151–160 of 314 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> your oncologist declares you "cured" at age 65 I don't think an oncologist would do this, though.
My oncologist has never said the word "cured" in my presence.
Mind you, it was in the 80s, and in Canada.
So use of the word could be related to time period and geography.
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…
Half the population have below average IQ's, and even people with above average IQ's still struggle with abstractions. These topics are complex and it's easy to frame the negative state in a way for low IQ and poorly educated people to grasp, so they tend to side with what they "think" they understand.
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…
What would healthcare-centric revolt look like? You would need to apply pressure to specific congressional representatives, who support a specific ideology and don't believe in universal healthcare (A Crowdpac campaign has funded close to $4 million dollars to challenge Susan Collins when she's up for reelection due to her supreme court vote; that most likely won't scale). I could of course see rouge elements of such…
Everybody refusing to pay their hospital bills en masse maybe?
Perhaps the real problem is that chemo, radiation, and surgery don't really cure cancer, in most cases. There is a lot of bad science in cancer research. The "science" that bothers me the most is the use of 5-year survival rates. Suppose that a cancer that starts at age 60 becomes symptomatic at age 65, and kills the patient at age 70. Scenario 1: you are 60 years old, get screened, and opt for treatment (who wouldn'…
Most people survive early stage cancer. Very few survive late stage cancer. Very often cancer is diagnosed late stage, which is the main reason for cancer lethality.
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. Well you could have had my man Bernie Sanders, if the DNC hadn't stabbed him in the back. So you know who to put first up against the wall.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> your oncologist declares you "cured" at age 65 I don't think an oncologist would do this, though.
My oncologist has never said the word "cured" in my presence.
Aside from assisting the body's natural healing process, the best medicine can usually offer are treatments.
Example: insulin is not a cure for type 1 diabetes, even though you can live a long life with this treatment.
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United Healthcare's CEO received $17.4 million in compensation last year. I don't know anyone on the GS pay scale making that. That excessive compensation could've been directed towards healthcare delivery instead of padding someone's pockets. Private insurance is beholden to shareholders, universal healthcare is beholden to citizen stakeholders. It's plainly obvious that the private insurance market in the US has fa…
UHC paid out over $100 billion in care. How much it pays its CEO is completely irrelevant, except as an emotional appeal and rage bait. The system may not be functioning properly, but it has nothing to do with how much UHC's CEO makes, or shareholders make. (UHC's profit margin is just 7.5%). The decision of whether to have limits on how much you're willing to spend for one case exists whether you have a private syst…
That's a pretty significant exception, from the perspective of "designing" a social order.
It's a brute fact that humans measure their well-being in part by comparing their situations to those of their neighbors and of others with whom they come into contact. [0] People can become disgruntled, even envious, when they discover that they want things that others have but they don't. It's a fact of life: natural selection has hard-wired us to experience at least mild envy, which motivates us to try to improve our lot (by fair means or foul).
So how should we respond to that brute fact? I used to think that folks who resented high executive compensation should just get over it, or go and earn such compensation themselves. I remember listening approvingly to the old Eddie Chiles TV commercials: Don't have an oil well? Get one! [1]
These days, on the other hand, I'm increasingly realizing that this is unrealistic, and also that we broadcast an unrealistic message: You, too, can make it to the executive suite and pull down the big bucks if you just work hard enough and smart enough, starting when you're young. But that's akin to saying that if you just work hard enough and smart enough, you can play for an NBA team or win the British Open golf tournament. That's certainly true for a few people; for the vast majority, though, that message seems delusional and perhaps even fraudulent.
That in turn has led me to think that high executive comp, and the sense of vague disgruntlement among others to which it contributes, might be akin to the unremarkable public water pump that was discovered to have been the source of London's deadly 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, in which more than 600 people died in just a couple of weeks: [2] To outward appearances the water pump was innocuous and beneficial, but in reality it was silently poisoning the community and attacking the social fabric.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/3/963/1841...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chiles
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...
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Again and again history reveals a surprising fact: you can push people really far before they finally reach their breaking point. And when that breaking point is finally reached, the trigger will not be what you expected.
This is especially true when there are no obvious and politically viable good alternatives. In the US everyone outside the center-left or center-right seems to be an absolute lunatic of one sort or another, and even if that weren't the case the two party oligopoly system is deeply entrenched and guarantees that alternatives can't succeed. There's nobody who is both sane and electable that isn't part of the mainstream…
But agreed - proportional parliament allows for articulation of important non-majority views (such as the emergence of the Green party in Germany many years back).
Perhaps the real problem is that chemo, radiation, and surgery don't really cure cancer, in most cases. There is a lot of bad science in cancer research. The "science" that bothers me the most is the use of 5-year survival rates. Suppose that a cancer that starts at age 60 becomes symptomatic at age 65, and kills the patient at age 70. Scenario 1: you are 60 years old, get screened, and opt for treatment (who wouldn'…
> This kind of statistical chicanery leads people to opt for treatment, which is usually very bad for you. In the 70ties survival rates for cancer was 25% today it's 50%. You think that's because we discover it sooner and tweak statistics. Sure statistics can be made misleading, but overall stats comparing survivor rates across decades can be expected to correct for stages and time of discovery.
I think there is debate about late stage cancer survival and chemotherapy drug effectiveness, which OP somehow spread over the whole "cancer" topic.
I doubt there is any debate about treatment in early stage cancer cases, apart from some indolent types diagnosed at old age.