211–220 of 314 posts
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How does this rhyme with the fact that many countries have well functioning, tax financed healthcare systems?
Just because it's "free" doesn't mean you aren't paying plenty for it.
Of course people still pay. It's not provided by magic fairies.
However, it's not automatically inefficient just because it's publicly funded.
The author apparently has no idea how to do CPI calculations. She somehow seems to be calculating inflation adjusted wage increases to CPI changes. Rather-- Median Family income in 1970 was $9,870 [0] Median Family income in 2021 was $79,900 [1] CPI in 1970 was 38.8 [2] CPI in 2021 was 271.0 Ratio of incomes = 8.1 Ratio of CPI = 6.98 So household income has increased more than inflation. Median household income might…
The title's premise is so outlandish it deserves at least a little bit of critical thought... But because it confirms some previous biases (even if at a completely different and more extreme scale), more than I expected are acting as if this is true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this rhyme with the fact that many countries have well functioning, tax financed healthcare systems?
Just because it's "free" doesn't mean you aren't paying plenty for it.
See the chart at https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm; we pay more in taxes than any other OECD nation does total for healthcare, and then pile individual spending on top of that.
It's a terrible article, but that title is somehow worse.
(Honestly, I don't think this really deserves a submission, it's just wrong..)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because it's "free" doesn't mean you aren't paying plenty for it.
> tax financed Of course people still pay. It's not provided by magic fairies. However, it's not automatically inefficient just because it's publicly funded.
It's inefficient because nobody is as careful spending other peoples' money as they are with their own money.
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Really? I remember a thread on reddit about the HBO series Chernobyl. A lot of posters who lived through it commented. One I recall said that root canals were free in the USSR, but you didn't get any anesthetic. Another commented that the hospital stay was free, but you had to bribe the nurses to take care of you. Having had a root canal myself, it's "no thanks" to free communist health care.
I’d rather suffer through it and live, than die because I couldn’t afford it.
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I have long advocated for Japanese-style federal zoning rules which would stop local municipalities from playing these games. I agree that housing is more expensive, but of course, housing is priced into inflation numbers - and wages have kept pace. Housing is a major driver of inflation. Part of the discrepancy here - and housing needs its own entire article - is how low interest rates factor into affordability. In…
Isn't the down payment delta pretty significant? Having to save 160k instead of 40k for a 20% down payment significantly delays the point at which a millennial household could start accruing home equity, feel confident about starting a family, etc.
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The expense comes from the cost of poor people getting free emergency room treatment getting passed on to the paying customers.
No, it doesn't. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06147-9 > The overall mean for charity care as percent of total expenses was 2.62% for for-profit hospitals compared with 2.95% for nonprofit hospitals...
The author apparently has no idea how to do CPI calculations. She somehow seems to be calculating inflation adjusted wage increases to CPI changes. Rather-- Median Family income in 1970 was $9,870 [0] Median Family income in 2021 was $79,900 [1] CPI in 1970 was 38.8 [2] CPI in 2021 was 271.0 Ratio of incomes = 8.1 Ratio of CPI = 6.98 So household income has increased more than inflation. Median household income might…
The consumer price index (CPI) is untrustworthy. It incorporates adjustments into things like technology that don't actually reflect utility. For example, if you look at the section on "Computers, peripherals, and smart home assistants" you'll note a nearly 300-fold decrease in the consumer price of computers from 1997 to 2022. How the heck does that work? Computers today are cheaper than in 1997 but surely not 300 t…
So while if you buy new you can't get very much computer, if you buy a bunch of junkers, you can get enough to get by. But they have to be in a sweet spot of "old enough" to have depressed price and "new enough" to not be useless for current applications. This was actually a problem during the 2010's long reign of Intel, because they didn't add a lot of generational performance improvement, so old systems retained their price for longer. Since other architectures have caught up on leading performance, pricing has finally started discounting these older CPUs again.
Still, it's not a 300-fold difference and the bottommost price brackets tend to need a DIY approach. But it's definitely more feasible than 1997.
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This is all true, but I am guessing the article skipped it because rising healthcare costs likely impact Gen Z much less than the population overall. Obamacare has allowed children to stay on their parent's insurance for much longer. All of Gen Z is still young enough to qualify for that, so as a generation they haven't felt the full cost of seeking insurance independently. Plus the overturning of the personal mandat…
> There is still something very wrong with the healthcare system in the US Government interference with the free market.
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 treatment can cause some massive negative externalities. Just imagine how bad it would be if there was a massive pandemic and only the rich could afford vaccines; there would be so many unvaccinated hosts for that virus that new variants would keep emerging and significantly harm the quality of life for everyone.
Also, market efficiencies are largely a product of the ability of the consumer to compare the price and quality of different services. When the government is the consumer, it A) can afford to allocate this task to a few experts (rather than demand the entire population learn how to evaluate the cost and efficacy of medical treatments), B) can use its monopsony power to negotiate prices, and C) can use its treatment and outcome data to identify opportunities to do preventative maintenance rather than the more expensive (in both life and money) emergency care.
I'm more sympathetic to free markets than most, but healthcare is arguably the sector where free markets would produce the worst outcomes.