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Amazon Health

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Re: Amazon Health

#71

Post by mulmen »

adventured wrote: post #62
yarg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premiums are as high as they are because health care is run as a for profit industry - health care in America is orders of magnitude more expensive than in other countries. If you remove the profit motive prices will drop down towards something more reasonable, in this situation it's not unreasonable to expect that the system could be maintained with employee premiums. The cost of initialisation of services will be h…

> Premiums are as high as they are because health care is run as a for profit industry That's disproven by the fact that for decades premiums were extremely reasonable. In fact, premiums roughly tripled in just 20 years. That increase is radically beyond cost inflation in most everything else except university tuition costs. That spike wasn't caused by healthcare being for-profit, it was for-profit in the decades pri…

No, I don't want to guess. You obviously have some insight here, would you mind sharing?

Re: Amazon Health

#72

Post by onemore2 »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #58
yarg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premiums are as high as they are because health care is run as a for profit industry - health care in America is orders of magnitude more expensive than in other countries. If you remove the profit motive prices will drop down towards something more reasonable, in this situation it's not unreasonable to expect that the system could be maintained with employee premiums. The cost of initialisation of services will be h…

The traditional economic view is that private, profit seeking enterprises actually offer better prices to consumers because of competition, while monopoly firms charge higher prices bc they have more market power, and government run enterprises yield lower quality products because they don't have incentive to compete on quality. India has a very competitive healthcare system that is largely out of pocket and while th…

It's relatively easy to keep the costs low in Europe: you pay in queues and cheap health care instead of money. That doesn't mean good-or-bad automatically. E.g. giving birth by C-section is a rare event in Europe but it's very common in the US, making the "born" event very expensive on average in the US. You usually get over-testing in the US and under-testing in Europe.

If you have a suspicious mole, or a woman reports pain in the uterus, in Europe you might wait one or two years before a doctor sees you. And then you might get just an "everything looks fine" or a mild painkiller, and start again to look for another specialists or just go to the private health. It's known, but somewhat silenced, that a significant number of heart/liver/kidney patients just die before they get to see the specialist because the system is overloaded. This payment-by-queue drives costs down, but is obviously a bad thing.

It's also known that the public health in Europe just don't cover some treatments, depending on the country. Or they are so overloaded that they just don't work. Think about that: you pay for a supposedly full health insurance, but if you're so unlucky to catch a Hepatitis C that it's not covered because the treatment is expensive, you just wait for your death. Costs are lowered, for sure.

Another side effect is that the top notch specialists in Europe earns about the same money as an average or a bad doctor working for the public health. This causes some of the said top notch to go to greener pastures: the US. It's very typical that the (rich) Europeans go to the US to receive cancer treatments. Thus the US costs are driven up and the Europe costs down.

Re: Amazon Health

#74

Post by atopuzov »

watertom wrote: post #26

I think these 3 will no longer provide health insurance for their employees, they are going to create a new more affordable framework and they will allow any other large company to participate. The goal will be keep the cost of insurance the same for the employees, while eliminating the cost for the companies entirely, which is why this will take off. It’s crazy to have employers paying for healthcare, this I believe…

Amazon just wants to screw over it's employees and save money.

Re: Amazon Health

#75

Post by kalleboo »

watertom wrote: post #26

I think these 3 will no longer provide health insurance for their employees, they are going to create a new more affordable framework and they will allow any other large company to participate. The goal will be keep the cost of insurance the same for the employees, while eliminating the cost for the companies entirely, which is why this will take off. It’s crazy to have employers paying for healthcare, this I believe…

> every employer wants to drop that overhead cost

One thing I've always wondered is why aren't the large unionized companies heavily lobbying for socialized healthcare and pensions, with a clause sneaked in there absolving them of their preexisting liabilities?

Re: Amazon Health

#76

Post by mtgx »

dboreham wrote: post #57
donw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, things are a bit more complicated. Being largely for-profit is part of the problem with healthcare in the United States, but plenty of other countries have privatized healthcare that works, Japan being the first that comes to mind. The difference being that, in the US, the long-term dysfunction of our political system has allowed the regulatory framework for healthcare to be built to service its own indust…

>The difference being that, in the US, the long-term dysfunction of our political system has allowed the regulatory framework for healthcare to be built to service its own industry, rather than the needs of individual citizens or society at large. You can templateize that statement, inserting pretty much any aspect of life in place of healthcare and it will still be true.

And that's because the US government no longer responds to the needs and wants of the people, but to the needs of corporations and rich people, which happened because of legalized bribery, or the ability to buy a politician's vote with "donation money".

This is why Larry Lessig was right when he kept saying that this is the root cause that needs to be fixed before anything else. People should be supporting such "single issue" politicians that want to reform this system all over, because this is what will fix everything else in the long term, whether it's economic, healthcare, or even social issues (which tend to be turned into issues to distract from the real harm they're doing somewhere else).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g

Re: Amazon Health

#77

Post by shaqbert »

mtgx wrote: post #76
dboreham wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The difference being that, in the US, the long-term dysfunction of our political system has allowed the regulatory framework for healthcare to be built to service its own industry, rather than the needs of individual citizens or society at large. You can templateize that statement, inserting pretty much any aspect of life in place of healthcare and it will still be true.

And that's because the US government no longer responds to the needs and wants of the people, but to the needs of corporations and rich people, which happened because of legalized bribery, or the ability to buy a politician's vote with "donation money". This is why Larry Lessig was right when he kept saying that this is the root cause that needs to be fixed before anything else . People should be supporting such "sin…

Why did Larry Lessig not find more support amongst the tech billionaire crowd? His open source policy programs on fixing US democracy ought to be a magnet for hobnobbing billionaires at the very top of Maslow's pyramid.

Re: Amazon Health

#78

Post by dagw »

shaqbert wrote: post #77
mtgx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's because the US government no longer responds to the needs and wants of the people, but to the needs of corporations and rich people, which happened because of legalized bribery, or the ability to buy a politician's vote with "donation money". This is why Larry Lessig was right when he kept saying that this is the root cause that needs to be fixed before anything else . People should be supporting such "sin…

Why did Larry Lessig not find more support amongst the tech billionaire crowd? His open source policy programs on fixing US democracy ought to be a magnet for hobnobbing billionaires at the very top of Maslow's pyramid.

Why did Larry Lessig not find more support amongst the tech billionaire crowd?

Cynically, because both the current system in general and the current administration in particular is perfect for billionaires. They have everything they could ever want, so why risk that? Don't fix what ain't broken.

Re: Amazon Health

#79

Post by scrame »

shaqbert wrote: post #77
mtgx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's because the US government no longer responds to the needs and wants of the people, but to the needs of corporations and rich people, which happened because of legalized bribery, or the ability to buy a politician's vote with "donation money". This is why Larry Lessig was right when he kept saying that this is the root cause that needs to be fixed before anything else . People should be supporting such "sin…

Why did Larry Lessig not find more support amongst the tech billionaire crowd? His open source policy programs on fixing US democracy ought to be a magnet for hobnobbing billionaires at the very top of Maslow's pyramid.

because tech billionaires don't give a shit if poor people die or go bankrupt from medical bills. They've likely never even had to think about it.

Re: Amazon Health

#80

Post by tempay »

mulmen wrote: post #70
aaavl2821 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traditional economic view is that private, profit seeking enterprises actually offer better prices to consumers because of competition, while monopoly firms charge higher prices bc they have more market power, and government run enterprises yield lower quality products because they don't have incentive to compete on quality. India has a very competitive healthcare system that is largely out of pocket and while th…

Why would we compare healthcare cost in terms of GDP and not the number of insured or the total population?

Comparing it to the population then suffers from not accounting for the wealth of a nation. It may appear expensive due to a high cost of living and therefore high staffing costs, but it doesn't matter if everything else is also scaled accordingly. You also have to consider outcomes, spending much more to get slightly better outcomes might be deemed worth it.

That said, it doesn't matter which metric you choose, US healthcare does poorly in almost all of them.

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