301–310 of 549 posts
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Why that article points out the US spends $12k/capita on healthcare the singles out administrative costs at $1k/capita while ignoring all the other relevant factors is beyond me. They then use the misleading infant mortality stat, ignoring that the US considers vastly more babies viable than any other country, meaning we try to save infants that other countries write off, thus they count against the US when it fails,…
> The US pays about twice per nurse or doctor in the system, and part of that is because the US pays nearly twice for most skilled work. which is in turn because in the US an average GP comes out of medical school with $200k-300k of student debt that has to have interest serviced and paid off within some 10-20 year timespan. That cost ultimately ends up being borne by the patient and their insurance. unfortunately th…
> the AMA agrees there is a problem and is onboard with expanding the pipeline
Oh come on, they could start by accepting everyone with a 3.5+ and decent MCAT instead of requiring that you have a 3.95, volunteering experience, clinical experience, and near perfect MCATs. The path is unattractive because it's filled with bullshit requirements that don't matter.
On top of this most med schools discriminate against their largest pool of potential top students: Asians. It's well known if you're Asian you need much higher MCATs and GPA to get into med school. How many people have been pushed out of considering medicine because of this?
USA Healthcare is 19.5% of GDP. Canada + Australia + UK + (a few similar countries) average 10.5% of GDP. The USA healthcare price gouges via run away prices. Healthcare corporations corrupting congress is the fuel that forces this on people (and breaks a free market).
I’m a Canadian, and I would never want to give up our single payer system. That being said, Canada has a huge health care problem right now. Frequently they need to close emergency services in major (& minor) cities at night due to staff shortages. The wait times for basic diagnostics is on the order of months (not days or weeks). For example, a relative of mine has lost 90 pounds since the start of the year, complai…
We are now reaping what they have sown.
This is a classic "underfund to prove the system doesn't work thus we must privatize it!" move.
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The article mentioned CSV files, it seems more like a reflection of what a huge bureaucracy the US healthcare system is. I liked their suggestion that the government should have created the database as part of the law, done the processing on the raw data, and made it more accessible.
import a CSV into Postgres with open(filepath) as fd: first_line = fd.readline() cols = [] for col in first_line.strip().split(','): col2 = f'''"{col.strip('"')}" text''' cols.append(col2) cols2 = ','.join(cols) print(f"create table {table_name} ({cols2});") print(f"\copy {table_name} from '{filepath}' csv header;") this variant will ingest whatever trash is in your CSV fields as-is (cast & cleanup later) run the out…
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>Should we apply the same sort of "stupid X law" to people who drink alcohol or drive motorcycles or play rugby? Yes, precisely. Keep chopping down at these factors until all that's practically left is private healthcare -- that's a feature not a bug. It's enough that I have to pay the bill to scrape the blood off the street when a motorcycle is crashed, not interested in paying someone elses motorcycle related healt…
Yes, I'm getting sick of paying for people who drive cars, go to restaurants and concerts, and have children. > socialize your health related losses while privatizing the gains you reap. Those famous health care gains.
Driving cars would be minor and apply to almost everyone, so it would mostly cancel out and be negligible. Really it would be a slight discount for taking transit, and that seems... fine to me.
And those other ones aren't even notable risk factors.
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I’m a Canadian, and I would never want to give up our single payer system. That being said, Canada has a huge health care problem right now. Frequently they need to close emergency services in major (& minor) cities at night due to staff shortages. The wait times for basic diagnostics is on the order of months (not days or weeks). For example, a relative of mine has lost 90 pounds since the start of the year, complai…
Much of the current failures are due to conservative provincial governments (looking at you, Ontario...) purposely underfunding before and into the pandemic. We are now reaping what they have sown. This is a classic "underfund to prove the system doesn't work thus we must privatize it!" move.
USA Healthcare is 19.5% of GDP. Canada + Australia + UK + (a few similar countries) average 10.5% of GDP. The USA healthcare price gouges via run away prices. Healthcare corporations corrupting congress is the fuel that forces this on people (and breaks a free market).
But looking from another perspective - if healthcare is 20% of GDP, an awful amount of people are therefore paid directly due to this "waste". Any improvement in efficiency would mean those people lose out on jobs. A new use for them must be found, or there will be massive unemployment (at least, short-medium term).
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As two quick examples, both Switzerland and France have private healthcare providers and insurers. I think that’s enough to falsify your assumption :)
I don't think that disproves a general trend that increased socialization in healthcare costs leads to better outcomes and less per-capita spending. Also FWIW France and Switzerland both have universal healthcare, under different systems where France splits payments 3 ways and covers more with the govt[1], and Switzerland seems to have a system like the ACA in the US where it's compulsory, but they also set caps on t…
You also haven't given even a hint of proof for this alleged trend.
Maybe there is a trend, but let's look at some serious data before we just assume it's an obvious fact.
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I actually work in this industry and adjust claims myself from time to time, so I love talking about this stuff! > that must follow rules set by Medicare. (emphasis added) Yeah, I'm not sure that anyone seriously believes that insurance companies should operate in a 100% unregulated fashion. Even the US's food industry (which is predominately privatized) is regulated in some capacity. The argument is whether regulate…
The obvious regulation which almost every other country has is direct price controls on medicines, treatments etc. Not profit percentage controls. A dead simple “this is how much you’re allowed to charge”. I don’t really understand why anybody would be against introducing this in the US.
This is of course already happening since, most of the world has price controls. The US market is probably financing most of the world's medical research, and if we stop paying so much, it may shrink a lot.