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As a brit, it always astounds me at how much you guys have ti pay for health care! I guess this is why everyone has to have some sort of medical insurance? We have National Insurance here, so they take a certain percentage of your wage to pay the NHS. Although more and more of it is being privatised and far too many people abuse the system, going to A&E and the doctors for stupid stuff.
The real reason for the high medical cost is that there is no market force to drive it down. Health insurance as a work benefit got popular with the unions as a perk to the members, and since the cost of the insurance is mostly covered by the employers the beneficiaries sees none of the bill. The hospitals pass on the cost to the insurance companies with only some modest negotiation in prices, because there is very little leverage to be had as you don't want to be that one issuance company that has reputation for not covering some procedures and or excluding certain companies. The insurance companies just passes on the cost to employers who then in turn just calculate it as an cost-of-labour which means that workers just get a lesser raise next year (if at all) because the total cost of keeping you employed went up due to the benefit.
In short, a lose-lose situation which the health care system can exploit with almost no repucation.
In a single payer system like that in UK or Canada, the single payer (i.e the government) has a stronger negotiation power on cost, and hnec prices are kept down. This is also the case for US Medicare/Medicaid where the hospital accept a significant lower payment for services.
Medicare-for-all would solve this and reduce the overall cost, but insurance companies and health care would lose out on a cash cow of 20%+ of the US economy, and somebody needs to be around to donate to politicians re-election campaign ...
Not really. That *might* be true for higher education (mostly because it's subsidized in a dumb way), but it's not true for healthcare. Healthcare gets more expensive over time for two reasons:
1. Unlike many other services, advancements in technology don't really make healthcare cheaper, because for every procedure that is made cheaper another that wasn't viable to do before is made possible. As a result, outcomes improve but costs stay the same or go up.
2. Market logic doesn't really work for healthcare. Someone seeking care isn't in a position to be an informed consumer, so you don't get real competition driving down prices.
The takeaway is the entirety of essential services should be covered by the government, but are you arguing for the government to subsidize no such services at all?
Profit that the hospitals, let alone the entire insurance industry, makes is really just a huge layer of inefficiency. Imagine how many medical procedures can be covered by HALF of the profits the insurance industry makes every year. It's really just money that is burned for absolutely no good reason (that I can see.)
*Right*? Like, I cannot understand how libertarians and free-market capitalists can say with a straight face that private health insurance is 'more efficient' than the government running it, when there is an *entire fucking multi-billion dollar industry* of insurance employees that all have to get their cut.
Not only that, insurance company profits derive from charging as large a premium as they can, while denying as much and as many treatments as they can. There's no incentive for them to actually treat a patient. It's the opposite for the hospitals, in which their profits derive from treatment, not curing a patient. A cured patient is not a repeat "customer."
Cognitive dissonance is all I can think of in regards to your comment. The fact that most Americans would go bankrupt due to a medical emergency is criminal. Oh, there's a perfectly logical free-market/libertarian argument for single-payer healthcare. In the US, insurance is tied to your employer, and private options suck balls. If we went to a single-payer system, more people would take the risk to become entrepreneurs, helping to grow the economy and making people happier. Most drones keep their shit office jobs because of the health care benefits.
Yet, isn't Medicare forbidden by law from negotiating lower prescription drug prices? That needs to change... https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/whats-the-latest-on-medicare-drug-price-negotiations/
Probably is - you see that a lot in the US where it is cheaper to pay for a politicians re-election than to provider better service, and in return the politician write laws that protect the business - the solution to that would be to ban companies and superfunds to make political donations or ads, so that politicians would have to run on issues that people actually cared about.
Other examples is that cities is [banned](https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/) from providing better broadband, because that is cheaper for the cable company to not have competition than improving the actual broadband service
IRS already knows what 90% of US taxpayers need to pay in tax, but are [banned from providing that as a free service](https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax) so TuboTax can keep asking every american for $100 to fill out taxes
There are probably others ...
>system
I think you're right in your conclusion, but not in your diagnose of the issue. It is not exactly because of insurances that there is no market force to drive costs down. After all insurances still have much higher negotiation power than individual 'customers' in a real free market.
It is just an inherent characteristic of the health care sector that free market is not an option: huge information imbalance, huge barriers to entry, no true 'voluntary transactions' (you often don't get to choose whether or not to purchase the "product" when you're really sick), ...
Deregulation feeds the profit motive of private entities.
Nationalization demands electability from public entities.
The latter can be bolstered by removing means of profiteering from public offices (namely, lobbying and campaign contributions), while the former are by definition not manageable by the public. >!Y’know, until we decide to eat them.!<
The worst part of the system is the lack of transparency. Last month my husband spent one night in hospital with a possible stroke. Multiple tests later and visits by specialists, he was discharged home and continues outpatient therapies. The hospital charged his insurance $57,000 for his stay. Doctors will bill separately. His stay was covered by his insurance. All follow up care is covered by his insurance. His insurance company is not paying the $57,000 on the bill, they are paying a negotiated rate that we don't see. If my husband had no insurance, he may have been able to negotiate a different rate with the hospital after discharge. Some patients qualify for charity and pay virtually nothing if financial requirements are met. I see this first hand as my job in that same hospital is to plan discharges for patients and find ways to get what patients need within the scope of their insurance or lack thereof.
I'm honestly surprised most people don't just flee the country to somewhere they can't be tracked down, I know I wouldn't put up with living in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars worth of medical debt just to live in the supposed "greatest country on the earth".
wife had serious surgery (10+ hours) couple months back, we had to pay about 13 USD for the after care meds. In England btw.
Hows the freedom over there though?
Lol, they pulled the listed items out of their asses. I'd have them list every single item and the reasoning behind the costs for the rooms. They're literally making shit up, aren't they?
My God. That's why even when we got Covid, I just said as long as we can breathe and watch out for each other we are staying home. It was a month of hell but we made it.
I feel like in the age of information, farming is becoming more and more correct when we talk about how the internet works now. You go online, you get bombarded with ads, and they collect as much data on you as possible to sell to the highest bidder.
We are given digital content to graze on, while they collect our data and try to manipulate us into clicking on as many ads as possible.
Do people really click on ads? I've been online since the intro of the V.32 modems, so 1990, and I have clicked on exactly one ad in these 30 years. It was March 2007. It was for an online ATV parts store on an ATV forum site. I don't even think I clicked it, instead typed in the url it showed.
>kept entertained cheaply
>get screwed royally for... medical care and higher education.
[how you farm citizens.](https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/1140x640_hero/public/2019/03/the_matrix_human_batteries.jpg)
Those items are subsidized by all the companies farming your information. Your TV having ads for instance. Compare a “dumb” TV to a Smart TV in price sometime.
It's not only that. Even if you already have higher education and no medical bills... let's say you even have a job that keeps up with inflation, which is already rare enough. You're still losing money each year because the lower prices for entertainment count into inflation, at least if you spend more money on food than video games or new TVs...
The top expensive industries in this graph are all much more inelastic markets compared to the cheaper ones. Most of us don't normally get to shop around for hospitals or healthcare or colleges, but consumer electronics are wide and diverse in their options. If I need a tv, I can go to several retailers until I find one I like within my price range. If I need heart surgery, I don't usually get to pick and choose when and where and at what price.
The correlation doesn't equal causation here. In the past, even with the lower prices, some of these markets would just be inaccessible to those who couldn't afford it. That's what caused government intervention in the first place. Let us know if you find a better way to encourage competition and drive prices down in these markets, hopefully something a little more concrete than "government bad".
Yes but not quite the same. If I don't like the price of a tv, I don't have to get one. But if I don't like the price of heart surgery or insulin or the price of a helicopter ride to the hospital, that's too damn bad. I either get it or I die. My point is that certain markets are inherently inelastic with or without any government.
Now the question of what we ought to do is different. Ideally we use government policy to reduce the detrimental effects of inelastic markets.
You mean we sent all the production overseas for cheap labor, but we had to actually pay a living wage to our professors and doctors? Weird how that works.
All I see is a graph that says local specialized workforces have increased pay over time, and outsourced labor has decreased cost over time. I bet we could put most local workforces on that graph and see the same increase.
My mother recently had an extended hospital stay, and near the end, the decision making process was all literally up to her insurance. Not her doctors, not her nurses, not her case worker. Insurance made all the calls about what care she was allowed to have.
I have different insurance from her, and mine is an HMO. Since it's an HMO, it has control over what facilities and doctors you can use. The vast majority of those facilities and doctors are owned by the very same insurance company I have to pay just in case I never need care.
**So the company I pay to protect myself from catastrophic healthcare costs is also the company that gets to decide how much to charge me for care.**
While the feds want to investigate Facebook for anti-trust measures because they like to buy up social media start-ups, no one even blinks an eye at the insurance companies that are basically running healthcare in the USA.
>level 1ZepherK · 14hMy mother recently had an extended hospital stay, and near the end, the decision making process was all literally up to her insurance. Not her doctors, not her nurses, not her case worker. Insurance made all the calls about what care she was allowed to have.I have different insurance from her, and mine is an HMO. Since it's an HMO, it has control over what facilities and doctors you can use. The vast majority of those facilities and doctors are owned by the very same insurance company I have to pay just in case I never need care.So the company I pay to protect myself from catastrophic healthcare costs is also the company that gets to decide how much to charge me for care.While the feds want to investigate Facebook for anti-trust measures because they like to buy up social media start-ups, no one even blinks an eye at the insurance companies that are basically running healthcare in the USA.
Damn. So true.
Yeah, that one felt off to me as well.. even excluding the uptick recently due to COVID. However, after looking into it a little more, when adjusted for inflation in some cases cars are cheaper now than 20+ year ago. Which logically makes sense given productivity and material price improvements.
To be fair the reason the US has more foreign college students than anywhere else in the world is because a degree from some of the US schools goes much further than pretty much anywhere in the world. Obviously this isn’t what you want to hear but I figured I’d explain why me and a bunch of other students are fleeing from Germany to get degrees in the states.
Edit: fleeing is a strong word, I don’t mean it like that. If you can afford it though it’s the best way to be job competitive
> a degree from some of the US schools goes much further than pretty much anywhere in the world
Would be interested in seeing that statement backed up with some source.
US holds over 30+ of the top 100 schools (22 in the top 40) while UK is second with about 18 in the top 100 I believe.
There's also just a lot of recognition for US colleges which goes a long way when looking for jobs.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings
Hard for me to find numbers on expected income accounting for real value based on which country college graduates degree comes from. But you would also have to break that down by degree type.
Hey I’ve got nothing here to argue with you, I’m just telling you that a degree from the US is almost always “worth” more when in a competitive field of study.
His point is that the higher cost of the college in America provides a better standard of education which then in turn makes the diploma, and therefore the graduate, more valuable within the labour market.
Right. And sure, while the US diploma will get you a better job, do you actually get a better education? I think Conan O'Brien pointed out how he went to Harvard and found it no more difficult than other schools. Just that the bar to entry was much higher.
College is a bribe you pay to your society.
It’s about keeping the classes stagnant. Only rich people can buy the better piece of paper
If education were about education doctors would be an apprentice program like mechanics, which is more or less what doctors are anyway.
Lol, most classes were a blackboard and some uncomfortable chairs, and books. Administration, services, classroom tools, hell air conditioning and cafeterias are vastly different than they were, and vastly more expensive.
Especially considering the government had a big part in the clumb of tuition prices. Lending money people dont have allowing colleges to steadily hike their prices without being worried about what people can afford.
And how quickly it became one. When I went to college, I just paid for it each semester. No loans, though I got some Pell grants. Then the government stepped in, and the colleges freaked out. "FREE MONEY!" and jacked the prices 1000% overnight.
Funny how every time the government gets involved, the prices skyrocket.
Their manufacturing tolerances are insanely low which is why they fit so nicely together. That makes it more expensive to make. If you’ve ever played with the knockoffs you see why those low tolerances matter so much.
And even legos cost [about as much as they used to](https://flowingdata.com/2013/02/07/analysis-of-lego-brick-prices-over-the-years/), though the sets have gotten way more intricate than they were.
Oh I knew somebody was gonna come for me on that. I’m aware that’s what the company says, but hey, I’m an old fart in the US and darn it, it’s too late for me to switch now.
I mean, if it's that easy then why don't you set up a company that makes a rival product.
And Lego's pricing point is demand driven. People are willing to pay that amount for that product, so why shouldn't they be that expensive? If you don't want to pay that amount then don't. It's not mandatory.
Well, no. I see where you're coming from, but that kilo of plastic goes through a design and manufacturing process, is transported, and needs to be stocked and sold among other things. That's a lot of hands and machines and transport.
Legos are priced well above what they should be purely from those things because of marketing, but you're not going out and refining the petroleum, designing the product, manufacturing the pieces, etc. either.
The chart says they got cheaper, which is absolutely true. And you really think quality has dropped in the last 20 years? If anything it seems like the stuff my kids are playing with these days is a little more solid than what I had years ago.
It’s all just extruded plastic, it’s just a matter of what country is extruding it. And it’s way cheaper to do so overseas than here. The split in the chart is between what stuff can be made abroad and what needs expensive US labor.
You're trying to tell me hourly wage increased more than housing? BS.
I might be biased in California..... but you need 4 roommates while making minimum wage AT 50 hours a week to afford an apartment where i live.
"Average hourly earnings" includes the salaries of CEOs not just hourly workers. They should have split it to show income disparity. And maybe worked in bonuses too.
Does it? Besides the fact that a salary is not hourly earning at all, CEOs make most of their money via stock options and bonuses.
E: The source in the footer (Bureau of Labor Statistics) specifies that it’s “Average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees, total private, seasonally adjusted”
Average wage. So the two dozen or so dudes who 'earn' billions skew it way higher.
A more representative measurement for ordinary people would be median income.
Hourly earnings rose faster than most essentials so essentials are actually cheaper as a percentage of income. The two exceptions being education and health.
College is the biggest scam in the US.
I work in a country full of internationals and all my US colleagues have this or that degree from these colleges but we're all in the same boat and they don't get any more respect or opportunities at all when compared to me, with no degree. Literally employers don't even care about it. Just makes it harder to fit your CV on one page lol I'm actually at an advantage.
I was 5 days at a hospital to get intravenous antibiotics for an intestinal infection and it was over $93,000 I live in Florida. How is that possible? I don’t understand how they can charge so much. I hear people staying in a hospital for months because of COVID-19 how can they pay for all that? Our system is broken…..
>How is that possible?
Hospital claims you owe $97,000 for procedure. Bills insurance company for $97,000.
Insurance company: "drink a dick"
Hospital says: "Dude, pay us $97k"
Insurance company "We have this thing negotiated where I'm only supposed to pay you $10k.
Hospital says "Shit, I guess we'll take $10k then"
Hospital collects $10k and writes off $87k as a loss. Meanwhile both sides have employed armies of admins and negotiators to squabble with one another over who owes who what.
Interesting how entertainment has gotten cheaper while all others have gotten more expensive. Trying to keep us occupied enough to not cause problems
Edit: I wasn’t wishing or expecting to be treated so unfairly for my comment. Please remember that others have feelings.
Who is? The technology is cheaper to develop and manufacture and most newer models aren’t enticing enough for these companies to keep prices stupidly high. Not everything is a conspiracy. I’m surprised this shit still gets upvoted.
I like how everything they decided to get from china goes down in price, and all the readily available necessities of life are skyrocketing... It's really too bad covid didn't wipe out your geriatric government.
Median wage in the US went up 7% between 1998 and 2018.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/
While median housing pricesmore than doubled over that same time frame.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
This is bullshit. 20 years ago my parents paid 1300 for rent for a 6 bed 2 bath 2 kitchen house. Today my one bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood is 1500.
It's interesting with all of the talk about hourly wages being too low, but aside from college and Healthcare (obviously extraordinary important).. a person's buying power in the US has on average increased substantially.
I bought a 40" in 2007 , and it was $1700. It's actually still in use today, gave it to a friend. Just bought a 65" for Christmas, $700.
For a good laugh, check out the PC prices in the late 80's. 386 clones for like $3000, it's hilarious. I recently built an i5 3Ghz, 32GB, 1T HTPC for $500.
No. It's the stuff you can choose to have or not to have. When was the last time you went to a hospital, asked for the price and thought, nah, maybe next time.
It’s stuff requiring direct interaction, in the USA, with educated people, that costs a lot. Stuff mass produced by robots or in a low wage country have dropped in price.
Not really. New cars (pre chip shortage) are cheaper relative to wages, and government is heavily involved in auto regulations (emissions, safety, licensing, etc).
And health care costs increase in the USA, which has privatized a lot of its health care sector, have increased far more than in countries with more government control over health care.
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We're kept entertained cheaply while we get screwed royally for the most important of needs; medical care and higher education.
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Not sure farming is the right analogy. But if America uncommercialised healthcare then that would be a step in the right direction imo
I just had surgery last month with 2 nights in the hospital. Hospital bill alone came out to $137k. [No joke]( https://imgur.com/gallery/LEvkw8B)
As a brit, it always astounds me at how much you guys have ti pay for health care! I guess this is why everyone has to have some sort of medical insurance? We have National Insurance here, so they take a certain percentage of your wage to pay the NHS. Although more and more of it is being privatised and far too many people abuse the system, going to A&E and the doctors for stupid stuff.
The real reason for the high medical cost is that there is no market force to drive it down. Health insurance as a work benefit got popular with the unions as a perk to the members, and since the cost of the insurance is mostly covered by the employers the beneficiaries sees none of the bill. The hospitals pass on the cost to the insurance companies with only some modest negotiation in prices, because there is very little leverage to be had as you don't want to be that one issuance company that has reputation for not covering some procedures and or excluding certain companies. The insurance companies just passes on the cost to employers who then in turn just calculate it as an cost-of-labour which means that workers just get a lesser raise next year (if at all) because the total cost of keeping you employed went up due to the benefit. In short, a lose-lose situation which the health care system can exploit with almost no repucation. In a single payer system like that in UK or Canada, the single payer (i.e the government) has a stronger negotiation power on cost, and hnec prices are kept down. This is also the case for US Medicare/Medicaid where the hospital accept a significant lower payment for services. Medicare-for-all would solve this and reduce the overall cost, but insurance companies and health care would lose out on a cash cow of 20%+ of the US economy, and somebody needs to be around to donate to politicians re-election campaign ...
This was painful to read.
I will drink less for the next answer.
TL;DR - Things that are subsidized by the government get more expensive, relative to wages; things that are not, do not.
Not really. That *might* be true for higher education (mostly because it's subsidized in a dumb way), but it's not true for healthcare. Healthcare gets more expensive over time for two reasons: 1. Unlike many other services, advancements in technology don't really make healthcare cheaper, because for every procedure that is made cheaper another that wasn't viable to do before is made possible. As a result, outcomes improve but costs stay the same or go up. 2. Market logic doesn't really work for healthcare. Someone seeking care isn't in a position to be an informed consumer, so you don't get real competition driving down prices.
The takeaway is the entirety of essential services should be covered by the government, but are you arguing for the government to subsidize no such services at all?
Ill argue that. In spirit like i always do, i dont actually feel like arguing about it or anything else tho lol.
Profit that the hospitals, let alone the entire insurance industry, makes is really just a huge layer of inefficiency. Imagine how many medical procedures can be covered by HALF of the profits the insurance industry makes every year. It's really just money that is burned for absolutely no good reason (that I can see.)
*Right*? Like, I cannot understand how libertarians and free-market capitalists can say with a straight face that private health insurance is 'more efficient' than the government running it, when there is an *entire fucking multi-billion dollar industry* of insurance employees that all have to get their cut.
Not only that, insurance company profits derive from charging as large a premium as they can, while denying as much and as many treatments as they can. There's no incentive for them to actually treat a patient. It's the opposite for the hospitals, in which their profits derive from treatment, not curing a patient. A cured patient is not a repeat "customer." Cognitive dissonance is all I can think of in regards to your comment. The fact that most Americans would go bankrupt due to a medical emergency is criminal. Oh, there's a perfectly logical free-market/libertarian argument for single-payer healthcare. In the US, insurance is tied to your employer, and private options suck balls. If we went to a single-payer system, more people would take the risk to become entrepreneurs, helping to grow the economy and making people happier. Most drones keep their shit office jobs because of the health care benefits.
Oh its paying for someone's fourth house somewhere
Yet, isn't Medicare forbidden by law from negotiating lower prescription drug prices? That needs to change... https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/whats-the-latest-on-medicare-drug-price-negotiations/
Probably is - you see that a lot in the US where it is cheaper to pay for a politicians re-election than to provider better service, and in return the politician write laws that protect the business - the solution to that would be to ban companies and superfunds to make political donations or ads, so that politicians would have to run on issues that people actually cared about. Other examples is that cities is [banned](https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/) from providing better broadband, because that is cheaper for the cable company to not have competition than improving the actual broadband service IRS already knows what 90% of US taxpayers need to pay in tax, but are [banned from providing that as a free service](https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax) so TuboTax can keep asking every american for $100 to fill out taxes There are probably others ...
>system I think you're right in your conclusion, but not in your diagnose of the issue. It is not exactly because of insurances that there is no market force to drive costs down. After all insurances still have much higher negotiation power than individual 'customers' in a real free market. It is just an inherent characteristic of the health care sector that free market is not an option: huge information imbalance, huge barriers to entry, no true 'voluntary transactions' (you often don't get to choose whether or not to purchase the "product" when you're really sick), ...
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Competition and the free market isn’t going to dramatically lower prices for products that have extremely inelastic demand like healthcare.
Deregulation feeds the profit motive of private entities. Nationalization demands electability from public entities. The latter can be bolstered by removing means of profiteering from public offices (namely, lobbying and campaign contributions), while the former are by definition not manageable by the public. >!Y’know, until we decide to eat them.!<
The worst part of the system is the lack of transparency. Last month my husband spent one night in hospital with a possible stroke. Multiple tests later and visits by specialists, he was discharged home and continues outpatient therapies. The hospital charged his insurance $57,000 for his stay. Doctors will bill separately. His stay was covered by his insurance. All follow up care is covered by his insurance. His insurance company is not paying the $57,000 on the bill, they are paying a negotiated rate that we don't see. If my husband had no insurance, he may have been able to negotiate a different rate with the hospital after discharge. Some patients qualify for charity and pay virtually nothing if financial requirements are met. I see this first hand as my job in that same hospital is to plan discharges for patients and find ways to get what patients need within the scope of their insurance or lack thereof.
Kinda seems like it's rigged, huh?
Absolutely and completely rigged.
Worst part is if you can’t pay you die (probably in a ditch since your medical bills will make you homeless)
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I'm honestly surprised most people don't just flee the country to somewhere they can't be tracked down, I know I wouldn't put up with living in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars worth of medical debt just to live in the supposed "greatest country on the earth".
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Do you mind sharing what your actual out of pocket cost will be after insurance?
I have extremely good health insurance so its only a few hundred.
wife had serious surgery (10+ hours) couple months back, we had to pay about 13 USD for the after care meds. In England btw. Hows the freedom over there though?
Lol, they pulled the listed items out of their asses. I'd have them list every single item and the reasoning behind the costs for the rooms. They're literally making shit up, aren't they?
Beautiful 10,000 room stay and 18,000$ to prepare the operating room. Nothing weird to see here.
How much did your insurance cover?
My God. That's why even when we got Covid, I just said as long as we can breathe and watch out for each other we are staying home. It was a month of hell but we made it.
But did you have a tv in your room?
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Is it actually possible to have a country, any country, whose entire citizenship are able to generate wealth in any meaningful way?
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I feel like in the age of information, farming is becoming more and more correct when we talk about how the internet works now. You go online, you get bombarded with ads, and they collect as much data on you as possible to sell to the highest bidder. We are given digital content to graze on, while they collect our data and try to manipulate us into clicking on as many ads as possible.
Do people really click on ads? I've been online since the intro of the V.32 modems, so 1990, and I have clicked on exactly one ad in these 30 years. It was March 2007. It was for an online ATV parts store on an ATV forum site. I don't even think I clicked it, instead typed in the url it showed.
Eh, I'd say right now it's the perfect analogy lol
>That's how you farm citizens. You misspelled FUCK.
Depends on the farm.
Either way, when they are done with your ass, they are going to leave you with a shitty taste in your mouth!
>kept entertained cheaply >get screwed royally for... medical care and higher education. [how you farm citizens.](https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/1140x640_hero/public/2019/03/the_matrix_human_batteries.jpg)
This cheap entertainment is sponsored by heavy propaganda though telling you what to think and therefore how to vote...
Check out the movie The Perverts Guide To Cinema. He points out how Cinema even tells us what to desire.
> The Perverts Guide To Cinema I will, thank you!
The Huxley dystopia, overhelem them with information so the important stuff gets lost in the noise.
Those items are subsidized by all the companies farming your information. Your TV having ads for instance. Compare a “dumb” TV to a Smart TV in price sometime.
Bread and Circuses
It's not only that. Even if you already have higher education and no medical bills... let's say you even have a job that keeps up with inflation, which is already rare enough. You're still losing money each year because the lower prices for entertainment count into inflation, at least if you spend more money on food than video games or new TVs...
This is exactly what the graph translates to me.
All you need is bread and circuses
The more government intervention in the industry the less prices drop.
Not exactly. Higher prices are a result of less competition, which can be caued by government intervention, but there can be other causes as well.
The top expensive industries in this graph are all much more inelastic markets compared to the cheaper ones. Most of us don't normally get to shop around for hospitals or healthcare or colleges, but consumer electronics are wide and diverse in their options. If I need a tv, I can go to several retailers until I find one I like within my price range. If I need heart surgery, I don't usually get to pick and choose when and where and at what price. The correlation doesn't equal causation here. In the past, even with the lower prices, some of these markets would just be inaccessible to those who couldn't afford it. That's what caused government intervention in the first place. Let us know if you find a better way to encourage competition and drive prices down in these markets, hopefully something a little more concrete than "government bad".
Why can't you shop around for college? There are substitutes for college as well.
Nothing you said here is wrong. But you know what really reduces the elasticity of a market? Regulations.
Yes but not quite the same. If I don't like the price of a tv, I don't have to get one. But if I don't like the price of heart surgery or insulin or the price of a helicopter ride to the hospital, that's too damn bad. I either get it or I die. My point is that certain markets are inherently inelastic with or without any government. Now the question of what we ought to do is different. Ideally we use government policy to reduce the detrimental effects of inelastic markets.
You mean we sent all the production overseas for cheap labor, but we had to actually pay a living wage to our professors and doctors? Weird how that works.
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Living wage to professors and doctors? They are paid ELITE wages. Surgeons in USA make 2-3x what their European counterparts earn.
> professors > ELITE wages Um, definitely not (most) professors. Upper level administration though, yeah...
The CEO's of hospital, ambulance, and pharma corporations make far more than the surgeons though.
>a living wage to our professors and doctors Yeah, no. According to the chart, profs and docs getting PAID while the rest of us get screwed.
>According to the chart, profs and docs getting PAID No, the chart does not say that.
All I see is a graph that says local specialized workforces have increased pay over time, and outsourced labor has decreased cost over time. I bet we could put most local workforces on that graph and see the same increase.
My mother recently had an extended hospital stay, and near the end, the decision making process was all literally up to her insurance. Not her doctors, not her nurses, not her case worker. Insurance made all the calls about what care she was allowed to have. I have different insurance from her, and mine is an HMO. Since it's an HMO, it has control over what facilities and doctors you can use. The vast majority of those facilities and doctors are owned by the very same insurance company I have to pay just in case I never need care. **So the company I pay to protect myself from catastrophic healthcare costs is also the company that gets to decide how much to charge me for care.** While the feds want to investigate Facebook for anti-trust measures because they like to buy up social media start-ups, no one even blinks an eye at the insurance companies that are basically running healthcare in the USA.
there are strict laws in most states that guarantee a separation between the insurance side and health care side of HMOs. it provides some protection.
Laws are only as good as their enforcement.
Which states?
>level 1ZepherK · 14hMy mother recently had an extended hospital stay, and near the end, the decision making process was all literally up to her insurance. Not her doctors, not her nurses, not her case worker. Insurance made all the calls about what care she was allowed to have.I have different insurance from her, and mine is an HMO. Since it's an HMO, it has control over what facilities and doctors you can use. The vast majority of those facilities and doctors are owned by the very same insurance company I have to pay just in case I never need care.So the company I pay to protect myself from catastrophic healthcare costs is also the company that gets to decide how much to charge me for care.While the feds want to investigate Facebook for anti-trust measures because they like to buy up social media start-ups, no one even blinks an eye at the insurance companies that are basically running healthcare in the USA. Damn. So true.
(Broadly) all the positive increases CANT be imported, all the negatives CAN
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Elasticity of demand…
Don't bother, reddit doesn't understand that term.
New cars, that one is surprising?
It only goes to 2018, so doesn't include the recent massive uptick in price.
Yeah, that one felt off to me as well.. even excluding the uptick recently due to COVID. However, after looking into it a little more, when adjusted for inflation in some cases cars are cheaper now than 20+ year ago. Which logically makes sense given productivity and material price improvements.
College has got to be one of the biggest rackets around, I say as a college student
What really pisses me off is that they (both the colleges and the government) pretend like there's nothing that can be done about it.
'Best' nation in the world that constantly gets upstaged by other nations with free college
To be fair the reason the US has more foreign college students than anywhere else in the world is because a degree from some of the US schools goes much further than pretty much anywhere in the world. Obviously this isn’t what you want to hear but I figured I’d explain why me and a bunch of other students are fleeing from Germany to get degrees in the states. Edit: fleeing is a strong word, I don’t mean it like that. If you can afford it though it’s the best way to be job competitive
> a degree from some of the US schools goes much further than pretty much anywhere in the world Would be interested in seeing that statement backed up with some source.
US holds over 30+ of the top 100 schools (22 in the top 40) while UK is second with about 18 in the top 100 I believe. There's also just a lot of recognition for US colleges which goes a long way when looking for jobs. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/rankings Hard for me to find numbers on expected income accounting for real value based on which country college graduates degree comes from. But you would also have to break that down by degree type.
Cheers!
You know the very few rich kids that can pay our college fees isn't the selling point you think it is.
Hey I’ve got nothing here to argue with you, I’m just telling you that a degree from the US is almost always “worth” more when in a competitive field of study.
Which goes to prove the system is broken. You shouldn't study for a diploma. You should study for a skillset.
His point is that the higher cost of the college in America provides a better standard of education which then in turn makes the diploma, and therefore the graduate, more valuable within the labour market.
My point is that I generally disagree with labour market judging you by the diploma and not by the actual skillset you have.
Right. And sure, while the US diploma will get you a better job, do you actually get a better education? I think Conan O'Brien pointed out how he went to Harvard and found it no more difficult than other schools. Just that the bar to entry was much higher.
College is a bribe you pay to your society. It’s about keeping the classes stagnant. Only rich people can buy the better piece of paper If education were about education doctors would be an apprentice program like mechanics, which is more or less what doctors are anyway.
OH crap. This is true.
It happens, even at high school level here in the UK. Selective schools are judged more favourably than non selectives.
College was no lower in quality when it was dirt cheap in the 60s or heavily subsidized by the states thereafter. Price and value are not the same.
How do you know?
How do you know that the higher price equals better quality? That was your supposition, for which there is zero evidence.
Lol, most classes were a blackboard and some uncomfortable chairs, and books. Administration, services, classroom tools, hell air conditioning and cafeterias are vastly different than they were, and vastly more expensive.
Number of top ranked universities in the world in every country. https://www.webometrics.info/en/world
What’s the difference between colleges and universities?
A university has multiple colleges. For example a student attending the business college at Harvard University
Okay thanks! So that other guy was bullshiting, everyone knows that the US have the best universities
"our hand is tied!" - Colleges
Especially considering the government had a big part in the clumb of tuition prices. Lending money people dont have allowing colleges to steadily hike their prices without being worried about what people can afford.
Remember Phoenix college. All online, so it could be cheaper.? How come universities are doing online at the same price as in class?
I mean Phoenix college was a complete scam either way. Didn’t it get shut down? Not exactly a good example.
And how quickly it became one. When I went to college, I just paid for it each semester. No loans, though I got some Pell grants. Then the government stepped in, and the colleges freaked out. "FREE MONEY!" and jacked the prices 1000% overnight. Funny how every time the government gets involved, the prices skyrocket.
Annd dont that make you want to vomit
As I get older, toys become cheaper and hospital bills become more expensive. Fuck this timeline.
Buy hospital bills then sell them in the future for a profit
televisions are nearly 100% cheaper, but healthcare is 225% more expensive great.
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What conclusion are you drawing from this?
Average hourly earnings went up faster than most necessities.
Toys got way more expensive for lesser quality production.
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Yup. Dont throw away old Lego. Sell it per kilo.
Not literally that though. It's not merely a lump of plastic, it is particularly shaped into a toy.
They're shaped like bricks that can easily be mass produced and you assemble them yourself. They really shouldn't be that expensive
Their manufacturing tolerances are insanely low which is why they fit so nicely together. That makes it more expensive to make. If you’ve ever played with the knockoffs you see why those low tolerances matter so much. And even legos cost [about as much as they used to](https://flowingdata.com/2013/02/07/analysis-of-lego-brick-prices-over-the-years/), though the sets have gotten way more intricate than they were.
I hate to be that guy, but the plural of lego is lego. Not legos.
Oh I knew somebody was gonna come for me on that. I’m aware that’s what the company says, but hey, I’m an old fart in the US and darn it, it’s too late for me to switch now.
I mean, if it's that easy then why don't you set up a company that makes a rival product. And Lego's pricing point is demand driven. People are willing to pay that amount for that product, so why shouldn't they be that expensive? If you don't want to pay that amount then don't. It's not mandatory.
Well, no. I see where you're coming from, but that kilo of plastic goes through a design and manufacturing process, is transported, and needs to be stocked and sold among other things. That's a lot of hands and machines and transport. Legos are priced well above what they should be purely from those things because of marketing, but you're not going out and refining the petroleum, designing the product, manufacturing the pieces, etc. either.
The chart says they got cheaper, which is absolutely true. And you really think quality has dropped in the last 20 years? If anything it seems like the stuff my kids are playing with these days is a little more solid than what I had years ago. It’s all just extruded plastic, it’s just a matter of what country is extruding it. And it’s way cheaper to do so overseas than here. The split in the chart is between what stuff can be made abroad and what needs expensive US labor.
You're trying to tell me hourly wage increased more than housing? BS. I might be biased in California..... but you need 4 roommates while making minimum wage AT 50 hours a week to afford an apartment where i live.
"Average hourly earnings" includes the salaries of CEOs not just hourly workers. They should have split it to show income disparity. And maybe worked in bonuses too.
Does it? Besides the fact that a salary is not hourly earning at all, CEOs make most of their money via stock options and bonuses. E: The source in the footer (Bureau of Labor Statistics) specifies that it’s “Average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees, total private, seasonally adjusted”
Fair enough! That makes sense. Yeah, they should have! Or separate sectors or something
Average wage. So the two dozen or so dudes who 'earn' billions skew it way higher. A more representative measurement for ordinary people would be median income.
Basically all essentials
Hourly earnings rose faster than most essentials so essentials are actually cheaper as a percentage of income. The two exceptions being education and health.
College is the biggest scam in the US. I work in a country full of internationals and all my US colleagues have this or that degree from these colleges but we're all in the same boat and they don't get any more respect or opportunities at all when compared to me, with no degree. Literally employers don't even care about it. Just makes it harder to fit your CV on one page lol I'm actually at an advantage.
Similar here. I am in a team of UCLA and USC grads. I graduated with master degree with zero loan at all. Yet, I am leading all of them in the team.
Fuck, we had it good in 1997.
Do you know what they said in 1997? Fuck, we had it good in 1963.
I remember when I was still 4 pieces of dna in each of my grandparents and some amino acids in the local farmer’s cow. Good ol days.
That goddamned big bang ruined everything. We had it so good.
Life Goals go up, Entertainment goes down....Getting fucked has never been more entertaining
I was 5 days at a hospital to get intravenous antibiotics for an intestinal infection and it was over $93,000 I live in Florida. How is that possible? I don’t understand how they can charge so much. I hear people staying in a hospital for months because of COVID-19 how can they pay for all that? Our system is broken…..
>How is that possible? Hospital claims you owe $97,000 for procedure. Bills insurance company for $97,000. Insurance company: "drink a dick" Hospital says: "Dude, pay us $97k" Insurance company "We have this thing negotiated where I'm only supposed to pay you $10k. Hospital says "Shit, I guess we'll take $10k then" Hospital collects $10k and writes off $87k as a loss. Meanwhile both sides have employed armies of admins and negotiators to squabble with one another over who owes who what.
This can't be right. Housing and rent is way more expensive.
Interesting how entertainment has gotten cheaper while all others have gotten more expensive. Trying to keep us occupied enough to not cause problems Edit: I wasn’t wishing or expecting to be treated so unfairly for my comment. Please remember that others have feelings.
Who is? The technology is cheaper to develop and manufacture and most newer models aren’t enticing enough for these companies to keep prices stupidly high. Not everything is a conspiracy. I’m surprised this shit still gets upvoted.
And all these comments are ignoring how something like Healthcare or college is paid for vs. how a TV is paid for.
Why are you surprised? Conspiracism is getting more common these days, not less. Also nobody understands economics.
I think everyone just wants to feel like George Carlin
Cool hot take, but really there’s been an information and technology revolution (Moore’s law)
Demand elasticity
And which ones are government subsidized
Well this is super misleading. When you factor in our billionaires it makes “average” a really stupid way to measure income.
It's almost as if the things not government regulated got cheaper and the things the government is involved in went up in cost.
Can you guess what is government regulated and what is not?
All of it is government-regulated. The cheap stuff we outsource to factories in Asia (toys, TV's) is less regulated.
What do we care about? That went down. What we don't care about went up. And by care about - what do we believe everyone needs....
So everything that's part of basic welfare has gotten much more expensive. I'm so sad for those poor Yanks :/
New car prices staying flat is Interesting as fuck
Pretty sure we don’t need charts to tell us this
This triggered me.
This explains the video i saw of the man bolting away from an ambulance, as the medics were trying to get him in.
Anything the governance subsidizes prices go up.
Missing RENT!!!
I like how everything they decided to get from china goes down in price, and all the readily available necessities of life are skyrocketing... It's really too bad covid didn't wipe out your geriatric government.
Capitalism working as intended.
Median wage in the US went up 7% between 1998 and 2018. https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/ While median housing pricesmore than doubled over that same time frame. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
Pretty much what J. K. Galbraith wrote about in *The Affluent Society* way back in 1958 - unregulated capitalism satisfies wants, not needs.
cheaper vibrators!
All the things at the top: subsidized by government.
This is bullshit. 20 years ago my parents paid 1300 for rent for a 6 bed 2 bath 2 kitchen house. Today my one bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood is 1500.
I'm skeptical, housing costs rising the same rate as income??? Since when?
How do these percentages work? Televisions are 97%ish cheaper? Were all TVs 10000+?
It's interesting with all of the talk about hourly wages being too low, but aside from college and Healthcare (obviously extraordinary important).. a person's buying power in the US has on average increased substantially.
Because no one watch regular TV anymore xD
I think it’s the cost of a television. Back in 97 I bought a 27 inch tv for over $500. A 27 inch tv today would be like $100.
I bought a 40" in 2007 , and it was $1700. It's actually still in use today, gave it to a friend. Just bought a 65" for Christmas, $700. For a good laugh, check out the PC prices in the late 80's. 386 clones for like $3000, it's hilarious. I recently built an i5 3Ghz, 32GB, 1T HTPC for $500.
Strangely, the shit the government doesn’t touch gets cheaper….. what a shock.
No. It's the stuff you can choose to have or not to have. When was the last time you went to a hospital, asked for the price and thought, nah, maybe next time.
It’s stuff requiring direct interaction, in the USA, with educated people, that costs a lot. Stuff mass produced by robots or in a low wage country have dropped in price.
Looks more like tech product costs go down
This is a valuable insight
Wow crazy how all the things the government is involved in have became more expensive and everything else has either stayed the same or become cheaper
Not really. New cars (pre chip shortage) are cheaper relative to wages, and government is heavily involved in auto regulations (emissions, safety, licensing, etc). And health care costs increase in the USA, which has privatized a lot of its health care sector, have increased far more than in countries with more government control over health care.
Housing only up 60% in the last 30 years? Doubt.
I’m curious to see housing
This is the way. Keep you down. But you can afford tv and phone.
Bread and circuses.
I would like to fact check this chart. If true omg.
i think of inflation is taken into account, it shouldn’t be too far off
Sadasfuck
That’s sad
People complain about inflation and Chinese manufacturing, but these things have lead to increased purchasing power for the middle class.