fooger03

iTrader: (2)

The logic train is weak here.

The correct way to reduce the cost of healthcare is...

"Reduce the cost of healthcare"

For ******* serious; the only arguments that I've heard are "we should subsidize the cost of healthcare more" and "we should subsidize the cost of healthcare less"

What if we simply make healthcare "cost less"? Nobody in gov't is willing to try it because they'll make the doctors mad?

There are some pretty easy ways to make that happen - the first two include reducing the fucktarded cost of bringing drugs to market and opening up the educational dam which has for decades prevented bringing new doctors to market.

The next step is to stop trying to convince the masses of the false and abstract "value of life". Seriously, if there's some new life-saving drug that has just hit the market and it costs $80k/year to treat your chronic condition, and you can only afford $4k/year, then you simply don't need that drug. It's a shame that you didn't get said disease 10 years in the future when generic versions of the drug cost $1k/year, but the fact is that you dont; you live in the "now" and the simple fact is that the social cost incurred for providing you that drug isn't worth providing you with that drug.

There was previously a comment on insurance being "other people subsidizing the cost of your healthcare" - this is entirely wrong - this is not called insurance, this is called "socialism"

"Insurance" is: "Your current self subsidizes the cost of healthcare for your future self by paying a secondary entity an amount which they independently determine that they are willing to accept in exchange for paying all future medical expenses covered by the contract that you both agree to." In real "insurance" - if your expected future cost of healthcare is greater, then your present cost of healthcare insurance is greater by a proportionate amount. If you go to get new insurance and your current uninsured healthcare costs are $3k/month, then your new insurance costs $3k/month plus whatever they expect your potential future healthcare costs should add to that value. If you want better coverage for "pre-existing conditions", then you should have paid for the extra "perpetual coverage" rider on your previous insurance plan.

hector

This is the problem no one is talking about. Insurance cost is nowhere near the whole problem. And they won't just be pissing off the doc's.

Google annual health care costs by country. USA #1 far and away. Oh, and rising.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

There has got to be some phase which you can say to that weighted companion cylinder to cause it to threaten to stab you...

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Serious question: What about food?

Should farmers and agriculture companies be not-for-profits as well, or only grocery stores?

z31maniac

Yes, insurance is the problem. The amount of people it takes to push through a claim = doctor pay. The girl I'm seeing just left her job working for an EYE DOCTOR, just an EYE DOCTOR..............her only job, that paid more than 2x national poverty level for a family in this country, was just to verify insurance of the patients the next day. That's it. And that doesn't count the other 5-6 women that worked there basically doing admin work to check patients in, take their insurance, check them out, etc.

Doctors should be paid damn well, I'm perfectly OK with that.

A big part is the administrative overhead it takes to deal with insurance.

And to whomever earlier couldn't understand the "Insurance begets higher prices begets higher premiums" argument, you're lying to yourself for the sake of argument.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

I'm going to start campaigning the govt to subsidize megasquirts, so i not only get more customers (because the govt will pay a chunk bringing in new customers that weren't in the market due to cost barriers), i can charge more for the same service ( reg customer cost + govt extra ).

then ill convince all the customers that hate the cost of my megasquirts, that the only way to afford them is to increase the subsidy, and when they do, ill increase costs!

and then ill vilify anyone that wants to reduce the subsidy.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

the minute you pass a law that says "you may not introduce drugs to the market with fucktarded costs" you will cease to see new drugs introduced to the market.


these may only be the arguments you ever hear, but the later never is practiced, ever. coincidentally, the problem has yet to be "solved"

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

NBD:

olderguy

iTrader: (19)

Look what it has done with higher education; which has also degraded to the level of a 60's HS education.(just a separate point I am throwing into the mix)

leboeuf

iTrader: (1)

Huh? I guess it's the internet so you're just supposed to make stuff up.
The things I studied in "higher education" didn't even exist in the 60's.
Where do you guys get this ****?
You bitch about higher education failing you while typing on something the operates on bizarre quantum mechanics being leveraged and built on by millions of "higher educated" scientists.
Are you really that naive?

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

real classes i took in "higher education":

wonders in physics
Introduction to Contemporary Mathematics
graphic novels
conceptualization
human sexuality
ethics in journalism
radio production
color theory

i cant quantum.

Im trying to remember the name of the class i took where we discussed the homo-eroticism of Seinfeld. I do remember the book though.

ridethecliche

iTrader: (2)

So I guess this is the part where you support 'death panels'. Do you care about the cause of said chronic disease? What if it was exposure? Then who's responsible for payment? Should the patient be allowed to keep getting worse if the legal system is taking its time to figure that out?
Imho, there's a pretty big difference between throwing money at a problem and the scenario you decide. I think a large majority of the healthcare 'waste' goes from trying to save grandma when she's 100 years old with congestive heart failure and emphysema but the family can't let go and throws all sorts of surgery and invasive procedures at her because they read that one story of that one old person that had all of that stuff done and lived to be 150. Except grandma dies in the hospital connected to tubes, in pain (though well medicated), and in a complete state of delirium.

Also, you're not subsidizing your own future cost of care. That's not how insurance works at all. The healthy have subsidized the sick in health insurance for the entire time that it has existed. You pay for insurance because you think it's better to pay a monthly fee to mitigate the risk in case something happens. This is one of the reasons that the ACA had issues. Young healthy people were like '**** this' when they had to pay premiums. They weren't "going to get sick" so they saw no reason to pay towards it. Given how the legislation was pulled apart as it went through congress, as these things do, it relied a bit too heavily on healthy folks buying insurance.

High cost and low satisfaction as well.

Again, by the numbers docs are a tiny part of the pot. It's like colleges. The entire infrastructure around services is bloated as hell. Part of that is because of the sheer amount of administration that has to exist to deal with all the insurance companies because every single one has different rules for filing, different exclusions, etc etc etc. It's pretty bloody absurd. Folks trained to provide a service shouldn't have to deal with 10 different arbitrary checklists before providing care that is supported by medical literature that has risk scales and algorithms to support decision making.

I said one of the pros, not that cons didn't exist. Why do canadians pay less for the exactly same drugs and devices that we have access to? Their government has a huge ability to cut costs by bargaining. Medicare does similarly here, but in a way that's not sustainable because our markets are different. Places often lose money with medicate, which obviously isn't sustainable and a major con for those that want a medicare for all type single payer system.
The US is the market where a lot of companies make their profits.

I'm not really sure how to answer this given that there are so many billions of dollars of subsidies already going into agriculture etc. I see a sort of irony in something being for profit while receiving so much government assistance.

ridethecliche

iTrader: (2)

Re: above.

Public schools were actually pretty well funded in the 60's and teachers were respected enough to do their jobs because parents didn't think they knew better because of the internet. College is dumbing down in many places because students getting in there are woefully unprepared for the rigor of college classes since the high school curriculum and grades were meaningless.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

meanwhile in fake news:

ridethecliche

iTrader: (2)

Brain,
I'm actually a bit surprised that you took some of those classes. I wonder what college brain was like haha.

Did they have screenshots as well? Wonder what the editorial board has to say about this and what their note regarding the change reads...

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

DNMakinson

iTrader: (3)

Health Care costs in the USA took it's hockey stick turn up when Medicare came into existence.

Government subsidies in welfare, education, and health care all have produced more of what they tired to eliminate. Subsidies cause prices to rise through a number of means:
1) Folks charge more because they can
2) Fraud
3) Administrative costs (both for determining eligibility and to try to prevent said fraud)

All while taking away people's freedom.

ridethecliche

iTrader: (2)

Source? Curious to read about this.

fooger03

iTrader: (2)

"Death Panels"? Really? There's no such thing as "Death Panels" - you get to decide right now, before you're ever sick - your own future fate, and how much you want covered. If you want to make sure that your hospital coverage takes care of 3.5 million dollars in terminal care before it stops covering any more, then you are free to do that by your very own self - you are the sole person who gets a vote in that based on how much you are willing to pay for your medical insurance today. Are you only willing to pay for 100k worth of terminal care tomorrow because today you didn't see that you were going to get hit by a train and put into a coma in the morning? That's fine, but if your medical bills are going to be 150k for the hospitalization and treatment for your recovery, then either you have to come up with the other 50k somehow - or you'd better be quick at convincing a financial institution that you can repay a loan for that amount of unsecured debt. Are your outstanding bills $1m and you only make 35k/year? Good luck - and don't try to call the lender a "death panel" either. They exist merely to loan you unsecured debt that they need to have a reasonable expectation that you will repay.

Asbestos style? Where no one knew there was an issue until many years later? The employer and employee are equally responsible. They both chose by their own free will to participate in that line of work. In this case, it's good to have a "perpetual care" rider on your insurance which states that "once a condition is identified as beginning while the insured carried this insurance, that condition will be permanently covered by this insurance company regardless of future insurance status"
Also, this is a case where you're again determining that the value of a human life is so great as to have large societal consequences if it is lost. This is inaccurate. If a worker or class of workers dies in the future because a modern-day line of work was incorrectly considered safe, and those workers were uninsured, the company went bankrupt, and they could not afford the medical treatment, it would not be a significant loss to society - if alternatively we paid $100k/year per injured worker for a class of workers based on a cause that we deem in the future to be deadly or chronic, then that will indeed be the significant cost to society which we must avoid in the first place.

Yes. Covered correctly, the health insurance will pay for all covered medical bills and then seek recoupment of costs incurred if so deemed necessary.

This shows a partial understanding of the true societal value of a human life. We must also understand that this sort of event can be as true for a 7 year old as it is for a 100 year old. Other major costs (not an all-inclusive list) are those related to compliance and those related to "medical malpractice" - both also being direct descendants of "the value of a human life". There are plenty of places where we can cut costs of providing medical care simply by making it legal to be less focused on bullshit and more focused on "providing medical care".

Yes you are, Yes it is.

Citation Needed.

I'll provide one to the contrary:
In insurance, an insuring company determines your individual risk and assigns you a premium based only on the factors of your individual risk. For "group insurance policies", an insurance provider determines a risk profile for the whole group based upon - for instance - their employment - which actually used to be a useful tool when most people's primary health risks (and not-coincidentally their covered injuries) were based on the work they were doing. While the "group policy" does redistribute payment from the healthy to pay for premiums of the sick, the group is still literally paying today's premiums to cover tomorrows unanticipated accidents.

If instead, everyone had exactly the same health insurance premiums across the entire country, then we could say that "Insurance is everyone pooling their resources together to take care of the sick." In real life, nobody actually cares about "the sick" unless they personally know them, and all motives are self-serving, including those which on the surface appear to be selfless.

Fully true. Also compare to the active ingredients found in: You pay for insurance because you think it's better to pay a little bit every month now instead of paying out the *** in the unexpected event that something bad actually occurs in the future.

Young people have been like '**** this' for decades, because they realize that the cost of insurance has been astronomical compared to the relative cost of care ever since "government" had mandated that "those with the highest insurance premiums are only allowed to pay 6x what those with the lowest insurance premiums pay". The ACA had nothing to do with that.

The insurance "death spiral" is a condition where people with lower medical costs are forced to pay for people with higher medical costs (thus, the healthy subsidizing the ill). In every such scenario where the healthy are asked to pay higher premiums so that health insurance for the ill is more affordable, the healthy immediately flee the market. The reason that the ACA had issues was because it took freedom of choice away from the healthy, and they were then *required* to pay for the sick - moreso, the ACA, with premiums so structured, was never really even a case of "the healthy subsidizing the sick" - but rather it was always a case of "the rich subsidizing the sick"; it would have been politically unpopular to force "the healthy to pay for the sick." (As you mentioned below)

end point: If everyone knew what their lifetime medical expenses would be, there would be no need for medical insurance - we would simply start saving for medical expenses from day 1 so that our "devastating car accident at age 36" would be paid for just in the nick of time. Unfortunately, that is unrealistic since most of us never actually experience a devastating car accident in our lifetimes. Insurance, then, exists solely to cover the unexpected. Every other thing that insurance "covers" (like routine checkups or female reproductive care) is government mandated hogwash.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

the original title in paper was: Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump Aides.

online it's: Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Aides.

it's a non story actually -- wasnt ever changed.