prizrak;n3541515 said:
Ed,
This will explain why US healthcare is as expensive as it is better than I could. TL;DW version is that it's all about negotiation, there are no fixed costs and you go high to meet in the middle.
Very nice indeed, it shows perfectly well why profit at all costs from everyone might produce idiotic, inefficient outcomes.
As far as government backed insurance vs privately backed goes. The main benefit of a gov't run insurance can basically set w/e prices they want with the providers. Kind of like I had no choice but to pay $130 to renew registration on my car. I couldn't go to another DMV for a better deal... That keeps costs artificially low and means possibly less providers as the profit motive is diminished, it also doesn't actually solve the problem of lack of innovation in the cure department, in fact it may exacerbate it as it makes sense to do more treatment and management since profit-per-treatment is less.
I think you are mostly right, but I see a catch, and it is precisely because we are speaking of medicine. On one hand, you may have all the artificially low price you want, but if a private manages to give you better cures and cares, people will flock there, especially the wealthiest. This happens in Italy: State funded healthcare might be as high standard as the best hospital in the world in some areas, and get as low as an underdeveloped country in others, or be on the cutting edge in a field and quite backward in others.
When bad things happen, or if private manages to get just better than the publicly funded, people will go there and pay what they ask. Plus, most of the times, particularly for the best hospitals, waiting lists are insanely long, and people will shortcut to the private sector to have things done quickly.
On the other hand, research is still done in Italy, and it is mostly publicly-funded. It would also work extremely well in medicine, was it not for "barony", which is a different problem altogether and gives a name to university professors assigning research places out of sympathy or echange of favours instead of merit (which is, it is necessary to admit, something that profit-only oriented systems tend to reduce to very low levels). As it is now, outcomes are interesting, but not as good as they should.
To sum up: State funded healthcare doesn't mean the private sector will die, nor it means that research is not done, but of course it must be built correctly to avoid other form of waste and corruption.
P.S. Past tense of "cost" is "cost" because English is fucking retarded.
Thanks! To think I should remember it by now... 20 years of studies thrown in the toilet...
TC;n3541523 said:
The reason that surgery costs so much in the US is because of things like insurance. It's the same story with college tuition, the government backed student loans, so colleges raised prices. That forces people who would have paid cash, in the past, into student loans and years of debt.
I suspect the reason shown by Priz are far more to the point.
Also, a lot of drugs and various other treatments are developed in the US, since this is one of the only places where they can actually turn a profit. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some parts of your treatment were originally developed here, for example, where there was a profit incentive to actually innovate and develop such things.
Private profits exist in Italy too, and at the same time, most of the italian medical research comes from the mostly public (with some private excellences) universities, and it may be quite good.
The problem is that the product they're selling is healthcare. If their product is garbage, no one is going to buy it.
The problem in general is that people are not able to know what they are buying (say, problems will show up after years - McDonald's) or if they can't choose not to buy it, you will be able to rob them, particularly if the only drive is profit. Which is what we can see happening in healthcare.
People are willing spend money, but they need to feel like they're getting something substantial in return for it.
And they also need to get it. If they only feel it, they'll get robbed (see far overpriced luxury items).
The sole point of the McDonalds analogy wasn't health or sustenance, it was simply pointing out that selling lots and lots or products and services to lots and lots of people will result in higher profits than selling a small number of products/services to a very small number of people.
That is true, it translates in higher volumes and, if they are high enough, in higher profits, even at a lower per product margin. But it also means higher investments, higher costs for infrastructures, higher need of specialized people working. AND, it requires a higher number of customers. That is not always
the case with healthcare. Not all specialized roles can be filled, not all infrastructers can be doubled, but mostly, the amount of people requiring a certain treatment is not going to get any higher even if you invest and advertise, unless you are cheting people in buying things they don't need; take this drug even if you don't need it, even if it will have dire consequences on the entire medical field (antibiotics overuse?), even if it has the potential of harming you more than it helps - we see it everyday. short-term-profit-driven healthcare is dangerously inefficient and damaging.
Anyway, the point of all this was to show that when people think that some kind of solutions are good, this tells a lot about -how- they think, what their priorities are, what their valours are. Most of the times, with decent people, it depends on the level of complexity or the scale they use to look at and cathegorize the world, given that things usually change if you look at them from different perspective, and each one of them is not necessarily better or more true than the other.
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Blind_Io;n3541559 said:
Another day, another blunder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/w...rump-move.html
Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capitol and move the embassy from Tel Aviv. Goodbye two-state solution and pretty much any hope of cooling things in the region. Also, thanks for painting at target on every American for reprisal.
I noticed that too. I heard that it might have helped the russian get a stronger influence on the region and weakened the US hold. I wonder if this might be true.
