Can anyone point me to the ethnic breakdown of the opioid epidemic? Does it cut across ethnicity/race evenly or does one group suffer more (my guess would be white men).
Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
81–90 of 188 posts
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We do have a lot of relatively unskilled jobs that claim to require 4 year degrees, though. This comes from misalignment of specialization. We have too many English majors and not enough physicians and engineers, and the English majors can't all find skilled employment. That allows the unskilled employers to require a college degree, because the unemployed English majors will take an unskilled job over nothing, so…
We could shift the low-demand graduates to high-demand graduates with somewhat decreased cost, in theory, by simply axing two thirds of the low-demand programs, no? But here's where I run into a problem with this theory: why haven't we already, then? If the demand is that imbalanced, why aren't more companies desperate for labor to the point of training workers themselves despite mismatched (or no!) degrees, or why i…
> We could shift the low-demand graduates to high-demand graduates with somewhat decreased cost, in theory, by simply axing two thirds of the low-demand programs, no?
By what mechanism would you do this? It's not as if there is a centralized bureau of programs for all universities.
In theory you could stop offering student loans to students studying low demand subjects, but we haven't actually done that.
> If the demand is that imbalanced, why aren't more companies desperate for labor to the point of training workers themselves despite mismatched (or no!) degrees, or why isn't the big pool of under-employeed workers finding massive benefit to individual re-training that should pay off in spades?
The reason employers don't train workers is that it's all risk no reward. If the person drops out without finishing, or worse quits the day after you train them, you lose money. It's easier to just pay high salaries to qualified graduates from normal schools, which is what they do.
As to why people don't take on the retraining themselves, part of that is the cost. Which includes the opportunity cost. You not only have to pay tuition, you're spending all day studying instead of working.
And that can be a deterrent even if it balances in the long term. If you're making $30K/year now but would make $80K/year with a degree that costs $120K in tuition and another $120K in opportunity cost, you break even within a few years after graduating. But only if you have or can get somebody to loan you $240,000 at a low interest rate.
Obviously that becomes more attractive if either the tuition is lower, or there is less opportunity cost because the alternative pays less than $30K/year.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Has democracy failed? An outsider was elected even though he was running against establishment candidates with huge money backing them. I say democracy won.
You say that as though Trump doesn't have huge money backing him, not to mention foreign governments with equally deep pockets.
Clinton had the same advantage and her war chest was bigger than Trump's.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly don't like the US having higher prices than elsewhere in the world, but what I would like to see more discussion of there is "where does the funding for the development of the treatments come from" rather than just comparison of absolute cost. I suspect we're subsidizing (especially at the top of the market) a lot of research that the rest of the world is also benefiting from. This isn't necessarily the w…
afaik the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries with the highest profit margins. I am skeptical of your claims.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223
Profits seem pretty healthy, but R&D spending is also quite high. I'd expect a high-research growth industry to have much higher profit margins than mature things like oil and gas or media. Boggles my mind why banking is comparable, though. :|
Believe it or not, I'm not making claims. I'm trying to get people to go deeper on the issue sooner, rather than later, since a lot could change around it in the US in the near future.
> And it's not just cancer drugs - between April and June this year, drug company Gilead clocked sales of $3.5bn for its latest blockbuster hepatitis C drug Sovaldi.
This sort of thing - breakthrough new drug being ridiculously expensive at first - doesn't seem necessarily bad to me, as long as the price comes down over time and the drugs deliver the goods. We just need to make sure we know the numbers to watch to make sure we don't either bankrupt ourselves, or kill the motivation for research (jacking up the prices of old drugs is a scary recent trend I want us to crack down on).
Here's the core thing: "the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries with the highest profit margins" is not a policy suggestion. "Costs are too high" is not a policy suggestion. They suggest a few possible things - price controls, or higher taxes, come to mind immediately, but don't do anything beyond that. The US is in dire need of useful policy suggestions (even "medicare for all" is pretty thin, and ignores some disadvantages Medicare has compared to a lot of people's current private coverage), and in even more dire need of people who talk about things with more nuance than "socialize it all!" or "individual liberty is the most important thing!"
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is there a way to measure “Life expectancy of people most similar to you”? Wow.. whenever someone asks me why the US doesn't have humane social services and still regards drug addiction as a crime in need of punishment, I'll point them to this comment.
I don't get why this is a big deal. We already serve up content based on people similar to you or making similar choices as you, why not health forecasts? If I eat healthy, exercise, get the proper amount of sleep and am not addicted to drugs, why not show me how other people with similar habits as me are doing, instead of averaging in people who treat their body like a dumpster? Showing me the life expectancy averag…
Even if you are drug-free now, you could have a procedure in couple years and become addicted to opioids during recovery. Many people who are suffering from the opioid epidemic were prescribed these drugs.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#86Lingering effects of the great recession. There is a very strong and well studied relationship between unemployment, economic stress, and drug abuse. These are people who are depressed (clinically, economically, or often both), and they are self medicating. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/joblessne... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935688/ Unfortunately the media-driven obsession wit…
During the Great Depression though, life expectancy rose - especially during the dust bowl.
This could just be because the rate of improved quality of life (access to food, medicine, medical improvement) was exponentially increasing compared to the offset of the economic depression.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could shift the low-demand graduates to high-demand graduates with somewhat decreased cost, in theory, by simply axing two thirds of the low-demand programs, no? But here's where I run into a problem with this theory: why haven't we already, then? If the demand is that imbalanced, why aren't more companies desperate for labor to the point of training workers themselves despite mismatched (or no!) degrees, or why i…
> We could shift the low-demand graduates to high-demand graduates with somewhat decreased cost, in theory, by simply axing two thirds of the low-demand programs, no? By what mechanism would you do this? It's not as if there is a centralized bureau of programs for all universities. In theory you could stop offering student loans to students studying low demand subjects, but we haven't actually done that. > If the dem…
Yes, I think loan policy changes are our most practical knob to turn, as I think many of the current problems are the result of making college too apparently cheap with easy loans and deferred payments. Cracking down on for-profit colleges is a good first step, even though we've somewhat slowed down on that lately.
I'd favor a less prescriptive method around "study this, not that" and a more responsive one: your loans are in danger if your students' debt-to-income ratios are bad, or they aren't employed, etc. Probably "employed" is fine as long as debt-vs-income is checked too, vs "employed in the field," as I do find the liberal arts valuable in general for critical thinking skills even if not directly tied to specific careers. That's the five minute version, it doubtless needs some tweaks, but I wouldn't want to over-target it for today's specifics.
On the point of whether or not university education, as currently practices, is needed more or less:
> The reason employers don't train workers is that it's all risk no reward. If the person drops out without finishing, or worse quits the day after you train them, you lose money. It's easier to just pay high salaries to qualified graduates from normal schools, which is what they do.
That just makes me skeptical to if they really need the workers that much, though. Emerging industries can't work like this - someone has to do the work before the universities catch up - so how do we quantify e.g. how desperate we truly are for programmers? Heck, we even have people with degrees we generally don't want to hire because they somehow still fail fizzbuzz! Doesn't that speak terribly of our ability to produce high-demand graduates?
I'm sure there's a middle ground between "the risk of training this person and them leaving is small enough compared to the potential return they'd give us since the field is so ripe" and "nah, we're totally good," but how do we find out where in that space we are?
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
there is no legitimate reason the us should be praying at least an order of magnitude more for the same treatments
I certainly don't like the US having higher prices than elsewhere in the world, but what I would like to see more discussion of there is "where does the funding for the development of the treatments come from" rather than just comparison of absolute cost. I suspect we're subsidizing (especially at the top of the market) a lot of research that the rest of the world is also benefiting from. This isn't necessarily the w…
Here is more nuance for you:
A) Americans need to be more health centric. Half the problem is that a minority of chronic patients account for 50% of the costs.
Drive through rural America, fast food is the only option. Grocery shopping at Dollar stores and gas stations.
Solving Americas obesity epidemic is step one in fixing US healthcare.
B) Big pharma regulations. I like the idea of importing drugs and creating more competition. I also think it should be a national embarrassment that we let drug companies advertise to people. Drug decisions should be between doctors and their patients, not patients and the marketing wing of a big pharma company.
C) More access to preventative care. Maybe socializing everything healthcare is way too much to ask right now. But, EVERYONE should have access to regular doctor appointments at least for annual checkups. Earlier recognition of problems will greatly cheapen downstream costs if people aren't waiting till they are having a heart attack to seek care.
These are just a few pragmatic approaches imo.
Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Lingering effects of the great recession Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the problem. Also, the problem started in the last couple of years while the Great Recession began in 2008 (EDIT: and has since ended, with unemployment low for the last two years).
> Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the problem. Other countries (in the developed world at least) don't do as a shitty job dealing with welfare and healthcare, or have people feel like shit for not being "winners". > and has since ended, with unemployment low for the last two years) Unemployment is the easiest thing for government to swee…
I'm not really familiar with the policies enacted towards recovery... How "hands on" was the government in kicking the economy back into gear? Did we do much beyond lowering interest rates?
Many smaller manufacturing businesses both depended on selling to and buying from small impacted businesses... self-contained systems that keep money and management local. Restarting those economic ecosystems requires more than just lowering rates.
Anecdotally, banking consolidations have made it much harder for niche local businesses to attract financing - the town where I went to college had its entire industry of small farming equipment manufacturers killed off. The big banks refused to finance a "John deer competitor" that built tractors from local parts manufacturers, even though the local farms despised buying from John Deer - their only presence was low-wage retail/repair jobs, extracting profit from the community.