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The Other Half

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Re: The Other Half

#261

Post by branchless »

gknoy wrote: post #215
branchless wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand how people take the USA seriously. One of the most important things, which I doubt is in dispute, is access to healthcare. The USA tells us their model of capitalism is the best. They apply their system to healthcare. It utterly fails to deliver versus "socialist" solutions. At what point are you guys going to join the dots on this contradiction?

> One of the most important things, which I doubt is in dispute, is access to healthcare. One dispute seems to be over the meaning of the word "access". Some people, like my Libertarian friend, feel that "access" is satisfied if you have the freedom to choose your provider (or none at all) -- but god help you if you don't have any money, because no one should be taxed to pay for others' health care. For many, taxatio…

First up: I'm using the non-muddled version of access. Libetarians might say you can access it but they would also want full death tax, free access to land and a money system based on fair issuance of debt, meaning that people had a fighting chance of affording said care.

The US is a crazy cult for "capitalism" and "free" markets. The problem I have is the absolutism about it. Markets can solve everything. This is the USA position. They force other countries to change to it via the IMF, not content with messing up their own country.

Yet even on a very simple system to model, sports, they have a socialist model. You finish bottom you get the first draft pick. Because when reasoning about a small group of teams it's patently obvious that if you give all the TV rights to the top team, all the draft picks to the top team, you end up with a total mess.

Re: The Other Half

#262

Post by Frondo »

fencepost wrote: post #204
DanBC wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He said middle-aged guys with no obvious health problems Why would anyone see a doctor unless they had a health problem? (Or wanted health advice?)

> Why would anyone see a doctor unless they had a health problem? (Or wanted health advice?) Because "sedentary middle-aged American eating a typical American diet" (possibly including "fat" as well) might as well be considered a preexisting condition all by itself, and a simple checkup may catch something that can be addressed before it becomes a hospital visit. Most notable as things to watch out for are high blood…

Interesting. I was one of those stupid men who was immobilized with pain from acute cholecystitis, I went to the ER, and they still did it laparoscopically.

I did spend two nights in the hospital (one before the surgery, one after), but I'm surprised that surgery would be considered outpatient under any circumstances. Do they really send people home immediately after putting them under and rooting around in their chest cavities?

Re: The Other Half

#263

Post by reciprocity »

textfiles wrote: post #246

Hi, I'm Jason Scott. I had a heart attack and I'm the one who wrote the essay this is linking to. Since the entry was written last week, I went back to the Emergency Room twice. The first was because I was just feeling "a little weird", and they did a round of tests and verified that no, I'm healing fine, that's just how I feel now (I feel less weird every day). The second time was a few days later when I experienced…

I appreciate you taking the time to share your story!

Re: The Other Half

#264

Post by khedoros1 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #202
matt4077 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not completely sold on the relationship of stress and heart disease. I spend some time working in politics, and almost all principals worked 18h-days with less than 5h of sleep during the week. Yet life expectancy is higher than average. There are obviously ots of competing factors at work: they have plenty of opportunities to eat healthy, and the discipline that makes them get up at 5am also makes them go for a…

> bosses had to retire after run-ins with the crystal meth law they themselves passed... Wait, what?

Sounds like his bosses were politicians who helped get stricter drug laws passed, then were caught using those drugs.

Re: The Other Half

#265

Post by Cass »

ars wrote: post #237
komali2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding insurance, I wonder if you would have gone in if you were Keith, who at 35 is working sales at a department store. He might not even have been insured.

Want to disrupt the heart attack market? Make a small home machine that can take an EKG and tell you if everything is fine, or if you should go get checked. Adjust it to give some false positives, but no false negatives. Make it cost around $50, and make sure it's fully reusable (i.e. you can borrow one from a friend for a quick check). If machine learning is not up to the task, then send the EKG to a doctor, I belie…

An EKG machine cannot tell you whether you're fine or not. Not all heart attacks show up on EKGs, which is why the hospital will do a blood test for Troponin, too. A home Trop test would do what you want, but it can take several hours for the test to turn positive, and the hours between the onset of pain and the blood test showing that you're having a heart attack should really be spent attached to a cardiac monitor and in the presence of trained medical personnel, i.e. in hospital.

Re: The Other Half

#266

Post by stefantalpalaru »

mikeash wrote: post #5

"I’d now had been experiencing a heart attack for about a week." Holy cow. I didn't realize this was possible. This is a good lesson to all of us not to ignore weird, painful phenomena in our body.

>"I’d now had been experiencing a heart attack for about a week."

>Holy cow. I didn't realize this was possible.

It sounds more like ischaemia than infarct - so probably angina paectoris, not heart attack.

While we're at it, anticoagulants don't make your blood "thin" - they work by disrupting the coagulation cascade and have no effect on viscosity.

Re: The Other Half

#267

Post by Frondo »

gknoy wrote: post #215
branchless wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand how people take the USA seriously. One of the most important things, which I doubt is in dispute, is access to healthcare. The USA tells us their model of capitalism is the best. They apply their system to healthcare. It utterly fails to deliver versus "socialist" solutions. At what point are you guys going to join the dots on this contradiction?

> One of the most important things, which I doubt is in dispute, is access to healthcare. One dispute seems to be over the meaning of the word "access". Some people, like my Libertarian friend, feel that "access" is satisfied if you have the freedom to choose your provider (or none at all) -- but god help you if you don't have any money, because no one should be taxed to pay for others' health care. For many, taxatio…

You can tell them that taxation isn't theft because taxation is legal and democratically decided, and theft is not legal.

They will probably argue back, "in both cases you're taking something by force," but there are lots of pairs of things that share some traits but not others.

Sharing a trait does not make the two things the same thing (i.e. prison vs kidnapping, again, one is legal and one is not).

Re: The Other Half

#268

Post by Frondo »

incompatible wrote: post #226
blackflame7000 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a false assumption to say that because socialized healthcare works in some countries, the entire scheme of capitalism is therefore inferior. There are a number of unique aspects of Human health and insurance that make it very difficult to manage using conventional capitalistic means. (Namely that a human cannot be totalled whereas an object can) However, that is not an indictment on capitalism but is instead a…

We can start by asking if capitalism is inferior at providing health care, at least. People sometimes assume that capitalism means free markets. In practice it can also mean oligopolies, monopolies, rigged systems, and scams. That may describe the US health system, propped up with government regulations and subsidies.

For my part, I don't see a need to try out a more capitalist health care system when there are lots of people showing a good working socialized model in lots of other countries.

I'd say, go with what works.

Re: The Other Half

#269

Post by dragonwriter »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #231
incompatible wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can start by asking if capitalism is inferior at providing health care, at least. People sometimes assume that capitalism means free markets. In practice it can also mean oligopolies, monopolies, rigged systems, and scams. That may describe the US health system, propped up with government regulations and subsidies.

"In practice it can also mean oligopolies, monopolies, rigged systems, and scams" - Pure capitalism has none of those things. What you are referring to is cronyism which increases proportionally to the size of the market. Regulation should in theory be used to keep markets of sufficient size in check but it's a double edged sword. Often times regulation creates even more cronyism since only the approved players can a…

Pure capitalism, the real world system dominant in the industrialized West in the 19th Century for which critics coined the term "capitalism", has all of those things.

The unrealistic fantasy later capitalists developed as a propaganda to sell capitalism doesn't have those features, but then it also has nothing to do with anything that is, has, or ever could be, realized in the real world.

Re: The Other Half

#270

Post by nommm-nommm »

Tepix wrote: post #179
ryandrake wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably haven't been to a doctor for years and years. Like most Americans I have pretty shitty health insurance, and it's mostly about avoiding unnecessary expenses. I don't have any burning desire to pay a doctor, a blood test lab, and all the other various administrative leeches, just for them to all tell me everything's good. If something happens and I get seriously ill, I accept that I'll be paying through the…

Nope. The longer you wait, the worse are your chances and the more expensive it will be.

Thats a pretty bold conclusion. What evidence do you have to assert this? I'm not being a jerk, its just everything I've read in the past indicated that routine checkups do not lead to better health outcomes. If new contradicting evidence is available I'd love to know.
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