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California bans private prisons

theguardian.com

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Re: California bans private prisons

#361

Post by droithomme »

lacampbell wrote: post #272
etaty wrote: post #179

Just for fun, same sentence on health care. > I'm so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research and…

How expensive is health care in the US? IE, in my country dentistry is fully private, and it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaning. How much is that in America?

> it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaning

It's about the same for me in the US, where we also don't have insurance for dentistry in general.

Getting a couple stitches on a Sunday on the other hand last ran me a bit over $7500.

Re: California bans private prisons

#362

Post by tlobes »

Are there any private prison models that were shown to be more effective than their peers or public counterparts?

While I agree that the vast majority (if not all) of private prisons, and those who participated in profiting from them, are ugly spots on the progress of modern humanity, I'm weary about an overall ban on the concept altogether.

Rather than creating rules against an evil business model or incentives to promote a beneficial one, this "unabashedly California" move cuts off any hope of someone with an ounce of morality to disrupt and ideally create a prison system that truly aims to reform inmates.

Re: California bans private prisons

#363

Post by Paperweight »

imsofuture wrote: post #298
csallen wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dogmas are a disease… We should use the right tool for the problem. It's bizarre to me how rare this stance is. I understand disagreement over what exactly the "right tool" is, because these things are complex. But people who believe there is only one right tool for every job -- big government, small government, free markets, more regulation, whatever -- strike me as intellectually lazy.

Completely agree. The problem is not that capitalism is just blanket bad, or something reductive like that, but instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956786 Capitalism specifically enables a meta-game of spreading as dogma.

The US system is actually the worst of both worlds (capitalist and socialist). It combines heavy regulation costs, high litigation costs, high public funding, AND profiteering. Literally anything would be better. It's based on a government-protected trade union married to a system of geographic monopolies... yet it's still allowed to charge whatever it wants to a captive market - and then price discriminate on top! It's overburdened with CYA and barrier-to-entry regulations, yet falsely labelled as "free-market" and "capitalist" by its status-quo PR & lobbyists to get that political support. Same thing as Universities.

If it was truly "capitalist" then literally anyone would be free to hang a shingle and provide medical services (kind of like car mechanics), there would be competing professional accreditations (trademarked brands) as well (kind of like private technical certificates). But when the "market" is so perverted, "capitalism" (whatever is left of it) gets a bad rap because the incentives are fked to begin with.

Re: California bans private prisons

#364

Post by droithomme »

FoxPaw wrote: post #291
lacampbell wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How expensive is health care in the US? IE, in my country dentistry is fully private, and it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaning. How much is that in America?

Just a cleaning without x-rays? About $100-300. Dental isn't really indicative of "how expensive health care is" though. Lots of U.S. dental and vision "insurance" plans are really just mandatory subscription plans since their bills are pretty consistent, and anything that might cost more gets you a referral to a hospital. It's when you visit a hospital (voluntarily or via emergency ambulance) that you'll start getti…

> It's when you visit a hospital (voluntarily or via emergency ambulance) that you'll start getting the $1,000 - $100,000 bills that'll kill ya.

As a kid I had a 2 day hospital stay for an appendectomy that cost about $1000.

An appendectomy now runs around $100,000. An airlift to the emergency room will also cost around $75,000.

This is a common childhood ailment and is not related to living the so-called sinful lifestyle that people like to bring up as justification for high medical costs.

Re: California bans private prisons

#365

Post by rosser »

archie2 wrote: post #354
rosser wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trope that wait times are materially worse in single-payer systems is precisely that: a trope. You do not have to dig hard to find examples of wait-times measured in months to get diagnostic procedures scheduled, and where I live — the San Francisco Bay Area — the wait time for an initial consultation with, e.g., a dermatologist has been about the same, for as long as I've lived here. I know doctors who work in h…

That's because California is a terribly run state, and one third of your population is on Medi-Cal. You literally have the same problems as Canada.

O...kay?

So, how about all of the not-California parts of the US that have the same kinds of problems (which is, last I checked, more or less "all of them")?

Because, the thing is, only one of my examples was, you know, from California.

Re: California bans private prisons

#366

Post by archie2 »

DanBC wrote: post #350
archie2 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different systems have different problems. In Canada, some people die due to wait times for treatable conditions, or are forced to wait so long that their condition worsens to be beyond repair and they are permanently debilitated. Over 50k people leave Canada per year to get their healthcare in the United States instead.

> In Canada, some people die due to wait times for treatable conditions Do you think this doesn't happen in the US? If you're about to say "but in the US we can pay for healthcare", well that's true everywhere. Anyone with enough money can pay for healthcare.

In Canada, conditions covered by the socialized plans are illegal to be treated by private practice. More than 50k people leave Canada every year to get treatment in the US to either avoid wait times or the government refuses to pay for the procedures.

Re: California bans private prisons

#367

Post by [deleted] »

tlobes wrote: post #362

Are there any private prison models that were shown to be more effective than their peers or public counterparts? While I agree that the vast majority (if not all) of private prisons, and those who participated in profiting from them, are ugly spots on the progress of modern humanity, I'm weary about an overall ban on the concept altogether. Rather than creating rules against an evil business model or incentives to p…

[deleted]

Re: California bans private prisons

#368

Post by [deleted] »

staticautomatic wrote: post #270
crazy1van wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system One provider might charge a fortune. But then another will come along and realize he can get all this business by charging slightly less than a fortune. Then another comes along and charges slightly less. And so on until they are charging just enough to make a slight profit. That’s how a…

No, that's how a free market is supposed to work but no one's ever seen a free market in the wild.

[deleted]

Re: California bans private prisons

#369

Post by thaumaturgy »

archie2 wrote: post #287
arcticbull wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm also in favor of socialized medicine for basically exactly these reasons. Shocker, I know. The system works! I grew up in socialized medicine, and you get sick, you go to the hospital, they treat you and you leave. There's no step 4. Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It's all in y'alls control.

There is a step 4: pay exorbitant tax rates.

This argument is long, long past its expiration date.

While the US by some measurements has a lower overall tax rate than other developed countries [1], the difference between us and, say, Canada, who enjoy high quality socialized health care, is far from "exorbitant".

There's a very reasonable argument for considering all of the consequences of our systematically broken health care system as a "tax" -- it amounts to a massive financial and quality-of-life burden for most Americans.

Health care in the United States is more expensive than in other developed countries for identical procedures [2]. Medical costs are the worst kind of lottery, where an overnight visit for tonsillitis can get you a nice little $100,000 bill [8]. Do you not consider that a tax? Why not?

Medical bills account for 60% of bankruptcies in the US [3]. High medical costs are literally causing people to commit suicide [4] or to die of entirely preventable causes [5] while others just forego care entirely [9]. For those people who do jump through the hoops to get private medical insurance, there are entire bureaucracies dedicated to denying claims [6]. There are so many perverse incentives involved that some doctors are taking it into their own hands to try to lower medication costs, and pharmaceutical companies are responding by tripling the costs of the medication [7].

Meanwhile tons and tons of Americans stay in jobs they don't like just to maintain their employer-sponsored health insurance [10], strangling their wages and preventing positions from being opened up to more enthusiastic employees.

These things are all taxes. They are taxes on American society, impacting all of us. Anybody that's opposed to socialized health care "because muh taxes" is defending this system, this embarrassing, broken, corrupt system that endangers and kills countless people every year and acts as a massive multi-faceted anchor on our economy.

[1]: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/15/why-a...

[3]: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/05/bankruptcy.medical.bill...

[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/co21rt/elderly_couple... -- linking to Reddit here because there are a lot of comments there worth reading.

[5]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shane-patrick-boyle-died-a...

[6]: https://splinternews.com/a-glimpse-into-the-bureaucratic-hel...

[7]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/doctors-tried-to-low...

[8]: https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/ngngy/merry_fucking_ch...

[9]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/09/sick-of-high-healt...

[10]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/13/fear-o...

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