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Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

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Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#281

Post by jpadkins »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #257
Aurornis wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries. Wealthy people would learn to structure their earnings to flow into businesses in other countries to avoid this wealth tax. This would reduce income tax in the United States. I would guess the overall effect would trend toward a net tax loss. If you gave 40 million people an extra $15K per year to spend, the…

The end result of this logic is that poverty must exist for society to function and I just don’t accept that.

The OPM from the US government is defined as a relative wealth function, so technically it has to exist. Also you can compare the standard of living of someone above the poverty line in 1910 vs someone below the poverty line 2010, and 99% of people wouldn't trade places. Access to running water, toilets, air conditioning TV, Internet, mobile phones, etc makes life a lot better than what we called middle class 100 years ago. [source https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/air-c... ]

It's all relative and as long it's relative, mathematically speaking poverty has to exist.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#282

Post by bix6 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #57
bix6 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious where you live that healthcare is more than housing?

Childcare + Healthcare is more than housing. Healthcare alone would be more than the house we had before this one.

Ah the combo I see. So if someone is also renting or paying a mortgage they’re toast.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#283

Post by Der_Einzige »

epistasis wrote: post #166
toomuchtodo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://penncapital-star.com/uncategorized/americans-suffer-... > In 2022, UnitedHealth Group made over $20 billion in profit. Cigna made $6.7 billion, Elevance Health made $6 billion and CVS Health made $4.2 billion. All told, America’s largest health insurers raked in more than $41 billion of profits in 2022. Universal healthcare is good. America's for profit system is bad. You have to get rid of for profit insurer…

Big numbers with no context come across as a way to misinform. Viewed in light of total healthcare spending of roughly $5T per year, eliminating insurer profits does not appear to be even a drop in the bucket. Our healthcare costs are certainly a policy choice, but eliminating profit does not fix the system, and many far more cost effective systems around the world are fully profit based. Edit: absolutely wild to see…

If maga will eat shit just so a liberal has to smell it than “communist” jacobin readers will take third world health care just to force MAGA to deal with it.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#284

Post by conductr »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #212
conductr wrote: post #122

Wage stagnation is the root problem. When costs of all expenses go up over time but paychecks do not, it causes major stress.

It's more Baumols cost disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

I don’t think either of us is wrong

In more macro sense it’s wage stagnation driving purchasing power as compared to inflation. Under the hood, workers are experiencing it differently based on their trade and industry.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#285

Post by epistasis »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #142
cvwright wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs also used to be a lot lower - at least for most people who just pay the premium and don’t need much care. Now it’s not uncommon for a family’s health insurance to cost more than their housing. The people who are mad are those who are paying more and not experiencing the benefits.

https://penncapital-star.com/uncategorized/americans-suffer-... > In 2022, UnitedHealth Group made over $20 billion in profit. Cigna made $6.7 billion, Elevance Health made $6 billion and CVS Health made $4.2 billion. All told, America’s largest health insurers raked in more than $41 billion of profits in 2022. Universal healthcare is good. America's for profit system is bad. You have to get rid of for profit insurer…

Your comment has been edited extensible since you first posted some misleading numbers, so I'm adding this new comment on one of your additions:

> As long as a profit motive exists, there will be incentives to reduce or avoid care for more profits.

This is reversed from reality. Insurer incentives are to increase care and costs all the time. Their profits are tied to a fixed percentage of total expenditure, so the only way to increase profits is to increase costs.

Start replacing cheaper scans with MRIs, etc. Then profits rise.

Look throughout the entire system, and everybody's incentive is to perform more healthcare. That's the profit incentive throughout the system, from care providers to test providers to insurance companies.

That's a major (but not only) reason healthcare expenditures are such a high percentage of GDP compared to other countries, why healthcare expenditures are $5T per year in the US.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#286

Post by Der_Einzige »

thuuuomas wrote: post #191
Steve16384 wrote: post #73

Exactly the things that a well meaning society should provide to its citizens. What's the point of "progress" if we can't provide the basics to the majority?

In the United States, the working poor are considered deserving of their burdens in an immutable, moralizing, Calvinist way. “They make bad choices.” “They have bad culture.” “They have bad genes.”

[flagged]

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#287

Post by Aunche »

stackskipton wrote: post #204
Aurornis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did everyone just forget what it was like before Obamacare? Apparently you didn’t know anyone excluded for pre-existing conditions Obamacare also mandated coverage for basic care like your annual physical and many mental health conditions. It’s not perfect, but I guess it’s been long enough that people are forgetting how bad the situation was before.

>Did everyone just forget what it was like before Obamacare? Nope, I was adult working at IBM. I had very good medical insurance where it was small copay every time I saw the doctor. I had to get minor surgery on my foot and it was 50 bucks total. I think total cost billed to insurance was 500. Condition returned in 2023 and I was forced to get surgery again, I ended up paying ~750 dollars because of my Out of Pocket…

High deductible plans are the norm because HSAs are basically free money. Maybe Obamacare really is to blame for shittier health insurance, but it's also possible that IBM is just paying relatively less than it used to. Employers can deposit into your HSA, which effectively lowers your deductible below the minimum required to qualify as a high deductible plan.

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#288

Post by jpadkins »

garciasn wrote: post #156
Steve16384 wrote: post #73

Exactly the things that a well meaning society should provide to its citizens. What's the point of "progress" if we can't provide the basics to the majority?

Just look at the name of each of the primary groups in the US: - Progressives - Moderates - Conservatives Progressives, by definition, want 'progress'. Conversely, Conservatives do NOT want progress; if anything, they want regression and thus their desire to roll everything back done in the name of Progress(ives). Moderates just want to play both sides and find some sort of middle ground; something that doesn't reall…

so if a junior dev checks in 4k lines of crap code in the codebase, is that progress?

And what do you call the more senior engineer that advises we make changes carefully, and that there are subtle, important reasons why systems are working well today. Is that engineer a conservative?

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#289

Post by verdverm »

Epa095 wrote: post #138

I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise: look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%. And it really is as simpl…

Also look at the wealth inequality graphs

The oligarchs want a new gilded age

Re: Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

#290

Post by FabHK »

gruez wrote: post #162
Epa095 wrote: post #138

I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise: look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%. And it really is as simpl…

>And it really is as simple as that. It really isn't, because your "simple" comparison is bunk. For one, it's measuring stock vs flow. Stock prices measure stock, eg. the size of a piggy bank. Salaries measure flow, eg. your annual salary. Directly comparing the two results is meaningless. It's easy to demonstrate this with the piggy bank example. If your salary was 50k/year, you saved 5k/year, then your piggy bank w…

Good point. Doubling in 7 years means around 10% growth per year. So, if someone took out 10% of their stock nest-egg per year, it wouldn't have grown at all.

Having said that, GP does illustrate Picketty's point in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that r>g, that is return on capital is greater than economic growth, and Picketty did theorise that this would inevitably lead to concentration of wealth (unless war or other calamities reset the scale).

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