I remember when I was living in LA I had a health scare and needed a scan. I didn't have healthcare at the time. They told me it would be tens of thousands for the scans without healthcare. It was cheaper for me to fly home to Ireland and go private- about ten times cheaper. It's wild.
Don't get started on how families who choose to have a home birth are treated by the insurance companies... its a mess. From here on out my goal is to just focus on being as healthy as possible for my family and steer clear of the medical system as much as I can.
This is purely a fiat money printer/prop up GDP scam.
This is analogous to Chinese ghost cities and mega projects: the Keynesians think government spending is economic growth.
Hospitals lobby state governments to legislate what procedures must be performed in a Hospital for a 10x markup, vs in an outpatient office.
Insurance companies lobby for the most expensive care, since Obama Care 80/20 rule which effectively caps profits to a percentage. The only way to increase profits was to increase premiums much faster, since 80% of premiums must be spent on care. The $care $ necessarily had to increase in order to increase premiums.
The other way to increase premiums is to have government mandate all kinds of care must be covered by insurance. Birth control, routine visits, things that people should be paying out of pocket, are covered by insurance, which ends up costing 10x what they would in a free market.
yeah, i never would have guessed it was that high.
that’s nearly the level of US dollar dominance in global reserve holdings (58%), and there are no network effects in health care like there are for liquidity in finance.
Misconception. Fat people get their heart attacks and die in their 50s and 60s, which is actually quite optimal from an actuarial standpoint because they've paid out in taxes for most of their functional lives.
Real spending comes from frail elderly care as we keep these patients alive and they bounce back from the hospital in their 80s and 90s, go to nursing homes because their kids can't take care of them, slowly develop dementia and come back with recurrent pneumonias, UTIs etc.
In most other countries common sense prevails and these people would be made DNR/DNI and pass comfortably and peacefully but here the guilty out of state son who hasn't seen mom in 3 years will tell us "she's a fighter" and the patient will end up in the ICU for 2 months of suffering and being kept alive.
Sometimes I fucking feel like such a goddamn cunt. It's like I'm constantly tripping balls over every little thing, and making everyone around me want to strangle me with their bare fucking hands. At least I'm aware of how much of a piece of shit I can be sometimes. I have to figure out how to fix this fucked-up attitude before someone ends up shanking me in the gut with a rusty knife.
This would require a much longer post at some point, but the prices in American healthcare are fake. It's a huge grift designed to generate tax write-offs and commissions (although I don't think they're called that). No one is actually paying the amount that medical providers record as having been spent.
I know exactly what you are talking about. I've heard it explained several times. Yeah it would take a much longer post but he's right @kr. The "healthcare" market in the US is rigged. As in they over-charge and insurance and providers negotiate down. I should have mentioned that. I forget that most people don't know this. It always frustrates me when people act like US healthcare is a free market system. Its not. Very rigged.
I'll keep this in mind for a future post, because it is fascinating. There are a few really good episodes of Econ Talk that get into it, as well as a bunch of interviews with the Surgery Center of Oklahoma guy.
This is analogous to Chinese ghost cities and mega projects: the Keynesians think government spending is economic growth.