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The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

aaronstannard.com

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Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#341

Post by expedition32 »

anon7000 wrote: post #334
bonsai_spool wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And what the OP is pointing out is that if your injury is $30K, insurance covers nothing, because the premium + deductible is $40K. The point of insurance is to mitigate risk. If you think you have enough money to cover your risk, there's no reason to buy insurance. The sleight of hand here is first complaining that you did not incur enough hazards to offset the risk premium and then citing this as a reason the ris…

Risk is not the only factor. Premium cost is probably the more important one for most. If someone can afford the $40k deductible option, but not the $5k option, you’ll just have to accept the risk. Increasing earnings significantly right now is harder than hoping medical bankruptcy won’t matter in the long run. 30% of US households make less than $50k. That’s more than 100,000,000 people in homes with less than $3.6k…

In my country people are already complaining about a 300 euro deductible (my mom has a chronic illness so she hits that every year)...

I surmise that either Americans are all rich and have 40k in savings that they can lose with no sweat or

America is hell for anyone not rich

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#342

Post by machomaster »

BeetleB wrote: post #266
machomaster wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5GB data cap is ridiculously low. Might as well only count the slow speed.

In over a decade, the only time I hit that cap was because I let my kid watch too many videos on it. 5 GB is pretty reasonable for the bulk of the country. The only common things that can make it go over are games and streaming - both of which really are luxuries if you simply can't wait till you have Wifi access. So yeah - of course you should pay a lot more if you insist on doing those things.

This is akin to him saying that average American needs X money for the car to participate in society, and you suggest that his numbers don't math because one could:

1. Walk around everywhere (Idaho, Iowa) 2. move to New York (with ok public transportation)

Mobile phone and unlimited high-speed internet are requirements for participation in society.

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#343

Post by lowkj »

barbacoa wrote: post #300
postflopclarity wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

car-dependent infrastructure and urban design is hostile to human life.

Car depend infrastructure is amazing to families. A mom can take her children to the grocery store in a car in relative safety without worrying about mentally ill homeless people on the subway.

Why would you need to get on the subway to go to the grocery store? When I lived in Paris I was within a five minute walk to at least three general grocery stores plus various speciality shops. Always plenty of parents all around. This is not uncommon in properly designed non-car dependent cities. Not to mention deliveries are just that much easier and all without a car.

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#344

Post by staticman2 »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #253
evanelias wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed your 2400-word article a second time just now, and I still don't understand why your math is allocating 100% of your family's health insurance premiums to childbirth. And now I additionally don't understand your abrasive tone in answering this fairly straightforward question. Multiple commenters are raising this point, so perhaps you should consider that you aren't conveying this information well?

1. I mentioned, in multiple places, that this is the cheapest PPO offered to me through a limited selection of potential brokers / marketplaces - and that's important because it covers our current health care providers AND child birth as a benefit. 2. If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically. Individual marketplace plans become a viable, for instance, since the…

You are spreading misinformation when you say ACA doesn't cover childbirth.

If this was true it would be plastered in every newspaper for the last 15 years.

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#345

Post by teeray »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #310
teeray wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, I hand my credit card to the vet for a bottle of Gabapentin and I’m out the door.

That will be uhm, $15. Have a fantastic holiday!

My point being that healthcare costs for pets are immediately calculable, where it’s a big damn mystery for months on end about how much equivalent human healthcare will end up costing. Clearly, if the former is possible, the latter should be too.

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#346

Post by marbro »

ASinclair wrote: post #191
AnnaPali wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christian healthcare sharers do precisely this. By restricting services and the population addressed (your pastor or priest must sign off on your application), everything's extremely affordable. In particular, as we don't drink, do drugs, use contraceptives etc. we don't pay for coverage of them or their side effects. Obesity's also less of an issue. There's also the trick of telling the hospital you'll pay "in cash"…

So your pastor or priest conveniently rejects you if you have a chronic illness.

[dead]

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#347

Post by Tostino »

greenavocado wrote: post #335
cal_dent wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow. this thread is microcosm of how wild and polarised the internet can be.

It's pure facts. I used to live in a city where me and my wife were terrorized by homeless people on the light rail. Now we live far away from public transportation and no longer have to worry about the safety of ourselves or our children and our neighbors are fantastic people. Car dependency and castle doctrine is essential in a low trust society with a legal system that puts violent offenders right back on the stre…

[flagged]

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#348

Post by tboyd47 »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #75
hparadiz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a single contractor and can't really justify it. It saves me about 8k per year and this would be a bronze plan through MediCali if I got it. People would say "well what if you get a cancer or something" and yea that may be true but in that instance not only would I be out that premium but also the deductible and it won't even cover everything so maybe I'm actually better off stacking cash until the inevitable.

I'm right there with you - this is a case study in "perverse incentives." There is zero benefit to "paying into the system" to be had under the current model. Better to chance it and then sign up for a plan at the last minute since insurers can't deny you based on pre-conditions.

That's indeed the play for non-corporate-insured consumers. Short-term insurance was $1,000 a year for a healthy person last time I checked. Just keep renewing until you need ACA-compliant insurance for some reason.

But back to my point: that does nothing to solve the root cause, which is the price inflation. And Washington is so deeply compromised that they will never fix it. The only solution lies with us just walking away. We hate to bargain a price on getting exposed to the ugly side of life, like disease, discomfort, and death, but indeed, everything has a price. And we will continue to be tested on our willingness to pay it with until we start playing hardball.

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#349

Post by franktankbank »

tptacek wrote: post #274
potato3732842 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need the insurance industry sticking their dick in most of the business they do. Insurance is for the foreseeable but unforecastable, not for routine things. The additional overhead is substantial and adds huge marginal cost for routine things and say nothing of the principal-agent problem

You could zero out every dollar American insurers make and not materially alter consumer health care economics; their share of the health care pie is almost literally a rounding error.

They add costs in the form of hospital administration which wouldn't be their books.

Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence

#350

Post by franktankbank »

rfrey wrote: post #242
AnnaPali wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christian healthcare sharers do precisely this. By restricting services and the population addressed (your pastor or priest must sign off on your application), everything's extremely affordable. In particular, as we don't drink, do drugs, use contraceptives etc. we don't pay for coverage of them or their side effects. Obesity's also less of an issue. There's also the trick of telling the hospital you'll pay "in cash"…

Christians don't drink or use contraceptives? I think you have to have a pretty extreme "no true Scotsman" attitude to make such a claim. Even the drugs claim is pretty specious.

Pastor won't sign off (unless you come to an agreement).
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