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The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

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Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#91

Post by mikeash »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #78
cowsandmilk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health insurance will cover much of it, but more importantly Northern California is overpriced for medical procedures. Boston is $5,000 less and has equally good hospitals. And St. Louis is down at $6,000 and has really good hospitals as well. I had a friend who got an appendectomy at Stanford that was paid for by Google (she was on business travel, works in the London office) and the price was obscene, far above wha…

It’s not overpriced if there is no monopoly. No one is stopping other providers from moving to Northern California and stealing business by offering lower prices. If people want to live in a place with great weather, outdoors, food, and career opportunities, then they have to compete for it because lots of other people do too, and hence they have to compete to purchase things like homes and service from healthcare pr…

Nothing is stopping them, other than people not shopping medical procedures based on price, partly due to a complete lack of price transparency.

Maybe you could move in and set up a maternity ward and advertise it as “only $10,000!” And then people will ask what the competition charges and you won’t be able to answer. They won’t be able to answer.

Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#92

Post by apapli »

adventured wrote: post #82

> But unlike the prophecies of talking cartoon bears, all this money didn’t drive inflation through the roof and crash the stock market. It doesn’t seem to have really gone…anywhere. It sure did drive inflation. It went into asset prices, which have been massively inflated by low interest rates. Absurdly, the article is ranting about the rate at which real estate and rent are increasing, then pretending the inflation…

Inflation, at least in Australia where I live is measured as a “basket of goods”. I totally agree that inflation has gone higher than it seems reported, but I think that is due to categories that are not properly captured in the basket.

No elected government wants to do a review on a metric that will make them look bad unfortunately if it was corrected.

Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#93

Post by lotsofpulp »

mikeash wrote: post #91
lotsofpulp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not overpriced if there is no monopoly. No one is stopping other providers from moving to Northern California and stealing business by offering lower prices. If people want to live in a place with great weather, outdoors, food, and career opportunities, then they have to compete for it because lots of other people do too, and hence they have to compete to purchase things like homes and service from healthcare pr…

Nothing is stopping them, other than people not shopping medical procedures based on price, partly due to a complete lack of price transparency. Maybe you could move in and set up a maternity ward and advertise it as “only $10,000!” And then people will ask what the competition charges and you won’t be able to answer. They won’t be able to answer.

I would hope it’s common knowledge nowadays, at least amongst the educated, that you should call your insurance or check their website for in network providers. I can call mine and find out how much certain procedures or codes cost, and if it’s not an exact amount, they can usually give a pretty good estimate.

Also, I would expect any service to cost 50% more in the Bay Area.

Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#94

Post by JetSetWilly »

vishnugupta wrote: post #79
jstanley wrote: post #2

> Google tells me that the most common reason for hospitalization in the US is childbirth. Thankfully, here in San Francisco, that would only set me back $15,000 Surely this is not true? Does having kids just bankrupt ordinary people in the US or what? I'm not asking about exceptional cases, like what is the normal way of dealing with having to pay $15,000 just to have a baby climb out of your body, when I'm assuming…

Continuing that sentence... > ...unless of course we needed a C-section, in which case it’ll be a casual $30,000. In India, we got c-section done in a luxurious hospital in a suite ward for slightly over $1K. About 80% of that was covered by insurance. Even if it wasn't that kind of money is a typical middle class family in India can easily afford. Note that I'm talking about top of the line hospital so the median co…

In the UK a C-section costs an average of 2219USD to the NHS,

This cost disparity is not one of developed world vs undeveloped, it is one of an insane health care system vs a rational one.

Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#96

Post by mikeash »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #93
mikeash wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is stopping them, other than people not shopping medical procedures based on price, partly due to a complete lack of price transparency. Maybe you could move in and set up a maternity ward and advertise it as “only $10,000!” And then people will ask what the competition charges and you won’t be able to answer. They won’t be able to answer.

I would hope it’s common knowledge nowadays, at least amongst the educated, that you should call your insurance or check their website for in network providers. I can call mine and find out how much certain procedures or codes cost, and if it’s not an exact amount, they can usually give a pretty good estimate. Also, I would expect any service to cost 50% more in the Bay Area.

Hospital stays are a whole different thing from more routine procedures. A lot of the costs are directly billed by the doctor and bypass the hospital, and hospitals don’t know what their own costs will be.

If you have insurance that covers this, it’s simple. You don’t even need to call anyone. You’ll pay your deductible.

If you want to compete on price, you’ll either need to charge substantially less than people’s dedictibles in order to make a noticeable difference, aim your price competition at insurance companies (who pay vastly lower prices already), or target the not-exactly-lucrative uninsured population.

Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#97

Post by phkahler »

He misses what I consider a major issue. The price of college education is going up much faster than the cost of providing it. If you look at tuition vs what a professor is paid, one goes up much faster than the other. If you look at housing costs things don't add up either - renting an apartment seems to be a source of revenue for the schools. These are the obvious places the schools are making a ton of money - where does it go?

And then there are the absurdities. Where I went to school they now have all sorts of fancy places to eat on campus. I can't imagine students paying $4 a couple times a day for a Starbucks coffee when they're paying with borrowed money. This is just grossly irresponsible. I imagine the justification is "but everybody does it". The problem is nobody is teaching the general public anything about managing their money or evaluating costs of anything.

Sure, if you get a good job you can pay off your loan in X years, but that has nothing to do with the fact that you drastically overpaid for what you got (services provided).

Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#99

Post by noelwelsh »

randomdata wrote: post #88
noelwelsh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loan for housing is just lazy writing on my part. I should have made it clear I meant the cost of housing. For education, OP's article made a strong case for tertiary education (as the only group seeing wage growth). Also, if you believe that inequality and lack of social mobility are bad things then you should believe that all people should have easy access to tertiary education.

> OP's article made a strong case for tertiary education (as the only group seeing wage growth If wages are growing for this group, then it stands to reason that costs of joining this group should also be also rising. Economically speaking, there cannot be a disparity where simply having a tertiary education leaves you better off than not having it. If there is, then people will join that group, driving up costs and…

We have fundamentally different beliefs about the world. I don't believe access to education needs to be controlled by ability to pay, for example. (And costs of education are rising faster than wages, as demonstrated in the article. Also, some people enjoy living in the city.)

Re: The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth

#100

Post by shawn »

shawn wrote: post #85
kartan wrote: post #44

I very interesting article. This kind of numbers should be on the news all the time (like global warming) so people focus more on them instead of what is the last Twitt from the president. > "Get rich or die trying" I have always seen this as USA's major flaws. You are not supposed to have a good life but to risk everything for riches. This was working when the rest of the world was under-developed. USA citizens had…

How many TV shows I have seen that people laugh at the janitor looking down to him? Zero? In fact, the Scrubs janitor comes to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v2mEg9Cpvs

Now that is an impressive turnaround time. I noted two days ago that I could edit my comment after it was vouched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18158475

Now I can't: https://imgur.com/4nSRJux

Amusing that of all the features and fixes to implement, this even registered on an arc hacker's radar. Also happy to see that HN can still ship to production within 48 hours.

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