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asdf32 posted:It's going to be interesting watching Trump attempt to cut healthcare costs while constantly beating the "jobs" drum. Costs are jobs. Healthcare is close to 20% of the economy. Cutting healthcare 10% knocks out 2% of GDP.
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Jan 2, 2017 02:44
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It's a good thing those rallies worked. If they hadn't happened, we might still have troops in the middle east to this very day
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Jan 2, 2017 03:05
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asdf32 posted:It's going to be interesting watching Trump attempt to cut healthcare costs while constantly beating the "jobs" drum. Costs are jobs. Healthcare is close to 20% of the economy. Cutting healthcare 10% knocks out 2% of GDP.
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Jan 2, 2017 03:43
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cheese posted:What percentage of "health care" jobs are actually related to the insurance industry? It can't be very high.
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Jan 2, 2017 08:01
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asdf32 posted:It's going to be interesting watching Trump attempt to cut healthcare costs while constantly beating the "jobs" drum. Costs are jobs. Healthcare is close to 20% of the economy. Cutting healthcare 10% knocks out 2% of GDP. He's NOT cutting health care costs. If anything he'll increase costs and invest in the companies with the highest growth.
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Jan 2, 2017 13:54
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If anything, the healthcare industry in the US is grossly oversized. Last time I was in the ER overnight in this massive hospital I was its only there and all the other patient rooms were empty.
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Jan 2, 2017 14:10
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:If anything, the healthcare industry in the US is grossly oversized. Last time I was in the ER overnight in this massive hospital I was its only there and all the other patient rooms were empty. I see you don't live in New England. Though to be fair, half the people in the waiting rooms I've been in are just there to get painkillers.
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Jan 2, 2017 14:21
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:If anything, the healthcare industry in the US is grossly oversized. Last time I was in the ER overnight in this massive hospital I was its only there and all the other patient rooms were empty. My dad got pneumonia a few years ago and when he went to the ER like five+ different specialist doctors came in to look at him for about a minute each and every one added to the bill. I can't imagine how stupidly expensive that would have been without insurance.
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Jan 2, 2017 15:42
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cheese posted:What percentage of "health care" jobs are actually related to the insurance industry? It can't be very high. Well roughly, money = jobs and the insurance industry collects a good amount of money. So yes it has a lot of jobs and administrative type jobs are solid middle class jobs too.
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Jan 2, 2017 16:18
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No one with any power in healthcare(executives, administrators, physicians) have any desire to lower costs because who do you think is benefitting greatly from the status quo?
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Jan 2, 2017 17:33
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Insurance companies at least theoretically are incentivized to work to lower healthcare costs, but they're not incentivized to pass those costs on to consumers. The (very) slow adoption of bundled payments is a good example of insurers taking steps to reduce costs. But like most innovations in that area, Medicare and Medicaid lead the way.
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Jan 2, 2017 18:09
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axeil posted:
quote:a lot of money went into fixing the problems around documentation and robo-signing with lots of nasty downstream effects that didn't get play in the press because they were ideology neutral. things like the FHA taking a massive bath on its insured properties because its lenders were unable to foreclose for years and so instead of getting a house in mostly good condition, they got a house 2 years later that was a hole in the ground. that ends up costing the government a lot of money since the FHA is now unable to sell the home and has to write off the asset as a total loss. if that happened even a few times it's a multi-million dollar loss to the government and i know that it happened a lot more than "just a few times" If those houses were total losses anyway maybe it would have been smart to do everything we could to keep people in their homes so they could contribute to the economy and maybe make some payments down the line rather than throw families out on the street just so we could own unsellable ruins, huh. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 20:28
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VitalSigns posted:If those houses were total losses anyway maybe it would have been smart to do everything we could to keep people in their homes so they could contribute to the economy and maybe make some payments down the line rather than throw families out on the street just so we could own unsellable ruins, huh.
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Jan 2, 2017 20:49
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Can't allow that, would be a creating a clear moral hazard. You wouldn't want people to think they could make unwise financial decisions and think the government would bail them out and ask little in return. That certainly would just encourage bad behavior on the part of those people.
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Jan 2, 2017 21:49
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SaTaMaS posted:Yes the study says exactly what I quoted before, and that the 62.1% number is way off. The difference is the same as before - 62.1% is if you include every bankruptcy that included more than $1000 of medical bills, while 18% to 26% is bankruptcies that were primarily caused by medical bills. The second estimate is the less politically motivated one. It's hilarious that you're talking about "political motivation" when you just tried to pass off some garbage right wing think tanker's opinion piece of as a valid citation. These studies display a wide variety of results depending on the methodology used. You are cherry picking the study that best suits the argument you committed yourself to, despite showing no actual familiarity with the issue, and then claiming it's the best study because you're convinced anyone who disagrees with you must have a "political motivation". The fact these studies yield such wildly varying results is a sign that the data is extremely sensitive to methodology but there are good reasons to think in the case of medical care that a broader definition of medical caused bankrupcy is the right one because of how fundamentally disruptive a major illness is and also because the rest of the US safety net tends to be so paltry for people who lose their primary income. Further, in the US there are numerous and well researched reports of large numbers of people simply forgoing healthcare and working until they drop dead or literally cannot move because they cannot afford to lose their only income. If you want to whistle past the graveyard and keep citing garbage Fraser Institute studies as authoritative examples of how single payer health care doesn't provide far better protection from the economic hardship of illness than the American system then go ahead but anyone with eyes to see or the ability to read can see the ample evidence demonstrating how terrible the health outcomes of the US system are in financial terms: New York Times posted:In the new poll, conducted by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 20 percent of people under age 65 with health insurance nonetheless reported having problems paying their medical bills over the last year. By comparison, 53 percent of people without insurance said the same. Obamacare utterly fails to address this problem for much of the population. It's a lottery system where the quality of your care is dependent on where you live, and it leaves the most dysfunctional parts of the system untouched while downloading all the costs onto middle class consumers. Your insinuation that it's basically just as good as single payer is idiotic and even most of it's liberal defenders will admit the system was far from ideal.
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Jan 2, 2017 21:51
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VitalSigns posted:If those houses were total losses anyway maybe it would have been smart to do everything we could to keep people in their homes so they could contribute to the economy and maybe make some payments down the line rather than throw families out on the street just so we could own unsellable ruins, huh. The banks and investors could still claim the full value of a valueless foreclosed property because they aren't or weren't required to mark the prices of property to the market. Let's say a house was worth $500k in 2007, it was foreclosed in 2010, and now it would cost $5k just to get rid of the house. Selling it would be at a big loss, but keeping it on the books makes it look like the mortgage holder has $500k more in assets. I don't remember if mark to market is the legal standard for mortgages now or if it was just bailed out banks.
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Jan 3, 2017 01:00
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disjoe posted:Insurance companies at least theoretically are incentivized to work to lower healthcare costs, but they're not incentivized to pass those costs on to consumers. Insurers pushed for bundled payments since forever. Providers refused to go along with it because they axiomatically refuse anything Payers want. Also because until the last decade or so most payers were still using paper systems. For the same reason: "Insurers want us to use computers. So that must be bad for us. Lets try to administer billions of dollars using paper". Helsing posted:Obamacare utterly fails to address this problem for much of the population. It's a lottery system where the quality of your care is dependent on where you live, and it leaves the most dysfunctional parts of the system untouched while downloading all the costs onto middle class consumers. Your insinuation that it's basically just as good as single payer is idiotic and even most of it's liberal defenders will admit the system was far from ideal. The biggest problem with Obama care is that too many people are still on Employer based plans. Killing them is the first step towards fixing the system.
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Jan 3, 2017 01:39
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Mark to market was the accounting standard for all mortgage backed securities before the financial crisis and continues to be, though the valuation requirements have eased a little bit. During the financial crisis some people (including Noted Shithead Newt Gingrich) advocated a suspension of mark to market, which is akin to saying "NO THIS BUBBLE IS NOT BIG ENOUGH, MAKE IT BIGGER" Xae posted:Insurers pushed for bundled payments since forever. No poo poo? I had no idea. I knew about the paper thing but I didn't know that was the reason. I guess the government was the only insurer with enough leverage to really get the ball rolling. disjoe fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jan 3, 2017 |
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Jan 3, 2017 02:01
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A Buttery Pastry posted:IIRC, it's around half a million jobs total.
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Jan 3, 2017 03:01
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Why does that seem insane? There's 860k doctors in the US
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Jan 3, 2017 03:17
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ohgodwhat posted:Why does that seem insane? There's 860k doctors in the US I feel like having 2 insurance personnel for every 3 doctors might be a sign of misallocated healthcare resources.
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Jan 3, 2017 03:21
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Subjunctive posted:I feel like having 2 insurance personnel for every 3 doctors might be a sign of misallocated healthcare resources. Hahaha this dummy thinks we efficiently allocate our healthcare resources hahahahahaha
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Jan 3, 2017 03:26
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Does that number include agents (or brokers or producers depending on where you work)?
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Jan 3, 2017 03:56
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cheese posted:There are something like ~155-160m Americans who are fully employed - you are telling me that 1 in every 300 Americans with a job works for a health care insurance company or in some related capacity (like a medical billing clerk)? That seems loving insane. I wonder if we magic'ed every American onto Medicare, how many of those people would be able to transition to a federal/state/county job working with Medicare? This shouldn't be that shocking. Something like 10% of the workforce is employed in the healthcare industry or related industries. The number of Americans who are in some way tied to the healthcare industry is incredibly huge.
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Jan 3, 2017 04:27
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Xae posted:The biggest problem with Obama care is that too many people are still on Employer based plans. Killing them is the first step towards fixing the system. Is this some sort of 'make it so miserable for everyone that there's a massive push for UHC' accelerationist plan?
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Jan 3, 2017 05:00
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Subjunctive posted:I feel like having 2 insurance personnel for every 3 doctors might be a sign of misallocated healthcare resources. It prolly includes those doing medical coding and billing, AKA the person at the doctor's office that isn't the doctor. When viewed like that, a close-to 1-to-1 relationship makes some amount of sense.
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Jan 3, 2017 06:19
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Don't we have a healthcare thread somewhere in DnD? I'd like to talk about what happens step-by-step when China's market implodes.
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Jan 3, 2017 06:49
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It will all be fun and games until Deutsche Bank implodes and takes the EU with it and China starts invading around to deflect domestic unrest. Then it will be hilarious.
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Jan 3, 2017 10:02
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Subjunctive posted:I feel like having 2 insurance personnel for every 3 doctors might be a sign of misallocated healthcare resources. And how many dentists, dental technicians, nurses, home case assistants and other Providers are there? The number is North of 5 million.
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Jan 3, 2017 18:12
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Grouchio posted:Don't we have a healthcare thread somewhere in DnD? I'd like to talk about what happens step-by-step when China's market implodes. That's very hard to predict especially if you're only relying on publicly available knowledge, especially in regards to China. Most commentators seem to agree that things don't look very stable at the moment but trying to extrapolate a play-by-play breakdown of how things could go wrong or how bad the crash ends up being is extremely difficult.
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Jan 3, 2017 18:43
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tekz posted:Is this some sort of 'make it so miserable for everyone that there's a massive push for UHC' accelerationist plan? By pushing more people into the individual market you lower the overall cost per person of the pool. Plus it means that you can pick a plan and a Payer that has the Providers you want to see. Plus it helps make the Payers accountable. Right now Payers can piss off Members nilly willy and it just don't matter. As long as the VP of HR is happy they keep the account. Plus it stops hiding the up to 80% of the cost that the employer picks up that people don't see. A ton of people just see the $20-150 a pay period and think that is how much insurance costs. They aren't seeing the hundreds of dollars the employer is kicking in (tax free).
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Jan 4, 2017 00:47
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They will cure the Chinese market with TCM
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Jan 4, 2017 01:01
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Xae posted:By pushing more people into the individual market you lower the overall cost per person of the pool. Everywhere I've worked that has offered insurance has shown how much the employer covers and how much the employee is responsible for.
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Jan 4, 2017 01:09
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Xae posted:By pushing more people into the individual market you lower the overall cost per person of the pool. I live in a country with universal healthcare but at the moment something I'm doing for work involves researching available insurance plans for small businesses / individuals and it's loving nightmarish. Health insurance is not the kind of thing that lends itself to market mechanisms, from what I've been told I gather research on how people pick between options in situations like this shows that even savvy and well educated professional types usually tend to choose plans based on arbitrary features like which option is listed first. This just isn't an area where market mechanisms operate well and trying to force a market solution merely worsens outcomes. The solution here is to expand medicare to cover everyone and then to start addressing the massive rent-seeking that lobbyist control of Washington has enabled. Trying to fine-tune the Rube-Golderberg machine that is the American medical insurance system is just a set-up for more failure. And that's without even getting into how totally politically unfeasible your plan is. Medicare for all is a long-shot but it's at least plausible you could sell Americans on switching into plan that most people are already familiar with. I think there'd be blood in the streets if you told people you were taking away their employer insurance plans and replacing it with whatever crapifeid options the Obamacare exchanges have left on offer.
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Jan 4, 2017 01:45
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Helsing posted:I live in a country with universal healthcare but at the moment something I'm doing for work involves researching available insurance plans for small businesses / individuals and it's loving nightmarish. Health insurance is not the kind of thing that lends itself to market mechanisms, from what I've been told I gather research on how people pick between options in situations like this shows that even savvy and well educated professional types usually tend to choose plans based on arbitrary features like which option is listed first. This just isn't an area where market mechanisms operate well and trying to force a market solution merely worsens outcomes. The plans employers provide are subject to the same rules and regulations that the individual market is. My employer offers High Deductible health plans on Bronze, Silver and Gold which are nearly identical to what I can get in the exchange. The only difference is the ~$500 subsidy my employer provides. Medicare for all is a joke of a plan. Literally no one in the industry takes it seriously. Unless you want to put every provider in the country out of business overnight. The key problem with American healthcare is that the care is too expensive, but people don't talk about how to get costs down, they talk about how to pay for it. Medicare for all or no the cost of providing healthcare is increasing faster than any payer plan can handle. If left unchecked it will be 30% of our total economy in less than 15 years.
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Jan 4, 2017 02:09
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Helsing posted:I live in a country with universal healthcare but at the moment something I'm doing for work involves researching available insurance plans for small businesses / individuals and it's loving nightmarish. Health insurance is not the kind of thing that lends itself to market mechanisms, from what I've been told I gather research on how people pick between options in situations like this shows that even savvy and well educated professional types usually tend to choose plans based on arbitrary features like which option is listed first. This just isn't an area where market mechanisms operate well and trying to force a market solution merely worsens outcomes. Frequently the plans are utterly misleading as well. At work we had an HR guy come around and show us the math on the plans. Turns out the most expensive one loving sucked and the cheapest one with the highest out of pocket maximum was actually the best deal, especially if something catastrophic happened to you. The difference wasn't small, either; the "best" one was like $150 a month. The cheapest is $13.
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Jan 4, 2017 02:12
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Frequently the plans are utterly misleading as well. At work we had an HR guy come around and show us the math on the plans. Turns out the most expensive one loving sucked and the cheapest one with the highest out of pocket maximum was actually the best deal, especially if something catastrophic happened to you. At a number crunching and actuarial level the high-end plans can be proven to make your care worse. You are more likely to be over tested and over treated if the providers think it isn't going to cost you anything. You end up paying more for worse outcomes.
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Jan 4, 2017 02:16
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Xae posted:The plans employers provide are subject to the same rules and regulations that the individual market is. My employer offers High Deductible health plans on Bronze, Silver and Gold which are nearly identical to what I can get in the exchange. The only difference is the ~$500 subsidy my employer provides. How are market forces/mechanisms going to drive down prices and increase efficiency when a person is facing a decision that could wind up with them dying or having a permanently diminished quality of life, or the life of a loved one, which would induce even more "irrational" decisions. This imbalance of power between buyer and seller creates tons of perverse incentives to rent seek, as demonstrated in the pharmaceutical industry today. Markets are fine for the distribution of many goods provided they are properly regulated (and owned by their workers of course) but scarce goods that we simultaneously declare a fundamental human right must be provided as a public service for that declaration to mean anything.
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Jan 4, 2017 02:27
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Xae posted:The plans employers provide are subject to the same rules and regulations that the individual market is. My employer offers High Deductible health plans on Bronze, Silver and Gold which are nearly identical to what I can get in the exchange. The only difference is the ~$500 subsidy my employer provides. Wow, the industry that benefits the most from an extremely inefficient system is full of people who don't think the system should be abandoned. I'm shocked. quote:The key problem with American healthcare is that the care is too expensive, but people don't talk about how to get costs down, they talk about how to pay for it. Switching to a universal public system would be a massive cost saver and have the added benefit of freeing up economic resources that could be used more effectively elsewhere.
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Jan 4, 2017 03:34
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As someone who moved from a country with universal healthcare to the US, I can confirm that American health insurance is a confusing mess. It's not just the high cost, Americans don't understand how much more time and effort they put into thinking about their healthcare (between choosing plans and finding in-network providers, dealing with confusing bills and contesting denied claims) compared to your average socialist Canadian who just goes to the doctor/hospital when they're sick or injured. That being said I don't see the crappy US healthcare system causing a financial crash unless the Republicans decide to make medical debt non-dischargeable. I do think it partially explains why Americans elected a proto-fascist during a period of strong economic growth and low unemployment while Canadians went with a milquetoast neoliberal despite the near-recession caused by the collapse of oil prices.
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Jan 4, 2017 03:39
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