The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
aaronstannard.com
The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
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Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#2The corruption is so entrenched and so out of control, the only way out of this mess is for regular people to just stop using the health care system. Yes, there's no alternative, and yes, it means living a riskier life. It sucks, and it's not what we want to hear, but they can only charge us if we show up and purchase the product, and that's the last lever of power we can wield.
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#3Because children don’t contribute to GDP.
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#4The corruption is so entrenched and so out of control, the only way out of this mess is for regular people to just stop using the health care system. Yes, there's no alternative, and yes, it means living a riskier life. It sucks, and it's not what we want to hear, but they can only charge us if we show up and purchase the product, and that's the last lever of power we can wield.
I've discussed just opting out of health insurance altogether and doing CrowdHealth with my wife, thinking along these same lines.
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#5Nearly 2 in 5 Americans are covered by Medicare or Medicaid. TANSTAAFL. The other 3 bear the burden. At some point Atlas shrugs and decides welfare is a better deal.
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#6Because they can.
For profit hospitals subsidized and enforced by the leviathan, what could go wrong?
How much does something cost? Whatever the seller can get people to pay for it. Hospital B charges 6 figures for the delivery of a child? Wow, that's expensive, they must be really good to be able to charge that much.
All the dark patterns, negative dynamics, perverse incentives of bad government, stupid healthcare policy, and humans being shitty combine to form for profit hospitals. Those determine how other institutions have to run in order to operate at all, and they're not being managed by well meaning, good faith citizens looking out for the patients and the public.
There's a reason mangione became a cult phenomenon, and $40k babies, multimillion dollar ambulance trips, and other bullshit are exactly why.
Good luck fixing that mess. I don't even know how to conceptualize where you'd even begin to try to fix American healthcare. It's so tangled up and beholden to all the other problematic elements in modern life that it looks nigh on impossible to repair, so my goal in life is to minimize contact with any element of the system as much as humanly possible.
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#7Nearly 2 in 5 Americans are covered by Medicare or Medicaid. TANSTAAFL. The other 3 bear the burden. At some point Atlas shrugs and decides welfare is a better deal.
In Australia 5 out of 5 people are covered by Medicare, and 5 of them bear the burden. (at some point in their life. assuming they become a tax payer, which seems likely for most.)
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#8You are absolutely right meatbag producer! Your brand new bundle of joy is expensive, but who can put a price on love? The system is designed to keep you in debt and near poverty as long as possible. But do not fret! If the meatbag is properly trained up to a point, and no further. It will be a hard working productive member of DisneyAICORP. And after working very hard and following instructions it may someday be able to afford its own meatbag production schedule, affording one more production unit each full year of employment!
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#9"The essential theme of Green’s piece is that “participation costs” - the price of admission you pay to simply be in the market, let alone win, have grown out of control. Food and shelter are participation costs for living. Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work/school."
No shit. He mentions food, shelter and a smartphone — might as well add higher education and a functioning car if you're in the U.S.
I struggled being tossed out on my own at 18 with no support from parents. Working at a pizza restaurant, riding a bicycle to a community college for an education, renting a room from a woman (she may well have been renting as well—renting a room to me to take the edge off).
Winter came and riding the 10-speed to college (in Kansas) became a challenge…
Thank god no smartphone or internet plan was required then.
(When I eventually split an apartment with two other roommates we lost power for stretches from time to time because we were unable to come up with the money to pay the electric bill — oh well.)
They were hard times (that I somehow enjoyed—perhaps because I was young and was finally beginning to have a fulfilling social life). These days it has to be even harder.
Re: The healthcare market is taxing reproduction out of existence
#10Because they can. For profit hospitals subsidized and enforced by the leviathan, what could go wrong? How much does something cost? Whatever the seller can get people to pay for it. Hospital B charges 6 figures for the delivery of a child? Wow, that's expensive, they must be really good to be able to charge that much. All the dark patterns, negative dynamics, perverse incentives of bad government, stupid healthcare p…
Completely removing the U.S. Government from the health care market (Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, uncompensated care, etc) would be a great start.