31–40 of 66 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When each one accuses someone else of gouging us, assume that they're all gouging us.
Doctors are paid the same as software engineers for a job that is like 10x as hard. MBA hospital administrators have greed as their official main job responsibility.
A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to it through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man he only accepts them "so that you do not think you have left anything undone". The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain entry to the law, but waits at the doorway until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why, even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years he has been there. The doorkeeper answers, "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it"Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite many countries limit the supply of doctors with less expensive health schemes.
In the UK the government both limits the supply of doctors and manages a fairly cheap National Health Service. How? It is rationed by queuing and achieves poor medical outcomes.
I somewhat dislike the line of Kafka commentary that focuses on The Trial and The Castle and then associates their bureaucratic themes with his own life experience working various office jobs. One, because his writing is about much more than this theme (in which kafkesque is too frequently confused/mixed with Orwellian ) but more because it pushes away his short stories and aphorisms, which I think are much, much bet…
I also have read both the original German der Process and the English translation, and I feel that, even though German is my second language, the original has so much more terror and humor than the English version, which largely reads like a bureaucratic text itself. Understanding that Kafka would laugh out loud while reading his texts to his friend, I like to imagine his works to be a kind of interwar Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I love to imagine Josef K as Larry David.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC about 40 percent of all medical expenses are administrative costs and about 20 percent is drug costs. Improving those could drop healthcare costs by nearly half, without lowering healthcare salaries. To lower medical salaries, we need to address (a) the AMA acting as a cartel, (b) residency slots being paid for by Medicare and being limited, and (c) crippling student debt problems. As an example, nurse practitio…
> Improving those could drop healthcare costs by nearly half Wouldn't you have to decrease spending on admin and drugs up to 10x which would likely bring US well below the costs in most/all other rich c I'm not sure how feasible it would be to reduce admin and drug costs by almost 10x? Edit: to be fair 10x might not that far-fetched as I might have thought, admin costs are massively higher than anywhere else: https:/…
Also, you have to be careful about how you account for “administrative costs”. Medicare has low “administrative costs” but correspondingly high rates of fraud vs. a typical private insurer who has the incentive to spend more looking for it—administrative costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When each one accuses someone else of gouging us, assume that they're all gouging us.
Doctors are paid the same as software engineers for a job that is like 10x as hard. MBA hospital administrators have greed as their official main job responsibility.
I somewhat dislike the line of Kafka commentary that focuses on The Trial and The Castle and then associates their bureaucratic themes with his own life experience working various office jobs. One, because his writing is about much more than this theme (in which kafkesque is too frequently confused/mixed with Orwellian ) but more because it pushes away his short stories and aphorisms, which I think are much, much bet…