261–270 of 381 posts
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> So they intentionally targeted people with debt, so the "63% percent of respondents" is not able to No, that's not how it works. You oversample a group you are interested in and then weight it. To be honest, you don't know enough about statistics to evaluate this. You should either learn more or accept the conclusions of those who know more.
Even the study itself says "63% of respondents with debts ".
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> Republicans abandoned people who are in favor of abortion. Republicans abandoned liberal Republicans like Bill Weld. Every party abandons people. Sure. My point is that the party made this choice deliberately. Trying to pin the blame on Joe Manchin, who is doing yeoman’s work holding onto a key part of the old FDR coalition, is disingenuous. > Democrats consistently hold majority views on a wide range of policy iss…
You are absolutely wrong in thinking Gerrymandering does not affect Congressional popular vote. It absolutely does. Especially in non-Presidential years. There are secondary effects you are ignoring with this incorrect belief. In recent years, since SCOTUS abandoned voting rights, the closure of polling stations also affects voting numbers. We do not have proportional representation in the House, and the person with…
Gerrymandering does not even consistently hurt democrats in the number of House seats. Dems in 2020 won the same number of seats as their share of the Congressional popular vote.
> There are secondary effects you are ignoring with this incorrect belief. In recent years, since SCOTUS abandoned voting rights, the closure of polling stations also affects voting numbers.
This is the Democrat equivalent of believing the Big Lie.
> The way Congressional districts are made and the weirdness of the Senate representation is such that we will soon be governed by a minoritist party.
What’s Biden’s approval rating again?
> Who cares how things were in the 60s and 70s when the topic at hand is about the present day?
Because Democrats still claim to be the party of FDR, who stitched together a winning coalition. The electoral system benefited that coalition—when Biden became a Senator, Democrats had 10 percentage points more House seats than their share of the Congressional popular vote. That coalition is still viable. Obamacare was enacted on that coalition. Urban Dems have chosen deliberately to prioritize other things instead.
America has socialized healthcare with a hundred extra steps and implemented in the most inefficient way possible so that everyone comes out worse. Hospitals aren't allowed to deny care (obviously). They will bill people outrageous amounts and know that they will only ever see a fraction of it. So prices for people who do pay are raised considerably to make up for it. People don't get early preventive care due to cos…
In my country doctors don't give a shit about who you are or how much money you have. They do triage. You can be a millionaire yet have to wait 3 months for a new hip because there is someone with more urgent medical needs. It is pure unadultared fact based medicine to allocate scarce resources instead of market forces that turns you into a drone.
Universal healthcare is beatiful but also utterly terrifying. It is pure communism without the "some animals are more equal". It will lift up many Americans no doubt but for the prosperous it is not an automatic win.
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$1000 is $2 / day for les than 2 years (if you can do math unlike commenter below, that's including nearly 20% APR). I'm sorry but even the poor in america can come up with some way to make $14 in a week, if nothing else by picking up some cans. I live in a city where a segment of impoverished people come up with ways to spend $20+ a day in fentanyl, and they don't seem to have much trouble coming up with that even w…
People live in tents because 100% of their income goes to opiates. They can’t make more money and save it, because their needs will always exceed their income short of massive windfalls
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That's not at all a normal cost of having a kid. It says she ended up with twins and they were born prematurely. That said, I have no idea why it wasn't covered or how she ended up getting stuck with the bill. I've had catastrophic occurrences like this, too, years worth of spine surgeries in which I racked up a few million dollars of expenses, but my out of pocket max was $4,000 and that was all I ever had to pay in…
>> Any charges denied by the insurance were just dropped by the provider, not pushed to me. That's a provider choice, and not guaranteed.
So when you see things like a $14,000 charge for someone consulting over video for 10 minutes of work, or $800 for a bandaid, and you wonder how the hell a charge can possibly be that high, the answer is often that it isn't. That's just an artifact of this blind bidding thing going on between providers and insurers where providers send the largest conceivable bill they can to insurers knowing damn well they won't actually get that much.
This also feeds back into why insurance companies have such a horrible incentive to default deny everything. They know the providers are overcharging and charging for bullshit. Both sides are forced into taking equally extreme baseline negotiating positions by the total lack of pricing transparency.
It points at a very specific dysfunction of our system that goes well beyond the question of whether the government or private insurance purchasers should bear the bulk of the cost. This is a totally separate and orthogonal problem that both buyer and seller, no matter who they are, treat all transactions, no matter how mundane, like it's a blind silent auction for a rare Vermeer that hasn't seen a public market in 300 years.
America has socialized healthcare with a hundred extra steps and implemented in the most inefficient way possible so that everyone comes out worse. Hospitals aren't allowed to deny care (obviously). They will bill people outrageous amounts and know that they will only ever see a fraction of it. So prices for people who do pay are raised considerably to make up for it. People don't get early preventive care due to cos…
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Unless you make millions, it's unlikely your finances could survive an ICU admission.
If you're not incredibly rich, you're just temporarily holding all your savings & retirement accounts for the hospitals and nursing homes that'll eventually take all of it. And then some.
Some standout stats for me: - Hospitals recorded their most profitable year on record in 2019, notching an aggregate profit margin of 7.6% - From 2012 to 2016, prices for medical care surged 16%, almost four times the rate of overall inflation - Last year the average annual deductible for a single worker with job-based coverage topped $1,400, almost four times what it was in 2006... Family deductibles can top $10,000…
Proposed colossal change: a common practice of paying for healthcare out of pocket, instead of through healthcare insurance. Yes, this sounds unreasonable right now because prices are so high. But bear with me for a second. Most healthcare in the US is paid through insurance. Insurance creates moral hazard. Insured patients generally don't even need to know the prices of what they're buying, much less negotiate those…
https://www.healthcare.gov/high-deductible-health-plan/hdhp-...
There's pretty much a free open market for cosmetic medical procedures not covered by insurance. But markets can never really work for medically necessary treatments. Demand is essentially fixed regardless of price. Patients who are in pain or at risk of death will pay everything they have and go into debt besides in order to get treatment. On a large scale basis the only effective means of holding down costs is some combination of rationing and price fixing.
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Sometimes services are rendered which insurance does not deem required, and then refuses to pay for, and some items are simply not covered at all. For example, insulin may be covered by insurance, but needles and syringes are not. On top of that, it's basically impossible to anticipate the cost ahead of time for many procedures. One person I know was quoted $2,000 to $30,000 for a portion of a surgery that is not cov…
That's terrifying. The healthcare issue with the US is what seriously makes me want to live in Europe, at least to try it. The thought of your whole life falling apart just because you need medical care is horrible. I'm living the double-software-engineer-income, no kids life with my partner, and even then I think a major medical issue would be life changing. As a risk-averse person, the US feels like a place to get…
My uncle in Denmark had cancer, and they basically put him in a hospice-type facility to die, because anything else would have not been justified due to his age, the cost, and the low probability of success.
In the USA, he or his family would likely have demanded aggressive surgery and/or chemo or radiation, he would have died anyway, and there would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars of "medical debt" created.
I suspect many people who like the idea of socialized medicine are not prepared for the reality of the limits on care that would bring, particularly for the old and terminally ill.
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$1000 is $2 / day for les than 2 years (if you can do math unlike commenter below, that's including nearly 20% APR). I'm sorry but even the poor in america can come up with some way to make $14 in a week, if nothing else by picking up some cans. I live in a city where a segment of impoverished people come up with ways to spend $20+ a day in fentanyl, and they don't seem to have much trouble coming up with that even w…
You're taking one person's experience, who has mild medical expenses and applying their situation to loads of poor people as if their experience exemplifies the experiences of millions. Frankly, that's disgusting and while I don't wish you awful medical debt, it sounds like you could stand to be humbled by some. Think of bigger medical expenses over the same period -- 10k. That's 20/day. 100k -- 200/day. Now add ACA…
"You" being the parent OPs who I responded to who introduced the nation of $1000, which happens to be above the median for my state and most states shown in the article? Remember I'm RESPONDING to the $1000 comment, not introducing the figure. But maybe they said something about the $1000 you agreed about, so you went with the disingenuous approach of only impugning someone commenting on it and in bad faith accusing THAT person of introducing the figure.
The MAJORITY in my state and most states have less than $1000 in medical debt. Millions. This isn't some edge case. $1000 "exemplifies" the median medical debt in most states, according to the article.
>sounds like you could stand to be humbled by some
Yeah a subtle suggestion I ought to experience medical problems. Keep it classy. "Frankly, that's disgusting."
>Think of bigger medical expenses over the same period -- 10k. That's 20/day. 100k -- 200/day. Now add ACA monthly costs (300-400/mo). Then rent, then food. Etc etc.
Yes I thought about it, and then decided my $2/day figure still holds as a possible approach for paying off median medical debt. Thanks for the thought exercise!