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Those are not required procedures, so obviously there is much more of a chance for a real market there. But you can't just compare that with e.g. ER or cancer treatment.
Because the idea that cancer treatment as well as other exotic treatments needing to be covered by insurance is a pile of horse manure - i'm saying it as someone whose grandmother died from cancer and someone who has a few friends that successful beat down cancer. Lets engage in an intellectual exercise. 10MM USD (today) and for 1 person cancer is gone. Should we include coverage for cancer into all policies?
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Well, not if you need treatment. If you're poor, yes you won't pay anything because the hospital won't bother to bill anyone. But if you need surgery and have no insurance or medicade, there are cases of doctors sending you home, waiting for sepsis and then amputating, because it's cheaper and takes less resources. Extremely poor people may not pay for care, but be assured that in America, they get no where near the…
> And if you're poor and have cancer? Most other western countries will give you a chance Cancer is probably the worst example you could pick to prove your point. It turns out that the US system is highly-optimized for specialized care (which happens to include cancer), as opposed to routine care. That's one of the reasons it ends up being more expensive. In fact, even when including poor and uninsured people in the…
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> And if you're poor and have cancer? Most other western countries will give you a chance Cancer is probably the worst example you could pick to prove your point. It turns out that the US system is highly-optimized for specialized care (which happens to include cancer), as opposed to routine care. That's one of the reasons it ends up being more expensive. In fact, even when including poor and uninsured people in the…
Assuming you get treatment. In the US, cancer treatment is pre-paid, and if you don't have insurance you are SOL
No, even factoring that in, the US has dramatically better outcomes for cancer than the other countries listed.
It may be an overall improvement in efficiency, but it's not going to help patients long term. Whoever pays for the ambulances is going to eventually reduce their funding because they're being under used and revert them to the same state they were in before. If that wasn't the case, then they would have already been paying for more ambulances before Uber came along.
(It doesn't have to be that way. Other countries have managed to keep ambulance services affordable.)
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The reason you must get car insurance isn't to cover the cost of the car, it's to cover the very high variance in potential payouts to third parties should you cause an accident. Health insurance in principle works on a similar basis: it's a cost smoothing mechanism for unexpected large costs that not everyone is expected to incur. It breaks down if everyone incurs the big costs (old age) or not everyone insures (onl…
GP was referring to the car insurance, not the driver insurance. Those are separable concepts. If your rear-view mirror is broken off by a punk with a baseball bat while parked on a Chicago street, that is property damage to your car that would be covered by your car insurance. If you t-bone another car, the damage to their vehicle is covered by your driver insurance, while the damage to your own vehicle might be cov…
Health costs are borne by the community in A&E if people don't pay for it themselves. That's why a mandate is fair from a social contract perspective. Some people might prefer a state that leaves poor people to die on the side of the road after an accident, but not the majority.
(FWIW, in the UK, driver insurance is attached to the car (or possibly multiple cars) and is described as car insurance colloquially. Car insurance may or may not include property insurance, at two levels: damage you're not responsible for (fire and theft), or damage that you are (an accident you caused).)
I injured myself and needed to go to the ER. The injury wasn't life threatening, but I definitely needed to go to the hospital immediately. I called an Uber. I don't have the time or expertise to do the months of legalese and calculus it would take me to understand my insurance policy, so I have no idea how much an ambulance ride would have cost me. $0? $400? $15000? None of those numbers would surprise me. As best I…
What also happened: You received care at an ER. The time of professionals was used on you and not other patients at that time. You also received a diagnosis and verification that the injury was easily treatable and didnt require much else. What if they came to a different conclusion?
$900 is expensive but you are grossly mischaracterizinf the services you received.