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Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

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Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#271

Post by slg »

WalterBright wrote: post #248
slg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a country you would point to as a good model for free market healthcare? Because healthcare seems like a market prone to be abused by market forces because the demand for it is often inelastic. For example, the free market price for insulin is basically infinite because type 1 diabetics need a constant supply of it or else they die. Judging by the price of insulin in the US compared to our peer nations, it s…

The US before 1968. Insulin is heavily regulated by the FDA, making competition very difficult.

So would you say that other countries in which insulin is cheaper have a healthcare industry that is a freer market than the US?

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#272

Post by slg »

notch656a wrote: post #256
slg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a country you would point to as a good model for free market healthcare? Because healthcare seems like a market prone to be abused by market forces because the demand for it is often inelastic. For example, the free market price for insulin is basically infinite because type 1 diabetics need a constant supply of it or else they die. Judging by the price of insulin in the US compared to our peer nations, it s…

>For example, the free market price for insulin is basically infinite because type 1 diabetics need a constant supply of it or else they die. I've been to places in the Philippines where all available water is either on private property or being sold by private vendors. The price of water did not go to infinity, in fact you could buy a 1L bottle for something like 10 pesos, which is like $0.20. I'm not so sure a free…

>I've been to places in the Philippines where all available water is either on private property or being sold by private vendors. The price of water did not go to infinity, in fact you could buy a 1L bottle for something like 10 pesos, which is like $0.20.

The "basically" there was meant to show that I was being somewhat facetious. There are of course other factors at play. First the supplier wants to maximize profit and not price. The highest price doesn't necessarily yield the highest profit if it prices some people out of the market. Also a small group can't maintain a monopoly over a necessity required by a large group without facing a literal revolt. However when the group being taken advantage of is small, resistance becomes much more difficult to achieve. It is a lot easier to oppress the 0.5% of the population that is a type 1 diabetic than the 100% of the population that needs water.

>If the price were truly near-infinite the entire economy of workers and capital would flock to it in seek of infinite profits and competition would become fierce.

This would depend on some basic Economics 101 assumptions being true such as a commodity product in an industry with low barrier to entry and no economies of scale. Those assumptions rarely hold in the real world, especially in healthcare.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#273

Post by 411111111111111 »

c4ptnjack wrote: post #223
dan-robertson wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also more two-person households, so perhaps part of the change is young people not living with their parents for so long? Or perhaps it is old people living alone. I don’t think I have very good priors about this. I think the kind of people I know are not going to be a great cross section of US society (and I suspect this is true for basically anyone too).

It's actually the opposite, we are at an all time high for young people living with their parents, for longer. Approximately 50 percent of young adults 18 - 29 live with their family now[0]. Initially that was thought to be a transient externality of the pandemic but it seems to be sticking[1] thanks to the outfall of the bull market crashing. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-... [1] ht…

Which entirely disqualifies the proposed explanation of the original comment, which considered household income. thus bundling the parents and children's income together.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#274

Post by acdha »

mattkrause wrote: post #253
acdha wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is heavily paid for by taxpayer-funded research, so Americans are paying for it on both sides.

Heavily is something of a stretch: the NIH is a fairly small part ($40B) of the federal budget ($1,600B discretionary + another $4,000 mandatory spending). It's about 0.5% of the total budget, which works out to about a dollar a week for the average taxpayer. On top of that R&D spending has a huge multiplier: a lot of that money supports small, high-tech businesses, which in turn hire people...etc

I never claimed it was a huge part of the federal budget, only that NIH and NSF provide a large fraction of basic science research. It’s always tricky tracing that to actual treatments but the drug companies tend to fund development of promising candidates from taxpayer-funded basic research more than doing that basic science themselves, and a lot of their R&D goes to tweaking existing drugs which might make them more effective/convenient but definitely protects the company’s margin against generics.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#275

Post by modriano »

WalterBright wrote: post #249
modriano wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure that is a sensible inference to draw. Government "interference" in healthcare in many countries where citizens both have greater access and report more satisfaction with the healthcare service they receive. Also, free markets really don't have much to say for people who don't have the money to trade in that market, and in the healthcare space, denying treatment to people just because they can't afford…

The US had a free market in health care in 1968, and there's simply no evidence to support your suspicions.

First off, the US healthcare market wasn't a free market in 1968. State licensing boards regulated the supply of doctors and as Milton Friedman argued in his book "Free to Choose", powerful interest groups used the US court system to impose massive costs on unlicensed healthcare practitioners; "The AMA has engaged in extensive litigation charging chiropractors and osteopathic physicians with the unlicensed practice of medicine, in an attempt to restrict them to as narrow an area as possible." [0]. So no, even before Medicare and Medicaid, there wasn't a free market for healthcare in the US.

Still, in that time, there was much less government involvement in healthcare and the stats show significant improvement after the implementation of the SSA of 1965 Act. Infant mortality fell from over 2.5% in the early 1960s to just over half a percent now [1], with the decrease accelerating in the late 1960's before tapering in the 1980's. Life expectancy also jolted upward in the late 1960's [1].

Healthcare has increased in cost significantly since the time before Medicare and Medicaid, when the treatment for a heart attack was to lay in a hospital bed and wait to die, whereas now, we have much better treatments that can add decades on to people's lives. [2]

And regarding the pandemic hypothesis, there's so much evidence to support my claims. If vaccine shots hadn't been made free to individuals, uptake would have been far slower and life would be far worse as the death rate would be much higher than the (still horrifying) ~500 people per day.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association...

[1] https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?category=Health#In...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2012/jan/20/was-early-196...

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#276

Post by missedthecue »

Bilal_io wrote: post #190
missedthecue wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Japan has fewer bilingual citizens than even the USA.

> than even the USA. The US has a lot of immigrants, so I wouldn't count it as a country with a low percentage of bilinguals.

Citizens?

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#277

Post by ekianjo »

pezezin wrote: post #269
ekianjo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US, healthcare is effectively a collection of cartels Not just in the US. For example there's a huge glasses cartel in France with specialists that are protected by the government and make pairs of glasses cost 500~1000 USD with very little reimbursement, while in Japan private companies (that actually compete against each other's) let you have glasses for 60~70 USD all included. You are literally better off…

I recently bought a pair of prescription sunglasses and I had to pay almost 35 000 yen, about 250 USD or EUR at the current exchange rate, the same I paid for the previous ones in Spain 5 years ago. I would love to know where I can get them for a quarter the price!

You dont need prescription to get glasses in Japan.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#278

Post by Bilal_io »

missedthecue wrote: post #276
Bilal_io wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> than even the USA. The US has a lot of immigrants, so I wouldn't count it as a country with a low percentage of bilinguals.

Citizens?

Yes. As of 2020 nearly half of immigrants in the USA are citizens according to Pew Research[0]

0- https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#279

Post by WalterBright »

slg wrote: post #271
WalterBright wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US before 1968. Insulin is heavily regulated by the FDA, making competition very difficult.

So would you say that other countries in which insulin is cheaper have a healthcare industry that is a freer market than the US?

Other countries are not controlled by FDA regulations.

Re: Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties

#280

Post by WalterBright »

modriano wrote: post #275
WalterBright wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US had a free market in health care in 1968, and there's simply no evidence to support your suspicions.

First off, the US healthcare market wasn't a free market in 1968. State licensing boards regulated the supply of doctors and as Milton Friedman argued in his book "Free to Choose", powerful interest groups used the US court system to impose massive costs on unlicensed healthcare practitioners; "The AMA has engaged in extensive litigation charging chiropractors and osteopathic physicians with the unlicensed practice o…

> First off, the US healthcare market wasn't a free market in 1968

Yes, there was still some government interference that made it less of a free market. The beauty of the free market, however, is the closer it is to a free market the better it works. It's pointless to nitpick over just where the line is.

Healthcare outcomes in the US improved throughout the 20th century. There wasn't a magical change in the 1960s. The major government interference started in 1968, and your reference shows things improving throughout the 1960s.

> If vaccine shots hadn't been made free to individuals, uptake would have been far slower

An assumption without evidence. People don't appreciate things they get for free. In fact, the free vaccines seems to have engendered suspicion of the vaccine and lots of resistance to it. I've often suspected that charging for it would have increased vaccination rates.

Besides, in a free market, nothing whatsoever impedes any charity from giving out free stuff.

That said, I'd argue that vaccination against highly infectious diseases is a special case that suggests government involvement as a public good.

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