#LDTPoll: Who do you believe on the Russian hacking allegations?

It's true our healthcare is not priced correctly. That much we agree on.

The reason is a hundred years + of regulatory capture and massive government interference.

For example, the government legally LIMITS the number of fMRI machines per city. This means less people have access and the price is high. The solution isn't to soak the tax payer, rewarding crony socialism, by subsidizing current market players. But to instead deregulate the market so that more fMRI machines are made available.

Surely its better someone have an fMRI scan by an unlicensed practitioner (training would be arranged through a company representative who'd be on call) than the current system which is wait 8 months and/or no scan at all?

Japanese love technology. While I wouldn't suggest they defer to it. Medicine is actually quite hands-on. They certainly option it when they deem it reasonable. Why? Because it's so much more available. A city in the USA may be legally limited to a single machine whereas in Japan a single hospital may have a few.

Also, Americans consume more healthcare. Double Japan. If all things were equal,

Americans would pay twice as much.

Furthermore, a minority of America's are super users. A small number consume massive amounts of healthcare. A single obese American (or Australian for that matter) can be saved multiple times from coronary infarction. At a cost of a million dollars +. Just where do you think that money comes from?

MAGIC?!

In Australia, because Australians overwhelmingly support universal healthcare, they simply have a lower standard of living. For example, Universities in AU only train for 3 years for a bachelor's degree as opposed to our 4. The quality and resources expended on these degrees is much much lower. Many medical schools in AU are 6 years as opposed to our (and Japan's) 8 years. Again, the resourcing is much much much lower. This isn't showing up on charts of living standards. But, if you value higher education, it certainly is a lower standard relative to our Universities.

So, again, what major areas of social services do you want cut? Would you like our Universities to cut a year off (some AU Universities are talking 2 year bachelor's). Sound good? Cut two years off medical school Training? Reduce the quality if the training in those two years. Where it gets too the point medical students are learning medicine from watching Youtube videos?

Does all this sounds good to you? Not to mention all the other ways services are cut and prices higher to pay for all the free medical care.

Screw over the next generation so you can have something subsidized?

As to Japan. Unlike AU they produce most, nearly all, of their own medicines and medical device technology. While not in the league of the USA, which is the world leader in health and biotechnology (for now), Japanese are able to economize by making their own medicines and machines. Which they sell.

The best way to deliver cheap affordable healthcare is a free-market. This means massive deregulation together with decades of development. Furthermore, people will need to be rewarded for a healthy lifestyle by lower insurance rates and punished for unhealthy lifestyles with increased insurance rates. Smoke, drink, do drugs and are obese, expect insurance premiums to reflect your personal life choices. Which is fair.

That's how to being down medical costs in the real world. Free markets, private regulations, and competition. Sound money would be a huge help too. In due time.

 

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Personally I think anything we do is only tampering at the edges of the main issue. Deregulation as you suggest would lead to chaos with out a fundamental change in social attitude.

Sooooo... the issue about making the need to regulate redundant comes back to inspiring educating a regime of self-restraint, self- discipline and respect with the necessary asceticism ( aka the Japanese ) then the need for regulation whether perverse or not becomes unnecessary.

Mother nature is already enforcing the need for humanity to stop being such a consumer of resources. If we as race do not learn how to live with less we will become extinct.

The bottom line is that whilst your points are great and it's a good talk fest, they fail to address the reason for regulation, including laws to begin with. Whether that be pseudo altruistic or greed for power ( money) it is irrelevant except as a symptom of a fundamentally sick and over indulgent society. ( sick, because of it's own gluttony)

 

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Oh!

I have my idea of a solution. It's peacefully parenting with logic. Essentially think Catholic Trivium meets Peacefully parenting while attempting to implement best-practice through critical analysis of current research. Finally, take spanking and yelling completely off the table.

This would mean ending the current Government School paradigm. No more age delineated grades, but teach to aptitude. Competition to reward great educators. No more 50 minutes classes of discreet topics.

The manner inwhich Government Schools are perverting social development cannot be overstated. It is unnatural and unhealthy to allow teens to develop nearly unsupervised. One adult to thirty teens is unprecedented. Historically it would be 3-5 adults per each teen. Moderating behavior.

Also, we need to eliminate daycare from 3 weeks age. That's insane. Children should remain in the care of their parents for at least 4 years.

End the drugging of children. Particularly boys who are not normally of the temperament to sit still for 50 minutes. More like 20. Boys are now seen as broken girls. Girls have outnumbered Boys in University placement since 1983. Yet boys are constantly under attack as having unfair advantage.

So, yes, lot's of work to do. Start with one's own family. As that is where you personally have a say. Lead by example. Support private education that aligns with these values. Patronize small schools (mixed age less than 50 students, say age 5 to 12).

That sort of thing.

 

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The wait time for the MRIs I've seen recommended was less than eight days - in the last case, it was less than eight hours. I've seen less than eight minutes for beginning prep. Overuse of MRIs is of course part of the cost bubble in US health care - part of that excessive consumption of health care you complain about on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Americans already are paying twice as much - without getting the care. And most of it goes to various forms of overhead.

There is no free market way to pay for basic health care. The politically driven, ideologically motivated attempts to pretend there is has doubled the cost of health care in the US.

 

Now you are talkin'... and see what reg's/laws are required with a well balanced and healthy community...
The over dose of regulation and laws is only a reflection of how healthy/unhealthy a society is afterall.... IMO

 

Okay, we're going around in circles again. This is the thing, you're argument is this: If we force everyone onto a public healthcare, then magically it becomes cheaper. But it doesn't become cheaper. What happens is money that would have been spent on other public services is spent instead supporting healthcare. This in turn distorts the actual cost of healthcare. So, while healthcare appears to be cheaper, it's at the cost of mothers placing their children into daycare at age 3 weeks and going to work and etc....

Furthermore, if the option is so great, then why the need to force people into using it. Recall healthcare was CHEAP at the turn of the century. There were more physicians, more options, more innovation and through this free-market competition quality was being driven upwards while at the same time prices were dropping. Which is the real reason why the AMA lobbied and gained a near monopoly.

None of the so-called Democratic Socialist Nation States can afford their social programs in a sustainable manner. They are all built on stealing purchasing power and prosperity from future generations. The end result are societies that stop having children, which the State attempts to replace with immigrants.

Well, quality immigrants are gone. Quality indigenous children are not being produced. The socialist ponzi scams are collapsing.

Let's see how that works for us.

Note: fMRI is not MRI and the wait time in Canada is between 2 - 3 months.


Anyway, I do not disagree with you that healthcare is totally broken. In the USA and IMO many other Western nations. They just mask it through immigrantion amd cuts in other services. The solution is as always: sound money, free-markets amd law. That's it.

 

That's not what happens everywhere else. What happens everywhere else is that some of the money that was being spent on healthcare is now used more efficiently on healthcare, both in providing given services for less money and in reducing the services necessary to deliver a given level of care, and the rest of the money formerly wasted on the inefficiencies is available for other uses.

No, it wasn't. What is delivered now in a modern industrial State was largely unavailable to anyone, and most of what was available was beyond the means of most people.

People were dying of abscessed teeth. Gangrene from small wounds. Childbed fever. These were not voluntary refusals to accept care.

 

dup

 

You were talking about hospitals in Japan having two or three machines, patients commonly waiting for scans prescribed by doctors, etc, so I presumed you were talking about regular MRI machines - otherwise you wouldn't be making sense.

Of course, you were also talking about the US government limiting the distribution of fMRI machines to one per city, so maybe my criterion was silly.

fMRI machines are mostly research machines, with limited (although intriguing) uses in regular medical care. http://www.magnetic-resonance.org/ch/21-01.html They are MRI machines, essentially, with very strong fields and a different way of recording the image. The stronger fields involved make them both more expensive and more likely to have side effects.

The wait times for medical care in the US and various other First World countries for routine care have been measured, and they are longer than average in the US. After spending double what - say - France spends.

Canada is known to have long wait times for many things: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wait-times-for-health-care-in-canada-2016
but nevertheless delivers better medical care - as measured by outcome - than the US.

Perhaps the US would be better off adopting the systems of France or Norway - where wait times are shorter, and the delivered care even better than Canada's. For half the money.

 

Part of the reason healthcare and health insurance has gotten so expensive is the same reason why secondary education has gotten so expensive - administrator and/or executives are taking ever increasing cuts of the pie when they contribute precious little back to it. Case in point, if I recall correctly, nationwide the number of administrators and/or "non-teaching" staff at universities has increased something like 300% over the last twenty years... while the number of teaching staff has held relatively stable (this is in relation to the number of students, mind you). Additionally, the salaries for executives and "non-teaching" staff have increased dramatically, while the salaries of teachers has remained fairly stagnant against the rate of inflation.

 

Absolutely correct. It's not uncommon for University administration to lecture staff to run as high as 8:1.

This is why we need a free market in medicine. Medical Schools have the luxury of running piss poor educational services because they are able to act as the gate keepers through regulatory capture of eventual rent-seekers / physicians via government enforced licencing limits.

 

That was my mistake, my bias. Also, to be fair, the overlap between hospital and research is pretty blurry.

The point is, access to various medical technologies, hospitals, medical services, and physicians themselves, is all purposely limited by the Government to create an artificial demand and raise the price. The price of everything is raised. From the undergraduate hopefuls to the private schools that feed into the best Universities. All in the hopes of becoming a rent-seeker.

It's a violation of the US Constitution.

It's an example Government Authoritarianism - and if you ask the paper-bureaucrats (bureaucrats who's sole existence is to do and create paperwork for other bureaucrats) they'll tell you all about how important they are, how their job is important and blah blah blah.... Maybe some are. Most are not. This machine is an example of Progressive Socialism.

If we want affordable, high quality medical care and health services (including insurance) then we need to return to a free society.

We're going around in circles again.

Firstly, I disagree that State-run medical care is cheaper than free-market medical care.
Secondly, the notion that Government is going to more efficiently allocate limited resources in asinine.
Thirdly, the preposition that a free-market cannot supply high quality medical care is unfounded.

Fourthly, lets suppose that free-people are unable to deliver healthcare in the manner you wish. Well too bad. Then that's a fault of society and we must work on solving the social problem that has led to a situation whereby the only option available is to use the Government's special ability to initiate violence against morally innocent people in order to provide healthcare. By analogy, I will use human Slavery. Two hundred years ago, those humans believed that without human Slavery, humans chained to the land and their labor stolen, we'd all starve and die of exposure. In reality, the exact opposite was true. That argument was won through a bloody civil war. Is that what it will take now? Another civil war, before we stop using violence against morally innocent humans? So that we can all say, 200 years from now: Oh, yeah, I guess it was possible. Not only possible, but now we have such an oversupply of healthcare, they offer free fMRI scans at the mall while you're shopping hoping you'll pop in for an analysis (much like food samples are now given out to the obese, whereas 200 years prior, this would have been unimaginable).


Fifthly, we are not them, they are not us. This is like Iraqi's saying, 'Oh look, democracy works so well in the USA, therefor it'll work here'. But it doesn't work well there. AAMOF the USA purposely promotes parliamentary democracy as opposed to our system, because our system only seems to work in the USA.

 

That view is based on dozens and dozens of "mistakes" just like that one.

There is no actual free-market medical care for most people, and never will be, because a free market cannot be set up to provide medical care for most people. It lacks the basic and necessary features.
What government-paid medical care is cheaper than, is pretending to have free market medical care.

It can provide normal state of the art care to the rich, and some of their relations. It cannot fund the research necessary to improve the normal state of the art, and it cannot provide such care to the middle class or the poor.

Nobody believed that in 1816. Your entire worldview is based on silly fantasies of a past that never was.

 

i think we found out why you struggle to understand how economics work.... you don't know the difference between supply and demand.

 

Clearer: healthcare goods and services is purposely limited, meaning that there is more demand for the limited supply, raising the price.

There's no argument here, is explicitly stated by regulatory agencies.

Physician Supply and Demand Through 2025: Key Finding

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), unless something changes rapidly, there will be a shortage of 45,000 primary care doctors in the United States (as well as a shortfall of 46,000 specialists) by 2020.


--o--
Here we have doctors limited the number of doctors. This is unconstitutional. Not that Americans could give two craps - just give me free shit.

 

Wrong and no.

And how would you know? We don't have a free-market in anything, we don't use sound money and the law is something to be stepped over on the way to rent-seeking.

Once again, Americans cost 9000 EACH per year. However, 50% of Americans do not pay income tax. So that means per tax payer, we're looking at 18,000 EACH. What services are you planning on cutting to make up this amount? Oh, that's right, you live in la la land where magic happens. Okay, explain the magic. Because that's the bill.

Lastly, you CAN NOT KNOW what the future COULD allow. It may or it may not be possible to provide healthcare in an affordable manner without resorting to the initiation of violence against morally innocent people. IF it so happens that it currently is NOT possible, then we go without. Understand? We go without. We instead fix what is wrong with society that it requires the initiation of violence against morally innocent humans in order to provide a service and good.

But the fact is, it is possible. It must be POSSIBLE, because (according to you) it is possible - you just think we need to resort to violence. Well, I don't. That's the difference. You don't seem to trust the very society you want to live in. That's a little off.

 

Already laid out for you a couple of times - informed consumer, can refuse the deal, buyer gets the benefits, repeated dealings with identifiable entities, all that stuff.

I took classes in economics, game theory, and ecology, at a university. Although truth be told, high school economics would have been enough.

They're already paying that. So you aren't talking about a nickel extra - even presuming the US doesn't get the cost savings every single other country always has, without exception.

I can know about the past, though. You're always wrong about it. So what are the odds you're right about the future?

While we're fixing reality so that basic economic principles no longer constrain our alternatives,

meanwhile, for the time being, as long as we are still doing this horrible immoral thing we call "taxation",

how about we get the medical care that the other 33 First World systems get for the price they pay? Is there some reason we can't have what we've already paid for twice over, while the freedom-lovers are figuring out how to "fix" our entire society?

 

again you fail to understand supply and demand on an econ 101 level. restricting supply does not change demand. please stop embarrassing yourself. if you can't even get how supply and demand work just stop. the only thing you made clear is just how little you understand how supply and demand work
these are the determinants of demand. funny i don't see anything in here about a change in supply.

1. Income.
2. Tastes and preferences.
3. Prices of related goods and services.
4. Consumers' expectations about future prices and incomes that can be checked.
5. Number of potential consumers.

every time you post about history, politics, or economics you only embarrass your self with your ignorance.

 

Sorry but no. Your claim is that healthcare can never be organized through voluntary trade. Unless you know all possible futures, you cannot know if this is or is not possible.

While it's impossible to prove a negative. A single positive instance, which I presented to you previously, shows you are wrong. Of course, you don't want to take that evidence of cheap affordable medical care at the turn of the century(which is the entire reason why the AMA formed in the first place, they wanted Government to 'fix' that problem - and it did). Well, it's up to you to determine which standard of evidence you wish to use, apparently you want to hold 19th century medicine to 21st century technology. Okay, do that. It still doesn't prove a negative.

Until slavery was ended - people believed it was necessary.
Until Aristocracy was ended - people believed it was necessary.
Until man left Earth and entered space - people believed flight was impossible.

Thus, the best you can hope for is agnosticism in your belief that voluntary trade cannot be organized to provide healthcare and faith that the State will (which it will, it'll just cost 5 times as much and be half as good).

 

My claim is that it cannot be allocated via free market mechanism. That's because it lacks the necessary features. I have listed several of them, several times. The possible futures don't matter - unless one of them includes freedom from any need for medical care from doctors and hospitals and the like.

Besides, people will need medical care in the meantime. Any bright future of free market medicine the poor can afford is far enough in the future to be invisible now - so we need something that works in the meantime.

It never existed. People died of abscessed teeth, infected wounds, cholera, childbed fever, internal bleeding and clots from poorly treated trauma, and the like, not because there were no treatments but because they couldn't afford them or reach them. The ratio of doctors to patients was a quarter what it is now, and each treatment was slower - supply was less than a tenth what it is now. Quacks and charlatans abounded, and people impoverished themselves for no real benefit - but with so few doctors, that was often their only source of placebo effects.

Your entire worldview is based on such fictions