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Xae posted:Just nationalizing the payers is literally the dumbest thing you can do. It is the one thing worse than doing nothing. Because the only thing that happens is shifting a cost that is growing uncontrollably onto the public books. With no cost control and at the current growth rates Medical Care will be 30% of the US economy in 10 years. It is projected to start to drop in ~15 years due to "natural demographic changes". It will be something like 40-45% of the US economy at its height. Nationalizing the payers inherently controls costs. Medical price inflation is largely a function of the relationship between hospitals and insurers, not the actual cost of care. Why do you think the American system has grown 10 points since 1980 as percent of GDP when every other first world nation has seen 2-3%? You're arguing from the perspective that a medicare-for-all system would keep everything currently wrong with the system, and change only the insurance mechanism. It would not.
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Jan 5, 2017 00:38
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Xae posted:There are plenty of countries that have non-single payer systems that work well. Implementing a system that mimics one of those is a winnable fight that can improve people's lives. If you're talking about an insurance mandate with a public option, sure. You're still talking about a vast, vast expansion of medicare that the entire existing industry would fight tooth and nail against. It would still shrink private health care profits by more than half. I'm not sure it would be any easier than buying out the entire system at once. If you're talking about a private-only mandate, well that's not working out that great for us now, is it?
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Jan 5, 2017 02:59
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Ardennes posted:you would effectively shifting much of the cost burden from the general population. Not really, you're just making it a progressive tax vs a regressive one. The general population pays for health care no matter what system you use, it's just a question of who pays the most. In a private system, it's the poor.
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Jan 6, 2017 00:52
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What is that dumb quote from?
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Jan 7, 2017 20:47
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Having the majority of wealth tied up in financial instruments may provide a marginal benefit to the economy over hoarding it in a mattress somewhere, but it also creates unacceptable risk when we have a basically unregulated financial industry. Either way, it's not being spent on public works projects or much of anything that benefits the economy itself, or the quality of life of the people participating in it.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:14
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Ynglaur posted:And therein lies the problem. if you pay less, and costs are fixed, then someone else pays more. We need to get costs under control. In some cases that means delivering the same care for less money. In other cases it means delivering less care, because a lucrative fee-for-service system combined with a litigious culture encourages enough providers to over-intervene, or to intervene in the wrong ways. How do you propose we get costs under control in the current, private health care market? With a free market approach to healthcare, what incentive is there for a profitable business to cut costs to consumers if they don't have to?
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Jan 8, 2017 07:06
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Ynglaur posted:I do feel (i.e. I don't have a lot of good data points on this, other than personal experience which is often a terrible basis for broad-based policy), that we aren't evaluating enough about why provider costs are skyrocketing. Is it greedy doctors? Is it medical liability insurance premiums? Is it government regulation on the type of medical devices permitted for certain surgeries? Is it the general health of the populace caused by saving more babies via NICUs? I would be surprised if costs are wholly driven upwards by one single thing, and we may make decisions as a society to simply deal with higher costs for certain things, but I see very few policy-makers doing more than wringing their hands at the issue of cost. Given that we are the only first world nation with a fully private healthcare system, and that cost inflation is worse for us by orders of magnitude than anyone else with a comparable economy, can't we can make a rational case for causation here? Maybe it's just as simple as "Where healthcare can be driven by profit motive, it will be." Maybe not a whole lot more analysis really needs to be done, and maybe if we are able to nationalize the system and negotiate prices as a single buyer, the costs will necessarily go down, as they have for everyone else who has done this. edit: I'm actually shocked that you would even present neonatal infant care as a case for cost inflation when we have a worse infant mortality rate than loving Slovakia. Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 07:13
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Ynglaur posted:Perhaps, though keep in mind that the US effectively subsidizes the world's pharmaceutical research right now. In other words, "Yes, the US private market drives higher costs because companies are searching for higher profits," but also, "The US is the only private market, and therefore the only place to realize profits." The answer to this question may be legitimately "yes", but are we willing to dramatically slow the pace of pharmaceutical innovation in exchange for socialized healthcare? There's no reason to believe that socializing our healthcare system would slow down pharma or biotech innovation. Nobody is suggesting nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry. It's entirely possible that our pharma research is successful despite our healthcare system, not because of it. In no other country does a pharmaceutical company need to spend three times the cost of researching a drug to market it.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:28
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Xae posted:Countries use differing definitions of live birth and viable birth. Oh I see. So, America just has a different definition of "baby" than every other country, which is why by every measure and report it only seems to have a horrifying infant mortality rate. When in fact, we have the best babies, really the most amazing number of deaths per 1,000 live births. Everyone says that, they say "America has a really incredible rate of baby death". That's what they say, it's really incredible. The best. edit: Did you know the WHO actually studies and publishes data on infant mortality rates? In fact, they have a whole page on the methodology and sources for their infant mortality data. Funny stuff to publish for an organization that "concluded" a decade ago that it's an inaccurate metric. Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 17:17
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Ynglaur posted:In other words, the aggregate profit of the industry is close to $0, but the profits and losses are at opposite ends of the spectrum. This is a heck of an assertion that I would love to see some sources for.
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Jan 9, 2017 17:19
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Xae posted:Child mortality != Infant mortality. Are you arguing that the ranking data from the CDC and the WHO itself is incorrect? Both data sets show the United States around 30th down the list of developed countries for infant mortality. If it is incorrect, by how much and why exactly? If the WHO knows the data is inaccurate because of a reporting discrepency, do they take that into account when they publish their rankings? If not, why not, and why isn't that mentioned in the otherwise extremely verbose and complete dataset? If the WHO does correct for it, why does their data correlate so closely with the CDC? Moreover, why do you want to dismiss this metric out of hand? Even if the data is as flawed as you claim, the countries above us on the list are not "developing" in any sense of the word. They are Finland, Japan, Portugal, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Norway, Korea, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Belgium, etc. All of which spend infinitely less than we do on healthcare, all of which inarguably let fewer babies die.
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Jan 9, 2017 19:40
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Helsing posted:Here's a CDC study which specifically uses standardizing measures and the US is still among the worst ranked in the OECD. Well, this deepens the well. Why the gently caress does America have nearly twice as many preterm births as the UK?
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Jan 9, 2017 21:12
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Xae posted:Most of that information is in my quote. The rest of it is in the document. According to the document you've linked, the WHO does in fact apply their corrections to the country rankings they publish. And guess what? It tracks almost identically with the data that the CDC publishes. You're the one claiming that all the published data is wrong, and that the United States infant mortality rate is better than all the research seems to indicate. Where do you think it should rank instead, and why?
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Jan 9, 2017 21:18
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Private Speech posted:Thanks for twisting my words into so many strawmen, really quite something to behold. Things I support - higher taxes on the rich, more mobility for workers, free access to healthcare, education, childcare, unemployment, state provided housing even. But I guess I'm not a true socialist because I say that taxes can be a burden on poor people, huh. You don't get to do that when you posted this paragraph: Private Speech posted:To your second point, while you can claim that humanity can do "anything", the truth is that what is physically achievable is rather limited, and even less so what is politically feasible. For one the amount of capital the developed world would have to give up and transfer to the developing countries would be truly enormous, such that by current standards it would impoverish practically everyone in the US, even ignoring the issues which distributing wealth all over the globe would bring up (concentration of capital is arguably more efficient than the opposite, thus the overall level of world wealth/capital could be even lower than a simple equitable distribution would suggest). Even poor people in the developed world do have it rather good. This is not only instantly, provably false, but the underlying argument is literally a defense of crony capitalism. 71% of all the adults in all the world owns a total of 3% of global wealth. The median top 5% household wealth in the US has more than 90 times the wealth of the median US family. It would take an impossible level of wealth transfer to "impoverish everyone in the US". The United States has more wealth than any other country in the world, and at the same time its population is sicker, poorer and dumber than most other first world nations. The population of the US would benefit hugely from a massive, global wealth distribution. Private Speech posted:That is a completely different issue, but taxes do economically "hurt" individuals, even if they benefit in turn. I'm sorry, did you seriously just define yourself as a socialist? Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 23:05
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Private Speech posted:For one Britain and the US both have very high inequality, while somewhere like Denmark is doing much better in that respect, despite not having a tax regime that much different from the UK. This is not even remotely true. Denmark's taxes are 10-20% higher across the board than the UK's. Denmark has the highest top personal income tax rate in the OECD. It takes five minutes to google that information.
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Jan 18, 2017 23:17
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Private Speech posted:Are you taking into account national insurance etc. as well, and looking at the effective rate of tax for median income? I'm genuinely curious of the numbers if so, but I'd still say Britain is closer to Denmark than the US. In fact I specifically chose Denmark because I know it has a high effective rate of tax for the median wage earner, and because I've read that the UK has as well, while the US does not (due to low VAT and high tax thresholds). http://www.tradingeconomics.com/denmark/personal-income-tax-rate http://www.tradingeconomics.com/denmark/sales-tax-rate
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Jan 18, 2017 23:57
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Private Speech posted:Wealth != income, which is the central point of why I said that we can't elevate everyone to a comfortable (for a western person) standard of living, and conflating the two doesn't help. Yes I read much the same Oxfam report as you, and in fact even the one before that, and post here about that one when it came out. Income inequality is a lot less clear cut unfortunately, at least in part because the income of the top few percent comes mostly from capital gains, which both require a considerable amount of wealth to get a relatively mediocre annual income, and actually rely on extracting the wealth of the workers they employ. Or from another angle you can look at reports about climate change, which frequently say that if every human engaged in the same level of consumption as the western world, and therefore caused a similar level of emissions, the pace of their accumulation would rise several times over. Income inequality is absolutely clear cut and obvious, and so is wealth inequality, and we're talking about both. They're perfectly well studied, the data is available. Capital gains are beside the point and don't clarify your argument at all. I can't tell if you're handwaving because you're out of your depth, or if you're just cloudy about what your argument actually is. Why are you bringing up climate change? You seem to be arguing that wealth redistribution is bad because then everyone would be equally poor. Well yeah, no poo poo, that's the point. Everyone would make about $11.5K a year, and would control about $35K. The math isn't hard, and in most of the world, that's a very comfortable standard of living. The vast, vast majority of humanity would benefit from this happening.
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Jan 19, 2017 00:32
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Private Speech posted:This is the best I could find for effective tax rates, but it excludes VAT, which at additional 20% in the UK, 25% in Denmark and 0-8% in the US is going to push UK closer to Denmark (the big thing here in particular is that Denmark has only 0.2% national insurance, which is very little compared to the UK, and somewhat makes up for the higher income tax). Holy poo poo, look at those goalposts fly. What you said was: "Denmark's tax regime is not much different than the UK". It is wholly, significantly and completely different than the UK. You seem to be doing a hell of a lot of math for little apparent reason.
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Jan 19, 2017 00:39
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Private Speech posted:What's the difference between national insurance and income tax again? Beyond separate thresholds. Compared to the US, South Africa's tax regime is the same as France's. I have no earthly idea why that matters.
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Jan 19, 2017 00:47
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Private Speech posted:Leaving aside the issue of capital gains, of course it's true that the richest country in the world could make every one of its citizens have a reasonable standard of living. You can look at the costing for basic income to see the kind of tax numbers you'd need for it (extra ~30% universal tax to give everyone a living wage as basic income IIRC, and that's assuming people don't start quitting their jobs bringing tax revenues down), but yes it would be possible. This doesn't really help the rest of the world though. But certainly, America could use a bit more redistribution to take care of its poor better, I think we agree on that. You're still assigning penalty to taxation, and referring to it as "redistribution". You seem to consider it a sort of necessary punishment that the rich "take care of the poor". Have you considered that higher marginal tax rates help the rich as well? It's not just "the right thing to do", taxing the rich is good for the economy in general, which in turn, is good for the rich. The rich certainly don't benefit from the social breakdown and authoritarian chaos that massive wealth inequality generates, either. Put very simply, would you rather have half a billion dollars that you have no hope of spending in your lifetime, but you live in a country with a strong middle class and a growing economy, or would you rather have three billion dollars that you have no hope of spending in your lifetime, but you live in a post-soviet authoritarian satellite state? Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 17:15
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asdf32 posted:Taxation is a penalty to the individual in the short term. Don't make that silly detail be the point of contention here. And a benefit in the medium to long term that vastly outweighs the short term penalty. It's not a silly detail, it's the core difference in perspective that I'm trying to reconcile. edit: It's not even a short term penalty. The only way that could be true is if tax money disappeared into space after collection. In a progressive system, some benefit more than others in the short term, but everyone is buying something tangible and immediately helpful with their tax money. Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 18:23
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asdf32 posted:You're sort of trying to argue that tragedy of the commons doesn't exist. But it does. This doesn't mean what you think it means.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:49
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Helsing posted:Neoliberalism and Neoconservative, the two guiding ideological tendencies of the last 30 to 40 years These two terms mean completely different things contextually and don't work in the way you're using them at all. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Thatcher, Jinping and Nieto are all neoliberal politicians of some form or other. Neoconservativism is entirely compatible with, and arguably a product of neoliberalism.
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Jan 29, 2017 03:24
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SHY NUDIST GRRL posted:Well Iraq was deffo neo con. And it is a failed idea. So he's not too off base. I don't disagree with his point, I'm just saying that "neoliberalism" is an older, separate kind of idea than "neoconservative", and is also the opposite of what Americans would call "liberalism". The term "liberal" came to mean opposite things between Europe and America around the time of the new deal, and neoliberalism refers to the european version, i.e. laissez faire economics and colonial empiricism. It's understandably confusing, but important to get right.
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Jan 29, 2017 05:49
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BrandorKP posted:On the other hand it is chinese new year... That's a pretty fuckin huge factor, to be fair.
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Feb 1, 2017 20:30
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Cheesus posted:Even if she did, do we have any idea of her strength to push her agenda and push back on the previous? Her track record is pretty clear if you google around for a minute or two. She trumps (heh) Obama in that regard handily, his time in the senate was marked more by his speeches than his ability to create effective progressive policy.
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Feb 6, 2017 22:52
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Confounding Factor posted:Is it too simple to say well just take 10% off the top of the 1%, redistribute that and we get to do whatever we want with our time? Not really, that's a pretty good start.
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Feb 24, 2017 04:49
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Private Speech posted:It's more like, the number of people living in shanties in the US is fairly tiny, and they do sometimes have options if they are willing to move. You see, people who live in shanties could simply move if only they had the will. Perhaps the poor are lazy and simply prefer not to work?
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Mar 3, 2017 20:38
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asdf32 posted:The existing tax structure is already makes it so rich people pay more dollars. Not as percentage of income or holdings, it doesn't.
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Apr 14, 2017 20:23
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asdf32 posted:US tax rates are mostly progressive until the very super rich. Your chart undermines your own argument. How is a tax rate that levels off around the 40th percentile and then drops four points at the 99th "mostly progressive"?
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Apr 15, 2017 17:49
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Ccs posted:Does this mean that the current market is an inflated asset bubble that has to pop at some point? Or can it continue to rise even if other avenues for investment (like real estate or commodities) open up again as sensible places to put money? Yes, no or maybe. Who knows. It's an odd question because stock trading is necessarily speculative. Yes, it's an inflated asset bubble, but not really any more than it ever is. It can continue to rise as long as everyone agrees that it should, and then when something happens to spook the herd, it will crash again. There is no reasonable way to predict any of that unless you're the one manipulating the market. Real estate was only ever a "sensible place to put money" because it gave a consistent return, until it suddenly and dramatically didn't. You seem to be assuming that market activity is based on rational and organic decision making by investors. It's not.
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May 5, 2017 22:57
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wateroverfire posted:What is the important point to you, I guess? The very rich won really big compared to the relatively poor over the period we're looking at. But that's a relative comparison. In absolute terms the relatively poor have won as well. A 39% real increase in purchasing power is nothing to sneeze at - that's a real improvement in standards of living. Why is the increase in inequality a more important point than the improvement of living standards for everyone? Because if that 39% increase in purchasing power also happens during a period when wages only increase by 11% despite a 73.4% productivity increase over the same period, it's entirely fair to point at the people who are hoarding a third of the economy for themselves and call them loving thieves. It's also fair to point at the fact that every extreme economic collapse in modern history has been preceded by a period of extreme wealth inequality like we're seeing now. So, sure if you squint at the numbers and talk in purely absolute terms, the poor are doing better than they were 40 years ago, but that's an utterly meaningless and misleading piece of information in the context of what's actually happening.
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Aug 25, 2017 17:55
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