The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms • Hacker News Board

Re: The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms

#161

Post by JamesBarney » Mon, Oct 07, 2024, 6:32 PM UTC

cherry_tree wrote: post #154

JamesBarney wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes health care is very different in every country in the world. There are a 1000 ways to do it well but the US is unique in having insane healthcare costs. Having non profit insurance companies isn't the difference, having mandatory health insurance isn't the difference. It's not that easy to fix.

Seems like you’re misrepresenting these countries in stating that they “rely” on private insurance (these are countries with public healthcare). Are you able to point to a completely private system that is insurance based and works well? Or what do you think public systems that also include private insurance add to the table that is missing from the US market?

In what sense does the Netherlands or Switzerland have public healthcare?

Re: The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms

#162

Post by alan-hn » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 1:24 AM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #156

alan-hn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money and greed naturally get in the way. Is that not obvious? People are finding any way to game the system just to get more money You're thinking of using money as a measure but everyone else is using it as a target...

No, greed (or wanting money) is one of the reasons some people with brains get paid better. if they can think of things or ways of doing things that save money or create value, or both, then they will get paid lots. They could still agree with their employer that they get paid the equivalent of a postgrad stipend, but they probably don't. You don't need to game a system for that to happen.

So why does a PhD university professor make less than a wall st trader frat bro

Re: The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms

#163

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:14 PM UTC

skhunted wrote: post #155

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand why someone can't say "we should get rid of these bad regulations which are causing problems" without someone hearing "we should get rid of all laws of any kind whatsoever".

Because for 40 years now the Republican party has demonized regulations as a concept. So now we are in a situation where people like you write: Regulations as a concept are the category of thing which is causing the problem. No sensible person thinks regulations as a concept is bad but, well, roughly 1/3 of the U.S. population is not sensible on this topic. No sensible person thinks all regulations are good. Regulati…

The actual problem is that "regulations are bad" has become a decent heuristic, because such a high proportion of the existing and proposed regulations are a result of regulatory capture. Your objection seems to be that you want to call this "bad governance" instead of "bad regulations" but it's not clear how that's even supposed to be different.

The number of people who think that all regulations are bad is limited to a handful of actual anarchists with no real power and a presumably larger number of rules pedants who want to play different definitional games where they use "regulations" to refer to the things they don't like and call the things that they do like "laws" or "rights" or some other allegedly distinct thing where the distinguishing criteria is doing all the work.

Of course, getting people to spend all day arguing about terms is to the advantage of the people who like the status quo, because then they can get the people who claim regulation is generally good to pass their regulatory capture rules and get the people who claim regulation is generally bad to repeal or fail to enforce the e.g. antitrust rules intended to protect people from their predatory behavior. But then you're just playing into their game -- the Certificate of Need laws etc. are of the first category.