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42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

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Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#221

Post by jandrewrogers »

DanBC wrote: post #149
njarboe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every European health care system, I believe, has some way of limiting the amount of care provided to people. It is just not so out in the open as a dollar cap on what people can get in a lifetime. Not every possible, super-expensive procedure is approved to be available to people through the public healthcare system. (Would love to hear of a country that has "universal health care" that does not limit what procedure…

This seems to be pushing a myth: expensive treatments must be better treatments, right? We have very good evidence that these new, expensive, treatments do not extend life and that they make quality of life worse. England set up something called the Cancer Drugs Fund. This provided access to new medication that hadn't yet been assessed for value; that were in the process of being assessed; or that had been assessed a…

Life expectancy in the US is low largely due to anomalously high fatal injury rates (e.g. automobile accidents) and homicide particularly among younger cohorts. These factors are unrelated to medical outcomes. And in fact US medical outcomes are significantly better than average in this regard.

Once you've made it past your 20s, life expectancy in the US is quite good.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#222

Post by fzeroracer »

gerbilly wrote: post #144
Pharmakon wrote: post #4

Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. Recently my mother had a flare-up up radiation-induced pneumonitis and the PPO insurance she pays $14,000 annually wouldn’t approve a single unit of Advair. It took a week of talking to doctors and insurance drones to figure out that they were pushing her to an alternative that cost them $100 less. If I woke up tomorrow and people were burni…

> Sometimes I’m just amazed that people haven’t risen up in bloody revolt yet. The political class just divides us and keeps us fighting over non-issues. We're like crabs in a bucket, fighting with each other on the way to the pot of boiling water.

It's interesting because in a prior post I had made illustrating why people have such strong animosity towards the rich it was claimed that I have that exact mentality.

In reality, the poor and middle class are the crabs trying to escape the wealthy wanting to boil us is the best way I can put it.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#223

Post by mikeash »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #216
mikeash wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of insurance is to pool risk so that a bunch of people together pay reasonable amounts, instead of a few people paying enormous amounts and the others paying less. Lifetime limits give you lower rates in exchange for making the insurance much less like actual insurance. If we’re talking about “don’t piss on my leg and tell me its raining,” don’t sell me “health insurance” that will leave me high and…

I don't have any other insurance policies with unlimited caps. My home, auto, liability etc all have limits. Why is healthcare special in this regard?

Those are all inherently limited by the replacement cost of the insured item. With health insurance, there is no replacement cost.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#224

Post by d1zzy »

twoheadedboy wrote: post #112
J5892 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a $60k car seems like a completely insane concept to me, even with a Silicon Valley tech industry salary. Even $16k (used) was higher than I wanted to pay for my current car.

You have a good mindset. A lot of people view a car as a status symbol and derive its utility from a social point of view, which I think is financially unhealthy. To me all I care about is 1: How safe is it?. 2: How much will it cost me over its lifetime? And 3: Does it get me and my stuff where I want to? Everything else comes far behind these three things. People really shouldn't be borrowing money to buy a car. It…

Depends, borrowing money to buy a car and needing to borrow money to buy a car are 2 distinct things. I recently got financing for a new car because they gave me thousands of dollars discount for doing so. Over the course of the loan, if I pay it according to the full 5 year schedule they'll obviously get more in interest back but I plan to pay it off very quickly (and yes, I did make sure the financing contract allows to do that without having to pay off the entire schedule interest, only the interest accumulated until the time of the payoff).

As for the general idea what people should do with their money, I try to avoid those discussions because it's just a matter of priorities. To you it's more important to use your money to do other things, to others it's important that they drive a nice car. Life is too short and we should spend it pursuing that which makes us happy.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#226

Post by DanBC »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #221
DanBC wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be pushing a myth: expensive treatments must be better treatments, right? We have very good evidence that these new, expensive, treatments do not extend life and that they make quality of life worse. England set up something called the Cancer Drugs Fund. This provided access to new medication that hadn't yet been assessed for value; that were in the process of being assessed; or that had been assessed a…

Life expectancy in the US is low largely due to anomalously high fatal injury rates (e.g. automobile accidents) and homicide particularly among younger cohorts. These factors are unrelated to medical outcomes. And in fact US medical outcomes are significantly better than average in this regard. Once you've made it past your 20s, life expectancy in the US is quite good.

> These factors are unrelated to medical outcomes

When you look at different causes of death (diseases of the circulatory system, neoplasm, disease of respiratory system, external causes, mental and behavioural, diseases of the nervous system, and endocrine nutritional and metabolic disease) the US does worse than average on every single one of them apart from cancer.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/mortali...

> The U.S. has the highest rate of deaths amenable to health care among comparable countries

> Researchers have looked at mortality that results from medical conditions for which there are recognized health care interventions that would be expected to prevent death. While the health care system might not be expected to prevent death in all of these instances, differences in mortality for these conditions provides information about how effectively health care is being delivered. In 2006, the last year for which reasonably complete information is available, the U.S. had the highest mortality rate for deaths amenable to health care among the comparable countries.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#227

Post by jandrewrogers »

Arbitrary4657 wrote: post #217
jandrewrogers wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is for the entire population. I personally know people on welfare that received advanced new treatments and survived "terminal" cancer to this day. The overall cancer survival rate in the US for males is around 67%, which is extremely high even by developed world standards. It wouldn't be possible to have a survival rate that high if a large fraction of the population was excluded from treatment.

Anecdote != data. Do you have a source for that survival rate?

That survival rate came from a study in Lancet Oncology. It is not controversial that the US has exceptionally high cancer survival rates.

This is attributed to two factors: much more testing/screening than in most countries, which detects cancer at earlier and more treatable stages (though at high cost), and most new cancer-related treatments are developed and available in the US first so any resulting reductions in mortality show up in that population first.

As an example, my "anecdote" was cured of terminal cancer by an experimental drug therapy in late trials. Several years later it is FDA approved and becoming available in the rest of the world but at the time the only people receiving that treatment were in the US and it was correlated with a material increase in survival rates for that kind of cancer.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#228

Post by Retric »

jahaja wrote: post #199
Retric wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lobbing is not inherently corrupt. When a small group cares a lot about a specific issue say astronomers and light pollution lobbing is simply trying to get politions to pay attention to an issue. That effort is not free, in some cases they approach the issue by mailing or dolling people directly, in others they pay somone else to make these calls and phrase things in political terms etc. Now, that does open the door…

Why is it important for you to issue a petty nuance to this that you should, and probably do, realise that I already acknowledge? Compare: "China is actually not inherently undemocratic there's a lot of local officials etc being voted in". Yes, but on the systemic, overall, scale there's a blatant democratic deficit present for all to see.

Because it's a question of scale not kind, when you go to the DMV etc in the US you don't expect to bribe anyone. That's far from culturally or historically universal, so day to day it's just not that corrupt relative to other countries.

Now, is politics in the US rigged? Ehh. You do need to actually participate to be counted. Don't vote and don't lobby then sure they your voice is not heard. Now does everyone get equally rewarded when they vote or lobby? Clearly not as every vote is not equal and frankly that's part of our constitution. So is the US a democracy? Nope.

On the other hand the US is not a totalitarian state, the will of the people does actually matter and things happen without bribes every day. Compare it to say England where the landed gentry got to hold extra special power rather than ever shifting groups in the US and yea it's not that bad.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#229

Post by weliketocode »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #90
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average basically is the median - IQ is pretty well normally distributed.

Just to continue the aside, it actually is perfectly normally distributed, since it is a purely statistical measure. http://michna.com/iq.htm

This thread is very hackernews.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#230

Post by Retric »

Someguywhatever wrote: post #99
Retric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is China civilized? No. The rampant corruption, lack of free speech, etc don't qualify as civilized IMO.

I think in China you can say whatever you want about anything, you just can't criticize the government. In the US you can criticize the government but can't say whatever you want about anything else without blowback. In China the government persecutes you, in the US it's your fellow citizens.

Your fellow citizens are more than happy to persecute you in China.
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