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42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

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Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#211

Post by jandrewrogers »

davvolun wrote: post #187
chris_va wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, looking at 5-year survival rates by country, you'd be 15-20% more likely to survive in the US after you contract cancer than in the Netherlands. YMMV.

Did you factor wealth into that? I would hazard a guess that the bottom 20%-40% in the U.S. would have a considerably lower survival rate than the average for the rest of the country.

It is for the entire population. I personally know people on welfare that received advanced new treatments and survived "terminal" cancer to this day.

The overall cancer survival rate in the US for males is around 67%, which is extremely high even by developed world standards. It wouldn't be possible to have a survival rate that high if a large fraction of the population was excluded from treatment.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#212

Post by cabaalis »

I am a moderate conservative. I believe in self-reliance, fiscal responsibility, limited government. But receiving a death sentence like this one, physically and financially, is something I believe society could easily work together to create a parachute for.

It seems reasonable to me that not all healthcare should be covered by the government. Individuals need skin in the game for their own care. But catastrophic, life-ending diseases like cancer are a public crisis that every single one of us has been affected by in some way.

If there's a reason for government intervention of some kind, it's that.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#213

Post by [deleted] »

gaius wrote: post #33
Pharmakon wrote: post #4

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.

[deleted]

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#214

Post by nostrademons »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #90
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average basically is the median - IQ is pretty well normally distributed.

Just to continue the aside, it actually is perfectly normally distributed, since it is a purely statistical measure. http://michna.com/iq.htm

His rebuttal to the "IQ has fat tails" argument isn't very convincing. He's arguing that IQ should be defined as your percentile rank converted into a numeric score based on a Gaussian of mean 100 and stddev 15, but then goes on to say that yes, the results of most IQ tests will deviate from that Gaussian in the extremes, but that's because the tests are inaccurate, and will have whatever distribution the test-makers give them (which is probably not Gaussian).

However, a definition that differs from basically every empirical measurement of that quantity isn't a very good definition! That's like defining pi as 22/7 or the fine structure constant as 1/137 because it makes the math easier. Sure, that's true, and it makes it easier to explain to laypeople...but you're going to have problems when you try to predict or draw conclusions about the results of any experiments. Same with IQ - you can define it as the percentile rank converted to a scale with 100 as the mean and 15 as the stddev, but if that yields the prediction that children with a 175 IQ (5 stddev) are going to be 1 in 2 million while the observed frequency on say a Stanford Binet L-M is 1 in 10,000, you're going to draw drastically erroneous conclusions. (In practice the WISC3 and Stanford-Binet 5th ed aren't very useful for highly-gifted children anyway, because they ceiling out around 140 IQ, and basically all IQs over that are estimated with either the Binet L-M or early administration of the SATs.)

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#215

Post by seppin »

Someguywhatever wrote: post #99
Retric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is China civilized? No. The rampant corruption, lack of free speech, etc don't qualify as civilized IMO.

I think in China you can say whatever you want about anything, you just can't criticize the government. In the US you can criticize the government but can't say whatever you want about anything else without blowback. In China the government persecutes you, in the US it's your fellow citizens.

Yes, one is censorship the other is consequence of being a jerk.

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#216

Post by anonuser123456 »

mikeash wrote: post #50
rayiner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are enormously beneficial to insurance companies (they essentially have unlimited liability without them) and there is a ton of money to have the caps reinstated. I don't understand why you'd phrase it this way. Under the ACA, 80% of premiums have to go to medical care. A dollar saved providing care disproportionately benefits the premium payers, not the company. People act like all this money comes out of in…

The entire point of insurance is to pool risk so that a bunch of people together pay reasonable amounts, instead of a few people paying enormous amounts and the others paying less. Lifetime limits give you lower rates in exchange for making the insurance much less like actual insurance. If we’re talking about “don’t piss on my leg and tell me its raining,” don’t sell me “health insurance” that will leave me high and…

I don't have any other insurance policies with unlimited caps. My home, auto, liability etc all have limits. Why is healthcare special in this regard?

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#217

Post by Arbitrary4657 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #211
davvolun wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you factor wealth into that? I would hazard a guess that the bottom 20%-40% in the U.S. would have a considerably lower survival rate than the average for the rest of the country.

It is for the entire population. I personally know people on welfare that received advanced new treatments and survived "terminal" cancer to this day. The overall cancer survival rate in the US for males is around 67%, which is extremely high even by developed world standards. It wouldn't be possible to have a survival rate that high if a large fraction of the population was excluded from treatment.

Anecdote != data. Do you have a source for that survival rate?

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#218

Post by scottshamus »

chimeracoder wrote: post #162
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also how single-payer healthcare works in the majority of countries that have it. The problem is simple - in most developed countries, health insurance doesn't bankrupt the people it serves. It also doesn't have policy limits for common terminal illnesses. So why does this happen in the US - a country with insanely high costs and relatively mediocre health outcomes? The problem isn't insurance, it's the influenc…

> It's also how single-payer healthcare works in the majority of countries that have it. Only a couple of countries actually have single-payer healthcare[0]. For those that do, treatment for complex, expensive conditions like cancer is regulated by the government much more strictly than in the US, with the result that patients have far fewer options for (covered) treatment. Incidentally, those countries, like the UK,…

Do you have any citation for the "dramatically worse" claim?

Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

#219

Post by btrettel »

kxyvr wrote: post #209
kbos87 wrote: post #118

I recently watched a family member go through this. A few things that were sobering to see: - Three weeks in she was buried in paperwork. One chemo treatment would turn into 4-5 invoices from different subcontractors at a single hospital, some covered by her insurance, others not covered. Her insurer denied claims arbitrarily and made her go through a bunch of invasive and unnecessary procedures to prove her illness.…

I'm sorry your family member went through this. That's terrible and no one should have to deal with that kind of treatment. I'll echo much of what you said. When I was 21, I was diagnosed and treated for malignant melanoma (skin cancer) that had metastasized to my lymph nodes. The treatment worked and I've been healthy for many years. That said, it changed the way and manner in which I deal with billing and insurance…

Thanks, this was very informative and will change how I handle medical bills.

Unrelated comment: I recognized your handle from some of your earlier posts where you said you're an independent researcher. I'd be interested in learning more about how you got started, if you're willing of course. You can contact me by email at the address in my profile.

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