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Doc Hawkins posted:I know some fringe-y Americans who get a lot of medical and especially dental procedures done in Mexico. I wonder what factors might increase or decrease their numbers in the coming decade. My dad got dental surgery in the states then had to go to Mexico on business. While there his mouth started hurting and he could taste that something was wrong. Rather than wait to come back he went to a local Mexican dentist who started poking around and pulled out an infected strip of gauze like a magician with colored scarves that the American dentist had hosed up and left in the wound after stitching up the surgery. My dad got the problem fixed and some decent painkillers for a fraction of the cost without using insurance. The idea that American medical care is worth our insane cost in relation to the rest of the world is such a lie.
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Jan 13, 2017 15:12
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You can't get medical care in Mexico in an emergency, though. That only makes sense if it's something you can put off, like a cavity or a joint issue. You aren't going to put off a concussion, and most people can't spend 6 months in Mexico for cancer treatment.
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Jan 13, 2017 21:19
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Cost of my wife's root canal in the US, if she'd gotten it taken care of while we were over there: $1000. Cost of my wife's root canal on the NHS in the UK, once we got back: about $40.
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Jan 13, 2017 21:24
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B-b-b-but taxes!
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Jan 13, 2017 21:29
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feedmegin posted:Cost of my wife's root canal in the US, if she'd gotten it taken care of while we were over there: $1000. Yup. With insurance it's still $700 Out of pocket.
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Jan 13, 2017 21:33
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Seriously, gently caress dental costs. I ended up delaying some dental work at the beginning of last year until it was a legitimate emergency because my insurance doesn't cover dental and I was desperately trying to avoid the expense. My total out of pocket costs were around $2000 after using a dental discount plan to defer some of the cost. The whole thing honestly scared the poo poo out of me because I have no idea what I would have or could have done if I hadn't been able to absorb that cost.
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Jan 14, 2017 08:19
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Paradoxish posted:Seriously, gently caress dental costs. I ended up delaying some dental work at the beginning of last year until it was a legitimate emergency because my insurance doesn't cover dental and I was desperately trying to avoid the expense. My total out of pocket costs were around $2000 after using a dental discount plan to defer some of the cost. The whole thing honestly scared the poo poo out of me because I have no idea what I would have or could have done if I hadn't been able to absorb that cost. Well for old people the solution is to either fork over anywhere in between 10-40k (Case:  ) or rip out all of their teeth. Dental care a class issue? No way!
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Jan 14, 2017 08:31
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Medi-cal will cover most of the cost of getting a new crown but it requires three separate procedures and I'll also have to pay over $2,000 up front.
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Jan 14, 2017 08:36
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I'm currently looking at pulling money out of my 401k to afford to get a bunch of dental work done, it's fantastic
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Jan 14, 2017 17:00
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Hell I have dental insurance but have still been avoiding going to the dentist. I know I'm going to need to have a ton of work done and my jaw hurts on the regular (I still have my wisdom teeth and they probably are loving up). It's going to cost. I individually make more than the median household income in America and still cringe at the cost of getting major dental work done.
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Jan 14, 2017 17:12
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It was a battle to get my dental insurance to cover a crown. The initially denied having to cover it by claiming another cheaper procedure could be done. I had to write letters and call back several times before they agreed to cover 50% of the cost of the procedure(my dentist even wrote up the procedure with X-Rays to back it up).
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Jan 14, 2017 18:37
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Dental insurance seems to cost more than it would pay out. I'm not sure what the point is meant to be.
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Jan 14, 2017 21:19
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Cheaper rates I think? I would pay significantly more for dental insurance as good as my health insurance... My dental plan has an annual max payout of like $1500. What's the loving point?
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Jan 14, 2017 21:27
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At the health insurance broker I work at we generally advise clients to forgo dental insurance and just save for their own expenses.
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Jan 14, 2017 21:55
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Not to be a buzz-kill, because the topic is interesting and important, but maybe a healthcare thread is in order?
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Jan 15, 2017 02:58
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Freezer posted:Not to be a buzz-kill, because the topic is interesting and important, but maybe a healthcare thread is in order?
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Jan 15, 2017 03:49
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asdf32 posted:So where exactly do you factor voters into your equation. Some center left politicians supported deregulation and all republicans basically support it and voters keep sending republicans into office in big numbers. Can I say Trump again? Why does it seem like you compare the system to your personal ideas of success and keep score based on that? If voters don't want single payer healthcare and the system doesn't deliver it that should be scored as a democratic success, not a systemic failure. I know from our past discussions that your position here stems from a tautological definition of American democracy in which you assume that elections are accurate reflections of what voters want because otherwise they'd elect someone else. This despite a substantial body of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, showing deep and pervasive dissatisfaction with government and with both political parties. The full answer to your question would be a monograph length essay (at minimum) on the role large investors play in the political process, the extent to which voters are forced to choose between two extremely narrow ranges of options (neither of which actually disagrees on the fundamentals of the economic system), etc. One recent study which I know that you're aware of concludes, on the basis of extensive comparisons between the expressed preferences of voters at difference income levels, that: "the preferences of economic elites have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do." This wikipedia page on the so called "Investor Theory of Politics", which was coined by politician scientist Tom Fergusson, offers a reasonably good theoretical framework for understanding how this situation develops. Obviously there's a lot of cultural baggage here. You can't really discuss the rise of New Right ideology or neoliberalism in the late 20th century without going into the role of race, crime, Vietnam, generational change, etc. And voters have made plenty of decisions to enthusiastically support right-wing figures like Reagan (even if his popularity is massively exaggerated in retrospect compared to what it was at the time). The US electorate is certainly not secretly yearning for socialism, even if a lot of individual social democratic policies poll extremely well. Indeed to a large degree the evidence suggests the underlying desires of voters are somewhat contradictory and incoherent. But the really obvious reality here is that overall voters and their preferences aren't what drives policy making. Voters are obstacles to be dealt with on the road to power, and they're made significantly easier to deal with when both parties have to cater to the same basic pool of large political investors. Political disagreements are safely displaced to 'safe' issues which won't threaten the parasitic layer of lobbyists and special interests that run the country. There are specific situations where organized blocks of voters are able to press their demands more forcefully onto the system and get some kind of response. Life isn't a computer game where everyone always plays out their assigned role. There are unexpected upsets or disruptions and the people who run society are fallible humans who make mistakes or strategic oversights, which is how you can end up with a widely disliked figure like Trump winning an election he wasn't supposed to win. The claim here isn't that monied interests are omnipotent or that the US ruling class is monolithic and has no internal divisions that sometimes result in very real competition. But facile civics 101 models of the government in which political parties are just vote-maximizing efforts that cleanly replicate the desires of the "median voter" and produce an outcome based on that median voters policy preferences are an absolutely worthless way to interpret election results. quote:And that source goes on to describe how the term was invented in the 70's to describe how technology allowed increased trade and capital flows. U.S. immigration by percentage peaked around the 20's. Flows of humans have been larger in the past and the fact is that immigration hasn't been a dominant factor compared to trade in recent economic trends. Look, this is just ridiculous. You're completely ignoring anything I say and repeating these "just so" stories. You don't have to agree with my arguments but you need to at least demonstrate you've read the words I wrote and took them into account before crafting a response. Everything you've written here could have just as easily been written by you had you not read any of my arguments. I posted an article in this very thread describing how right at the height of free trade mania in the 1990s there was a lobbying move by American doctors to limit the influx of foreign trained doctors, a move explicitly prompted by a desire to prevent an "over supply" of doctors that they feared would reduce their wages. You also haven't addressed why the government couldn't just subsidize medical tourism to certified foreign clinics. Yes there would be barriers to entry here but they are far from insurmountable and would indeed be comparable to the similar technical and legal barriers to trade in goods and services that had to be overcome before modern supply chains could be internationalized to the extent that they are today. If you want to have a debate about globalization and the technical constraints on it and what the root drivers of American trade policy are (special interest lobbying vs. technical and structural constraints, or however you want to frame it) then that's great. I enjoy debates that force me to reconsider my positions or to arrange my own thoughts into arguments. But that's not what's happening here. Replying to you feels, frankly, like a big waste of time because your responses almost never seem to reply to anything specific I've said. Your just making the same bald assertion again and again. You don't really listen to what other people say and then integrate it into your future arguments, you wait for your turn to speak and then proceed as though you didn't listen to a single thing the other person said.
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Jan 15, 2017 20:23
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call to action posted:Yeah but, like most humans on earth, I don't really care about how trade has lifted the world up. I care about my family's prosperity, which trade has diminished the prospects of. Notice how your analysis focuses almost entirely on "countries", as if the wealth distribution in most countries isn't incredibly imbalanced. It's at least partially an ethics argument, is one American falling into poverty while 100 people in developing countries get a chance at better life a good exchange? Because that's close to the numbers you get. Ultimately if you only care about yourself then yes, globalism may have hurt of benefited you depending on where you are in the American society. I'd call you an utterly immoral sociopathic monster, but hey each to his own. quote:And long term, trade won't lift everyone up because, as soon as the Chinese are feeling their oats enough to request better health, safety, and environmental standards, companies will just move to the next hellhole. The marginal lift that trade provides to workers' lives is undone by the instability of structuring our society around industry's needs. Those "marginal benefits" are the greatest increase in global quality of life the world has ever seen. Saying "hey make companies have to pay them the same as Americans, even playing field  " is a red herring, since the companies would never do that. It's the same as saying gently caress them let them die in starvation I don't care, if they were "fit" enough to compete with Americans they'd have a chance to live.
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Jan 15, 2017 21:36
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Private Speech posted:It's at least partially an ethics argument, is one American falling into poverty while 100 people in developing countries get a chance at better life a good exchange? Because that's close to the numbers you get. Ultimately if you only care about yourself then yes, globalism may have hurt of benefited you depending on where you are in the American society. I'd call you an utterly immoral sociopathic monster, but hey each to his own. You haven't made a case as to why this is because of globalization and not in spite of it, considering how much economic wealth is siphoned from third world counties to sit in off shore bank accounts.
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Jan 15, 2017 22:03
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rscott posted:You haven't made a case as to why this is because of globalization and not in spite of it, considering how much economic wealth is siphoned from third world counties to sit in off shore bank accounts. How much?
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Jan 15, 2017 23:02
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Subjunctive posted:How much? Funnily enough, I just read an article about economic wealth being siphoned from developing countries to developed ones: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries As the article says: Since 1980, about $16.3 trillion Here's the report the article is based off of and the nice graph they made:
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Jan 16, 2017 00:09
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Right, but is the thesis that all of the proceeds of those resource transfers end up in offshore accounts?
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Jan 16, 2017 00:21
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Subjunctive posted:Right, but is the thesis that all of the proceeds of those resource transfers end up in offshore accounts? According the report around $7 trillion of wealth and assets ended up in offshore accounts and tax havens. That supports rscott's claim that large portions of wealth end up in tax havens, and the report in its entirety supports his claim that globalization is a net drain on developing countries, and so progress is made in spite of it, not because of it.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:29
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Subjunctive posted:Right, but is the thesis that all of the proceeds of those resource transfers end up in offshore accounts? quote:For example, in 2011 tax haven holdings of total developing country wealth were valued at US$4.4 trillion, which exacerbated inequality and undermined good governance and economic growth. So no, not all of it, but an awful lot of it. We really are sucking wealth out of developing nations and only incidentally encouraging some growth.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:30
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A bit surprised at the number of free trade fundamentalists itt given what's been going on the past couple years with Brexit, Trump, and the rise of a bunch of populists across the world. Even China, on the other side of the equation, is having digestive issues with maintaining growth at all costs. You can talk about an abstract "rising tide lifts all boats" but unless you can create a care package for those that are left behind then be prepared to see spasms of populism.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:44
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Uranium Phoenix posted:You could at least pretend to read the article and report I linked. I (quickly) read both. The first does not talk about what proceeds of resource transfer lands in offshore accounts. The latter also does not, though it seems to generally describe embezzlement or illegal capital movement to tax havens. Neither seems to effectively connect the dots from my question, or substantially support the claim about which I was asking.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:55
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Private Speech posted:It's at least partially an ethics argument, is one American falling into poverty while 100 people in developing countries get a chance at better life a good exchange? Because that's close to the numbers you get. Ultimately if you only care about yourself then yes, globalism may have hurt of benefited you depending on where you are in the American society. I'd call you an utterly immoral sociopathic monster, but hey each to his own. Problem is this progress exists in a period where all other forms of progress were kneecapped. It's like the first world burned down the third world's farms and destroyed their infrastructure and then took credit for feeding them (also sometimes literally true). Now we're expected to view the third world as becoming servants of the first and pretend it's a good thing because it's better than subsistence farming? I mean yeah sure, but better would be allowing them to take charge of their own economies their own way and grow their own regional or national markets instead of servicing ours with their cheap labour. It's not just 1 American falling into poverty for 100 foreigners being lifted up. It's also undermining sovereignty, reducing tax revenue, capping their middle class, propping up abusive institutions, gutting labour movements, destroying the environment, stealing natural wealth, etc. You're only looking at it from how far they've come while overlooking how much they're prevented from going further.
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Jan 16, 2017 11:07
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Higsian posted:Problem is this progress exists in a period where all other forms of progress were kneecapped. It's like the first world burned down the third world's farms and destroyed their infrastructure and then took credit for feeding them (also sometimes literally true). Now we're expected to view the third world as becoming servants of the first and pretend it's a good thing because it's better than subsistence farming? I mean yeah sure, but better would be allowing them to take charge of their own economies their own way and grow their own regional or national markets instead of servicing ours with their cheap labour. It's not just 1 American falling into poverty for 100 foreigners being lifted up. It's also undermining sovereignty, reducing tax revenue, capping their middle class, propping up abusive institutions, gutting labour movements, destroying the environment, stealing natural wealth, etc. You're only looking at it from how far they've come while overlooking how much they're prevented from going further. Would they have come further though? The countries closed to international trade and thus lacking the investment, industrial knowledge, industrial practices etc. brought on by multinational companies have almost universally done worse than the ones which aren't. Compare China and Cuba for example, where China has grown from crushing poverty to a level similar to the former soviet block largely due to international trade (and this was a massive increase in the quality of life for the average Chinese person) while Cuba has stagnated at best, despite being free to develop without outside interference. I'm not disputing there are distributional and other negative effects from globalisation, but the fact is that compared to the increase in quality of life (which includes things like being able to read and write, not dying from famine, not dying from easily preventable diseases and last but not least enormous increase in personal comfort) they are relatively unimportant to the average person on the street. Better to be a worker in corporate dystopia than medieval Europe. Perhaps if you've never lived in a developing country then it's hard to understand, but the incredibly absurd levels of misery make worrying about tax revenue and natural wealth almost comically irrelevant to most people there. Not to mention that many corporations prefer at least somewhat stable societies to ones riven with warlordism. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 13:46
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yeah, saying that serfdom is preferable to developing country factory work smacks of first world privilege.
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Jan 16, 2017 13:53
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Cuba suffered from an immense amount of outside interference and is actually a poster-child of why you can't compare countries and economic systems as though they each competed under fair circumstances. It's also a tiny country without a massive amount and variety of natural resources. I'd like to compare a South America that was free to develop its own economies and markets as they saw fit to the China we have. That would be a more revealing and interesting comparison, but unfortunately the first does not exist. I'm not saying serfdom is preferable, I'm saying that you can't act like the way we do things and serfdom were the only two options we could have had or that there being those 2 options is some accident of fate.
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Jan 16, 2017 15:19
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Funnily enough, I just read an article about economic wealth being siphoned from developing countries to developed ones: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries Then probably developing countries wouldn't have grown faster for the last couple decades. It's hard to tell what useful research is actually here and it's hard to account for this. If Bangladesh exports Prada handbags it would be tempting to take Prada's profit and count that "extracted" but that handbag might be traded for a deisel engine which will chug away adding economic value for a decade or two after the first world handbag buyer has thrown it in the trash. The "winner" is the developing country here regardless of the immediate accounting. This touches on a few things including comparative advantage and non monetary surplus value. But simple to say, in general stuff is more valuable to poorer people, especially stuff they'd have no other way of getting.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:11
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Private Speech posted:Perhaps if you've never lived in a developing country then it's hard to understand, but the incredibly absurd levels of misery make worrying about tax revenue and natural wealth almost comically irrelevant to most people there. Not to mention that many corporations prefer at least somewhat stable societies to ones riven with warlordism. Interestingly, when call to action used this exact same argument "people's immediate well-being and that of their family matters more to them than larger negative effects that are irrelevant to their daily lives" to explain opposition to free trade, you called him a sociopathic monster.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:50
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VitalSigns posted:Interestingly, when call to action used this exact same argument "people's immediate well-being and that of their family matters more to them than larger negative effects that are irrelevant to their daily lives" to explain opposition to free trade, you called him a sociopathic monster. If you don't see the difference between the two things then I don't know what to tell you. The difference being "the whole country has a better quality of life" as opposed to "one person gets a better quality of life". By the same token you could reject taxes, social programs, education etc. etc.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:16
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Private Speech posted:If you don't see the difference between the two things then I don't know what to tell you. The difference being "the whole country has a better quality of life" as opposed to "one person gets a better quality of life". By the same token you could reject taxes, social programs, education etc. etc. FWIW, I also read your earlier post as "the first world country", rather than "one person."
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Jan 16, 2017 19:24
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Uranium Phoenix posted:You could at least pretend to read the article and report I linked. Reducing these incredible complicated world-historic processes down to a couple abstract numbers and then using them to prove that progress happens either because of or "in spite of" globalization seems like a dubious exercise. I think it's fair to point out that trade flows end can end up extracting significant amounts of wealth from already poor countries but trying to say that development in, say, China, is happening despite globalization is a bit of a reach. It's fair to say globalization doesn't work in the way it's commonly presented, that the most successful economies don't follow the advice laid out by the so-called "Washington Consensus", or to point out that global growth rates have actually been lower in much of the world since the 1980s, but I don't think you can completely dismiss the exchange of technology, movement of factories or the opening of first world markets. If we broadly define globalization to refer to the process of greater global economic interchange and trade then I don't see how you can fully explain the growth of various Asian economies without reference to their trade with other parts of the world. Your argument might apply more directly to some other countries but at least in the case of a large country like China it sure seems as though they were able to bring in huge flows of investment and technology that they wouldn't have otherwise had access to had they tried to finance their growth exclusively through their own national economy. One might also argue that at least to some extent the pressure to sell in foreign markets is part of what helped Asian development strategies excel whereas a lot of Latin American import-substitution strategies under performed expectations, at least in part because companies had captive domestic markets and friendly governments which reduced pressure to develop globally competitive products.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:59
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Ynglaur posted:FWIW, I also read your earlier post as "the first world country", rather than "one person." Then it's a matter of degree and ethics. Are you trying to claim that say Vietnamese children should be ashamed of how some American workers have a harder life due to globalisation, when they are the ones who get to not starve? It's a false equivalence.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:48
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Helsing posted:Reducing these incredible complicated world-historic processes down to a couple abstract numbers and then using them to prove that progress happens either because of or "in spite of" globalization seems like a dubious exercise. I think it's fair to point out that trade flows end can end up extracting significant amounts of wealth from already poor countries but trying to say that development in, say, China, is happening despite globalization is a bit of a reach. This is about as well said as possible.
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Jan 16, 2017 21:02
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A rising tide lifts all yachts and drowns everyone else.
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Jan 16, 2017 21:28
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Private Speech posted:Then it's a matter of degree and ethics. Are you trying to claim that say Vietnamese children should be ashamed of how some American workers have a harder life due to globalisation, when they are the ones who get to not starve? It's a false equivalence. Not, but my sympathy for the American worker who has a harder life certainly remains. I don't take the attitude of, "Well, at least he's not starving to death. He has no right to complain, and should accept his lot in life."
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Jan 16, 2017 22:25
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Its ok to feel conflicted about rising incomes in developing nations at the expense of declining incomes in the old industrialized nations. Economics is personal.
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Jan 16, 2017 23:08
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