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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

#371

Post by epistasis »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #305
epistasis wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

I mean no disrespect whatsoever, but we have no common ground if the belief is a continued for profit system or more profits are going to fix any of this, based on the overwhelming evidence. At some point, one must admit that the US has entirely failed at a functional healthcare system considering the costs compared to care delivered and outcomes. If for profit insurer incentives are to increase costs as you say, we…

I literally do not care at all if there's a profit based system or not. It is completely immaterial to me. Both profit driven system and non-profit systems are successful around the world at delivering universal care.

That you are more focused on profit than on providing care to people is a definite difference. It is funny that you somehow think you could be disrespecting me in this exchange, because I think that putting people first is the only defensible position, and that your position of prioritizing a particular political bent over the health of people is ultimately extremely disrespectful to people and incompatible with leftist politics, liberal politics, or basic human decency.

Tl;dr putting profits over people is wrong, but so is putting profit-elimination over people. People first, everything else comes from that.

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

#372

Post by throwmeaway222 »

Henchman21 wrote: post #340
gruez wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HOAs come with the house. You can't just cancel them like you can cancel your netflix subscription.

No, but you can get elected to the HOA and move to dissolve it. Of course this isn't always advisable, some HOAs aren't awful, and some actually provide necessary services to homeowners.

I am with you there - the only HOA fees that absolutely need to exist is to service an elevator if it's a required part of your building.

Other than that many HOAs exist to fund the lawsuit against the developer for 20 years. <- this part was just a joke

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

#373

Post by diet_jerome »

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.

I disagree. The root problem that causes high prices of food/housing/healthcare is the lack of supply for food/housing/healthcare. The root problem that causes low supply of food/housing/healthcare is government regulation. There is enormous market incentive to provide more food/housing/healthcare, increase supply, and decrease prices. However, governments have made it difficult or impossible for the market to provide more food/housing/healthcare. Even if someone's paycheck is the same over 30 years, if the prices of things go down (as they have for nearly all products and services except food/housing/healthcare), their purchasing power would increase and they are by definition wealthier.

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

#374

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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…

> ObamaCare made things much better for those who could not get healthcare.

For some people who could not get healthcare. I haven't had usable health insurance since before the AMA because it can exceed my total earnings.

> For most, High Deductible plans becoming the norm left people in much worse state

Which tees up my larger point (thank you).

For years 3 thru 10+ of the ACA:

    News orgs (eg KaiserHN): 'Insured are everywhere now thanks to ACA'.
        (As far as a policy was unusable, lumping those policy holders
        into the insured group - this was more a lie than not.)

    What I actually saw: Unusable policies due to copays.
        Policy quotes that approached or exceeded total earnings ($12k/yr)
        Policy quotes that went down as income went up.
             (quote for $22k/yr earner cost 50% more than quote for $32k/yr)
During ACA's lifetime, news orgs, the insured and politicians haven't given the slightest crap about the many millions of uninsured.

Mostly we didn't exist. Sometimes we did for 5 seconds if it was an opportunity to bash a politician we never voted for.

The problem with disregarding people in a destitute state is they mostly stay destitute. When the more fortunate cease being so, the people they couldn't care about are in no position to help - or even care.

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

#375

Post by grafmax »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #346
WalterBright wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that anyone can buy stock. And stocks in the US historically outperform passive real estate investing.

Careful with "can". It is possible for the homeless guy on the corner to buy stock in the sense that he is not prohibited from doing so. But on the other hand, the actual fact is that he can not purchase stock.

Right, ability to buy stock is predicated on having the money to do it, after paying for basic necessities. People who work for a living have less money than those who don’t. So when stock prices rise, even workers who can save see less absolute benefit than owners.

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

#376

Post by hollerith »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #362
hansvm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco is an interesting one to me. They're widely touted as being cheaper, but most foods there have some sort of upscaling factor -- "organic", some sort of regional variation like "sockeye" salmon instead of farmed atlantic, a few extra steps of processing, etc. Rice, pasta, and fruit are all usually more expensive than other alternatives, even at bigco grocery competitors. You have to be a little careful if that'…

Costco used to be cheaper bc of the bulk factor, but nowadays I think of it as a good curator. The products are usually good quality. Even if more expensive

>curation . . . The products are usually good quality.

Costco has a strong record of getting me to buy food products that are appealing to me for a while, but that I now consider bad for my health.

About the only food products I will still eat that I can buy at Costco are boneless poultry white meat, Kerrygold butter, olive oil and fresh asparagus.

Costco stocks many fruits and vegetables, but most of them are much too high in sugar to be good for me, I now realize. (Berries are on the low side in sugar content, but Costco does not stock frozen raspberries or blackberries, and I avoid fresh berries because they're about 50 times as moldy as frozen ones.)

Examples of foods that I eat a lot of that I cannot get at Costco are cabbage, radish and (frozen) tart cherries.

In contrast, Whole Foods carries most of the 3 dozen or so foods that are good for me to eat according to my current understanding of nutrition (but not the tart cherries). I would probably be significantly healthier if many years ago I'd never become a Costco member and stuck to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.

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

#377

Post by lanfeust6 »

ambicapter wrote: post #157
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…

What is sickeningly upsetting is how difficult it seems to be for our news organizations and talking heads to talk openly about this fact.

Real wages are up and quality of life is on average better than it's ever been. But news organizations do in fact report on self-reported data periodically like living paycheck-to-paycheck (which just means they spend everything and don't save).

Self-reported sentiments about stress are not useful. Rich boomers who voted for Trump would take this poll and just as easily say the cost of groceries is a major source of stress.

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

#378

Post by BobaFloutist »

jpadkins wrote: post #281
yoyohello13 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

Do we have a definition for "has stable access to basic necessities"? In 2025 I'd call this healthy varied food, private sheltered sleeping space that's protected from extreme temperature, clean water to drink and bathe, Internet, public outdoor recreation space, health care, at least a day off a week and let's say 5 days combined PTO or vacation, enough extra to cover emergencies, and enough left over to slowly save for retirement or education or retraining or other opportunities.

I don't know, I'm probably missing some things and possibly parts of my definition is excessive? But I'd be curious to see how that would change trends.

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

#379

Post by slater »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #377
ambicapter wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is sickeningly upsetting is how difficult it seems to be for our news organizations and talking heads to talk openly about this fact.

Real wages are up and quality of life is on average better than it's ever been. But news organizations do in fact report on self-reported data periodically like living paycheck-to-paycheck (which just means they spend everything and don't save). Self-reported sentiments about stress are not useful. Rich boomers who voted for Trump would take this poll and just as easily say the cost of groceries is a major source of…

> which just means they spend everything and don't save

Here, lemme fix that for you:

"Which means everything costs too much and they can't save because they can't earn a livable wage thanks to everything going to the top 1%"

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

#380

Post by cma »

gruez wrote: post #255
Epa095 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%. So if you had 100 million you would get 1.7 million as dividend 5-7 years ago, now it's roughly doubled, without selling any of your stocks. Not that it really matters. Given how much faster the stock market grows com…

>Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%. Eyeballing this chart it looks like it dropped around a third since the pandemic. https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/spx-div-yld.... https://ycharts.com/indicators/sp_500_dividend_yield

Most companies moved to stock buybacks instead of dividends for tax reasons.
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