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Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

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Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#331

Post by Forbo »

danieltillett wrote: post #298
moduspol wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's truly worrying that comments like these are made unironically. Is there any amount of currency printing that you believe might be problematic? Or is the sky the limit? Perhaps most importantly: What happens if we accept your claim, spend and print money ad infinitem, and then you're wrong?

MMT sounds awfully like the Magic Pudding [1]. If governments can just print any amount of money they like to pay for everything whence cometh hyperinflation? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding

I don't understand why this discussion often turns to the Fed issuing more money, rather than the re-allocation of existing funds. It's pretty clear that the US is already spending more as far as %/GDP/per capita on healthcare than other countries that have socialized medicine. To me that just screams waste and inefficiency, er, I mean... profits!

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#332

Post by vamos_davai »

maxxxxx wrote: post #156
vamos_davai wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the frustration, but I think the anger should be directed at inefficiencies in the market. You can examine UPMC's Charge Description Master File for their different hospitals, and the cost for Y-90 Sirsphere is $222406.00 in Pittsburgh and $56687.00 in Erie ($150,000 and 2 hours drive difference). Not bashing UPMC, but this probably applies to hospitals around the country. These hospitals have huge costs…

"You can examine UPMC's Charge Description Master File for their different hospitals, and the cost for Y-90 Sirsphere is $222406.00 in Pittsburgh and $56687.00 in Erie ($150,000 and 2 hours drive difference)." And you know that the charge master prices are pretty much phantasy and nobody knows what the insurance rates are. They should have to open up all pricing. There should be no hidden negotiated prices and all hi…

They're legally required to since Jan 1, 2019. https://www.newsweek.com/end-hidden-costs-january-1st-all-us...

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#333

Post by cannonedhamster »

rootusrootus wrote: post #274
metalliqaz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The political system in the US biases area over population. The Senate will remain conservative as long as rural states remain conservative, and that will never change.

I'm not sure I'd bet on that. Cities are almost universally liberal, and even rural states start to turn blue as they get their own big cities.

Unfortunately without proportional voting being mandated purple states like Texas remain solidly red due to vast gerrymandering purposefully made to deny people the right to their representation by diluting their vote. This is actually the main cause of polarization in the US as candidates need to play to their base instead of moderating to play to a moderate base.

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#334

Post by bubbleRefuge »

moduspol wrote: post #282
bubbleRefuge wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal government cannot be crippled because it can issue currency ad-infinitem. As AOC is wonderfully publicizing, the notion that government finance works like household and business finance is finally starting to be debunked and at least talked about openly. There maybe other problems with universal healthcare, but financing it is not one of them.

It's truly worrying that comments like these are made unironically. Is there any amount of currency printing that you believe might be problematic? Or is the sky the limit? Perhaps most importantly: What happens if we accept your claim, spend and print money ad infinitem, and then you're wrong?

Inflation! Why can't the conversation be "how far can we go before we hit inflation?" instead of "we can't afford it" because we of the household analogy ?

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#335

Post by cannonedhamster »

JamesBarney wrote: post #65
cletus wrote: post #34

In Australia the Leftist government of Gough Whitlam introduced health-coverage-for-all in 1975 with a scheme called Medibank. In 1984 after a couple of governments, Bob Hawke's Leftist government created the Medicare scheme (Medibank became a government provider of private health insurance), which exists to this day. The most interesting stat I ever heard about Medicare was this: prior to Medicare the number one cau…

I'm all for universal coverage too. But reducing the profits of pharmaceutical companies well reduce the money they have for r&d dramatically. This will slow down the speed of pharmaceutical development. So I think it needs to be paired with reforms to the FDA to reduce the go to market costs for drugs.

Most basic research is funded by the government as there's no inherent profit motive. Research to make use of the foundational discoveries is funded by profit motive, as they get a monopoly on any working product. I'm pretty sure R&D is safe as there will always be profit to be made. You're also assuming congress isn't in bed with the industries, the ones who massively fund their campaigns and offer nice lobbying jobs afterwards.

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#336

Post by bubbleRefuge »

danieltillett wrote: post #298
moduspol wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's truly worrying that comments like these are made unironically. Is there any amount of currency printing that you believe might be problematic? Or is the sky the limit? Perhaps most importantly: What happens if we accept your claim, spend and print money ad infinitem, and then you're wrong?

MMT sounds awfully like the Magic Pudding [1]. If governments can just print any amount of money they like to pay for everything whence cometh hyperinflation? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding

Thank you very much. This is precisely conversation we need to have. Exhibit A: Obama boom we hit 10% GDP deficits, the biggest since WWII resulting in no inflation and in fact slight deflation and GDP never averaged above 3% annually. Exhibit B: WWII, we hit around 22% GDP deficits. Full employment ( with a very high labor participation rate [rosy the rivoter, etc]) no hyperinflation and probably not much inflation.

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#337

Post by cannonedhamster »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #133
cletus wrote: post #34

In Australia the Leftist government of Gough Whitlam introduced health-coverage-for-all in 1975 with a scheme called Medibank. In 1984 after a couple of governments, Bob Hawke's Leftist government created the Medicare scheme (Medibank became a government provider of private health insurance), which exists to this day. The most interesting stat I ever heard about Medicare was this: prior to Medicare the number one cau…

The United States currently has the highest 5 year survival rate for all cancers combined. I think it's a fair question to ask if that would continue to be the case in a MFA system for 300 million patients. Considering what a disaster the insurance marketplace was, I'm very skeptical. Edit: what I mean by "disaster": when it launched, the site completely crashed for over a month and then, when it finally came back up…

As a person with cancer going through treatment, even with fully paid for by my employer healthcare and making a good amount of money, this is super expensive and if I didn't have a job where I could work remote, I'd probably be bankrupt by now with all the time I have to spend in treatment and the initial surgeries.

5 year survival rates vary by the type of cancer, while cancers like leukemia, prostate, and breast cancer have made progress, most of those survival rate numbers are based on catching the cancer early, which, unfortunately most aren't caught early leading to a poor prognosis, my prognosis for example is 5% overall survival for 5 years with a significant drop off after 3 years. The survival rate is also heavily dependent on comorbidities, or other things that impact your health, this can leave things like surgery off the table.

Another fun fact is that we really still suck at cancer treatment because we don't know how it functions, and as previously stated there's over 100 different types of cancer, each with their own mechanisms and subtypes.

So to your main point, no unless there's some massive breakthrough in immunotherapy that's pan-cancer responsive for most patients (right now immunotherapy only works for roughly 20-30% of patients), the costs aren't going to go up dramatically as the primary option is surgery if it's early and if it's late you're probably still going to be dead within 5 years. The number of patients surviving each year only goes up by about roughly 2% per year.

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#338

Post by cannonedhamster »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #191
bryanlarsen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 year survival rate is poorly correlated with treatment efficacy. It's mostly correlated with how early a cancer is diagnosed. In most cases it's a good thing to detect cancers early, but saying a country is good at detecting cancers is not near as strong of a statement as saying that a country is good at treating cancers. And this gets complicated by prostrate cancer -- many would argue that mass screening for pros…

So then it can be argued that, due to long wait times in MFA, the cancer survival rate would go down due to later diagnosis.

Nope, the reason it's diagnosed late is often due to many cancers being asymptomatic and aggressive. Your immune system literally cannot recognize the bad cells because of checkpoint inhibitors among other things.

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#339

Post by cannonedhamster »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #180
burkaman wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cherry-picked stat. Most health outcomes are worse in the US than other rich countries with universal healthcare. There are many studies and charts you can search for, here's one: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26746...

1. This entire article and thread is about cancer, so I'm not cherry picking. If anything the broad "health outcomes" is a diversion from the main subject. 2. What percentage of poorer "health outcomes" are due to the US's ~33% obesity rate and overall horrid diet and have nothing to do with care or access?

Regarding obesity, there's a belief that's indicated by some studies that show obesity is related to causing cancer in younger people by clogging up the works and preventing your immune system from killing off the cancer cells.

Re: Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

#340

Post by cannonedhamster »

emddudley wrote: post #194
5trokerac3 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States currently has the highest 5 year survival rate for all cancers combined. I think it's a fair question to ask if that would continue to be the case in a MFA system for 300 million patients. Considering what a disaster the insurance marketplace was, I'm very skeptical. Edit: what I mean by "disaster": when it launched, the site completely crashed for over a month and then, when it finally came back up…

It sounds like you are implying that cancer survival rates are affected by the way Americans pay for healthcare. What specific mechanisms do you think are the cause? Total spending, ability to see doctors, insurance company approval of certain treatments...? Or something else?

There is actually evidence to show that while the coastal blue states and Texas have better (not great but better) survival outcomes, the ability to get diagnosed earlier is tied to access to preventative healthcare because if you have good health insurance and money you're more likely to go to the doctor if something doesn't seem severe, like most initial cancer symptoms, this causes patients to only go to the emergency room for health care which is often too late for a surgical option as the cancer has metastasized to your lymph nodes, which generally means it's in your other organs as well. This leaves chemotherapy and radiation as the resulting therapies, which while these can be effective, it's basically only life prolonging as radiation has a limit on how much you can due and damages other healthy tissue in the area and chemotherapy comes with side effects, organ damage, etc. and the cancer will eventually mutate, or the treatment could only slow the cancer or do nothing. Unfortunately doctors mostly don't know why the same treatment that works for the most patients doesn't work for all patients. Other treatments such as clinical trials can be either, unavailable for patients due to distance, trial rules, or a lack of expression of the marker that the medicine is hoping to exploit. While these are typically of no cost to the patient, it still means you have to be lucky enough to be near the location, be able to have the time off from work for the treatments which can take half a day at a time, and be able to have reliable transportation that isn't you driving yourself as the treatments can cause unpredictable side effects.
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