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Computer Model Reveals Escape Plan From Poverty's Vicious Circle
KentuckyFC writes "Infectious disease condemns poor countries to an endless cycle of ill health and poverty. Now a powerful new model of the link between disease and economic growth has revealed why some escape plans work while others just make matters worse. The problem is that when workers suffer from poor health, economic output goes down. And if economic output goes down, there is less to spend on healthcare. And if spending on healthcare drops, workers become less healthy. And so on. So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare. But the new model says governments must take care since the cost to a poor country can send the economy spiraling into long term decline. By contrast, an injection of capital from outside the country allows spending on healthcare to increase without any drop in economic output. 'We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap, but increasing health spending alone is not,' say the authors. And the amount required is relatively little. The model suggests that long-term investment needs only to be more than 15 per cent of the cost of healthcare. But anything less than this cannot prevent the vicious circle of decline."
Keep your people healthy and they'll live longer, work longer and pay more tax.
What kind of idiot hasn't realised this yet? (obviously, America)
This clearly is working for Africa.
So the solution to poverty.. is for other countries to just give you some money?
What the hell kind of solution is that?
Who would have thought? Well I guess WHO, CARE, Red Cross, Oxfam, ...
But, now we know the reason...
They are concluding that socialized health care while also allowing a competitive economic environment actually can work?!!?! but nutjobs form left and right keep telling me that's utter bullshit and a conspiracy!
Effective, sustainable anti-poverty measures begin here.
Poverty-stricken countries remain poor because they cannot produce enough to sustain themselves. They cannot produce enough because their workforce is sick. Give them medicine and you break that cycle without putting local farmers or manufacturers out of business. Doctors without borders is a good start.
Demand cuts in social programs including health care. The World Bank and IMF are evil.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Eat the Rich?
Another model of some type of human system basically follows the second law of thermodynamics.
Most "poor" countries to which we send aid, are being plundered just as hard, or even harder. Every time we send food aid to some poor African or central American country, the local farmers get no money for the little food they produce and the local market is ruined, stopping local production of food instead of encouraging it.
Every time we demand the lowest price for all the stuff we import from those countries, we make them find ways to produce even cheaper, lowering the standard of life there. This results in pricing that is so low that our own economy can't compete and we put import taxes on these goods. This results in the foreign producers being forced to lower their prices even more, again ruining their economy and health.
Instead of "sending aid" every time a famine or natural disaster strikes one of these countries, we should stop plundering them. Micro credits for local businesses there have helped a lot, investing in farming for local food supply helps. These people are perfectly capable of helping themselves, given half a chance.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In real science control groups are required to establish causality.
Social scientists are as terrified of real control groups testing causal hypotheses in human ecology as were the Jesuits of independent interpretations of the Bible. This is because social science is essentially a pre-enlightenment theocratic discipline:
If the powers-that-be oppose your social "science" then no matter how much data you gather, some variant of "correlation doesn't imply causation" will be trotted out to ignore it.
If the powers-that-be like your social "science" then the NYT will take one data point -- perhaps even one anecdote about one person at some point in history and base public policy on it. With the mass media holding mass and preaching said sermons the pious slaves to intellectual fashion, generally those with college degrees from the seminaries known as "colleges", and and with IQs below 140 who like to pretend to be morally superior "thought leaders" (knowing they have safety in numbers from hearing sermons at "mass") will then to the dirty work on the street.
Moreover, this theocratic sophistry, imposing social theories on unwilling human subjects, locks into place powerful interests that oppose any truth-discovery.
From Machiavelli's "The Prince" chapter 6:
If we are ever to escape this vicious cycle driven by the social sciences, the Enlightenment must penetrate them through Sortocracy:
Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them.
Fortunately, like the Protestant movement's impetus to independently interpret the Bible due to the Gutenberg press, the Internet is now letting people have direct access to and independent interpretation of data about human ecologies -- and the demand for freedom from imposition of social theories on unwilling human subjects will increase until freedom from theocratic forms of government -- and their social scientist theologians -- will win the day.
In the process, as with the wars for freedom of religion that lasted over a century, we cannot expect this penetration of Enlightenment values into the social sciences to take place without a struggle.
Seastead this.
Am I the only one who, when I read "a new computer model", thinks that the whole thing is a load of crap?
I've made computer models, and they're the working definition of "garbage in, garbage out". How anyone can put their faith (and that's precisely what it is) in anything coming out of them is beyond me.
It always reminds me of the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
So long as we just focus on *treatment* of the sick, costs will continue to spiral.
A general influx of cash doesn't just focus on treatment of those sick - it starts to alleviate the issues that allow disease to spread in the first place (lack of hygene, lack of vaccination, lack of clean water, lack of balanced food (and complete meals), and lack of general preventive care, and lack of birth control - ALL things people in poverty already lack).
Health care costs get under control when the focus is on prevention rather than treatment: you spend FAR less money when fewer people get sick. When you use the capital to address the causes of disease rather than just treating it, you spend much less on treating the ones that got away.
Relatedly, this is why insurance companies love birth control - a pill a day and a box full of condoms is far cheaper to them than the thousands of dollars for examinations, the birth, emergency natal care, and having to cover the kid for the next 26 years.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
(and gee, many of our problems in Education go away when one addresses the poverty issue that makes education impossible rather than constantly trying to change the education system that has otherwise worked for generations)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
"So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare."
If that's the case then the USA must be the greatest country in the world.
Just a bit disingenuous, no? The countries with the socialist bias are almost always about to run out of money, even with crazy tax rates (eg sweden). While I'm sure the world bank brats would love never to have to pay any tax, they do have a point. Take it too far either way causes too much power to be focused on too few people, with little oversight.
It boils down to who has control of the money, right? Whether it's the world bank, or the state, both are rife with corruption.
People helping others.
That's because it's full of the same kind of people who caused the financial melt-down and continue to believe in absurd things like trickle-down economics and that the 'market' will solve all problems.
When your economic decisions are made by people who only understand how to make the rich get richer, everyone else gets fucked in the process.
Bah. I bet you think it would be more effective for doctors to spend 20 minutes with the patient rather than 4 minutes with the patient and 16 minutes on t government paperwork.
I bet you also think eating healthy foods like vegetables and whole grains works better than eliminating $15 copays by exchanging them for $163 tax expenditures.
TL;DR Bill Gates is wasting his money?
"If [an injection of cash from outside the economy] is large enough and sustained for long enough... [W]e find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap"
That should generally be true anyways... for individuals as well as for poor nations.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
HealthCare does NOT mean healthy people. Sorry.
Capitol influxes that fix corrupted food supplies and increase dietary education will do a whole lot more good than extra white coats.
The HealthCare industry in the USA is overloaded with people who are dying from eating the Standard American Diet. Not because there's some massive "LACK" of healthcare.
Morons... we're surrounded by morons!
Read more on my blog at TheCleanGame [.] net
Keep it Clean! :D
"'We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap, "
No shit Sherlock, every time someone gives me a billion dollars I don't feel the poverty any more.
How about this, mandatory birth control for your out of control population growth... you think that would help your health issues?
No, instead you go looking for outside investment which will hurt you even more in the long term.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
What a dumb study. Everything you need to know about it is summarized in the "fits" of Fig. 2. I'm supposed to believe ANYTHING based on that? Then they marry it with the SOLOW MODEL?!?!? Clickbait "science" at its worst.
Out of the poverty trap, and into the corporate consumerism trap.
That this is said without irony when the United States currently has a large malnutrition problem. Food deserts -- where grocery a stores are not found, but there is plenty of nutritionally devoid (but tasty and cheap) fast food nearby.
How are you completely ignorant of the obesity epidemic and the circumstances driving it?
Which cause lower IQs...
Yes, just dump more money into it, and see it vanish into the pockets of those who are in power while they build a clinic that costs as much as three hospitals. And one year later, even that will start to fall apart, because the dictator's/president's/king's yacht has priority over the budget.
Poverty is not an economic/health issue, it is a cultural one. If you don't change how the people and their leaders think, countries will remain poor.
I came from a poor country, and lived there for 23 years. Enough time to see how things truly work.
The amount spent on care is completely disconnected from the benefit or real cost of care. There are few other fields where cooperating state-sanctioned monopolies conspire to drive up cost and deprive a minority of service entirely. It is not good for health. I doubt it will ever change.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"an injection of capital from outside the country allows spending on healthcare to increase without any drop in economic output." Well, dang, ain't that just the statement of the century.
I reject that as complete liberal bullshit.
I reject your rejection.
How's THAT for an argument?
I don't respond to AC's.
"Computer Scientists and Statisticians Demonstrate That Computer Models Can Demonstrate Anything You Like"
Well there is so many Health Alternatives, food and medicines worldwide, why do we still struggle with this kind of things? Poverty starts with the mind of those whos responsibility is managing a country, Please wake up!
Love the People
No obama is not going to shoot grandma."ut having the state manage it is no better. They have the power to dictate your behavior the moment you receive care." AS opposed to the private company decidign BEFORE ? And you having no recourse ? Furthermore I have *YET* to have the state saying me no for any health care ground, or my parents, or my family or my friend or ANYBODY I know. The worst that can happen is that the state here says "well we don't think this is a vital treatment, so we won't reimburse you 100% of it" or even "this is an experimental treatment so we won't help you getting it". Yupudo, how is that worst than the US ?
Again get that paranoid fantasy out of your system. For all your "governement is bad eleventy!", here around this is not the holocaust you think it look like.
If the nation in question lacks basic sanitation and suffers under despotic, and likely arbitrary on a day-by-day basis, rules about property ownership then of course it's going to be poor. But in such conditions getting Tamiflu on the cheap is small beans compared to the actual causes of poverty. But hey, it's the computer game SimCare; so anything goes.
Ergo, my country needs to invade and pillage another country.
But (sorry, Republicans!): do it cheaply. If you spend more money on the aggression than you pillage, obviously that's not going to count as a net injection of capital.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
One lesson that seems to be glossed over here is that since richer countries fare better, then making a country richer is (according to the model) a successful strategy for mitigating the harm of disease (and probably a huge variety of disasters, natural and man-made, as well). But my take is that there's a lot of countries, both rich and poor, which are trying hard to make their countries poorer and hence, more susceptible to disease under this model.
Back in 1900, virtually everyone was suffering from the same diseases. The Western world had discovered the benefits of public sanitation and fire control, but a lot of places still didn't have that. Medicine was still in the sawbones era where uncontrollable infections routinely led to amputation. What changed from then to now is that the developed world developed, including vast knowledge of pathology and the biology of our bodies.
Everyone on the planet can use that development process as a template, readily subject to local modification. It's something that has been demonstrated to work, to make people wealthier and healthier. And they are doing so. I think it's getting better.
do what the Chinese do and bring infrastructure like wi-fi and roads and shit
Y'know soften them up for colonization through "altruism"
In 25 years they'll be the industrialized centre that are "takin yer jerbs" (or whatever the Mandarin equivalent praise is)
in summary, globalization
Just a bit disingenuous, no? The countries with the socialist bias are almost always about to run out of money, even with crazy tax rates (eg sweden).
I guess we know who Jobs willed his Reality Distortion Field to.
Sweden has, as a percentage of GDP, less than half as much debt as the USA.
Norway is very decidedly in the black with their pension fund.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
A little prayer every day keeps the doctor away... germ theory is just a theory
It sounds like the cure for poverty if for someone to give you money. is there a -1, Obvious?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
that is nice. but here in america, we have a plan to get back into the prison of poor health for poor people.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
That's true. People who insist on ignoring facts, and make their decisions based on right-wing ideology, will reject these arguments as "complete liberal bullshit."
What a load of stupid garbage. Anyone that thinks politics, economics, culture, geography, and the happenstance of history doesn't rule the destiny of nations is an idiot.
To claim its all down to healthcare is just mindless self serving statistics for healthcare aid organizations. To claim that all the worlds many problems will just go away if we have healthcare. How completely stupid.
Obviously poor health contributes to poor economic conditions. But as someone that has actually been to these countries and seen what is really going on... the poor health is itself a symptom.
In Nigeria for example there are villages with open pit wells. Just a hole in the ground where water bubbles up. No effort made to keep it clean or sanitary. They wash animals in the same pit they drink from. SHOCKINGLY they get horribly ill with some frequency.
This is a problem that was solved about 6000 years ago if not earlier. You create a series of step wells. The highest step is either human drinking water or completely left untouched. The next step is for cleaning. And the step after that is for animals.
This costs nothing to build. Literally nothing. You can use dirt/clay from the area and just build this with local labor at a cost of literally nothing. Not 2 dollars a day. Not 10 cents a day. ZERO.
And yet they drink from the open pit well and get all sorts of horrible water born diseases.
The politics and culture in most poor countries is beyond hopeless. You're dealing with entrenched ways of doing things that kill.
If you want to fix these places you need to graft a new culture into their community that actually is effective. This isn't colonialism. We're not sending our own people over there to live permanently. Rather, you build a reasonable village for these people and structure it along lines that will be successful. That is your best chance at bringing real change to those parts of the world.
If you lack the "care" to do that... then just leave them alone. You're just wasting everyone's time otherwise.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
We've seen that the left's solution of throwing money at every problem doesn't work and often causes problems. The right's approach of just letting the poor fend for themselves (once the government gets out of the way) seems to move things in a good direction, but not always quickly. If this study and follow-ups can tell us where the happy middle is that would be a very ggod thing.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Looking at history for examples to support the assertion, who injected the cited capital into the likes of the United States, Australia? Who injected the cited money into the likes of England during/after the plague?
Who injected the cited money into the Dominican Republic while withholding it from Haiti? Why does South Africa prosper while Rhodesia/Zimbabwe suffers abject poverty?
It just seems that reality is far more complicated than this model's premise chooses to allow it to be. But, that's IRL. It's complicated. This model, meanwhile, is bunk.
Because you haven't bothered to read Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit" or even think about how the extended human order came about.
We have tried this many times before.
Send lots of money.
The debt from this money is then leveraged to get the country to sell its resources to international corporations.
The people of the country now have to pay for water, and are restricted from hunting and fishing on their native lands.
The people cannot afford to pay for this privatized food or water and cannot gather it themselves any longer, so they starve to death.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The kind of "healthcare" that matters in developing countries is something that costs a few hundred dollars a year; less than a month of an ACA bronze plan. The kind of "healthcare" that is under discussion in the US is mostly overpriced, unnecessary fixes for poor lifestyle choices, plus useless intensive care at the end of life.
Keeping people healthy so that they live longer is not something healthcare does, it's something that good nutrition and exercise do.
Most people in the US die after retirement, so keeping them alive longer actually is not good financially like you imply. But American are covered by Medicare after age 65 anyway, so even if what you wrote were true, the US already has single payer, socialized medicine for those people.
Finally, your thinking that government should keep people alive longer so that they pay more taxes is pretty telling, and rather scary.
The summary of this article and the comments that follow are great evidence for why slashdot should avoid economics issues - the contributors here by and large simply know nothing about it. If you're interested in poverty and development issues, go read Chris Blatman's blog, or the World Bank's regional or country blogs or actual academic articles, or any of a host of other sites with content produced by people who know what they're talking about.
The title of the post is the worst offence: "Computer Model Reveals Escape Plan From Poverty's Vicious Circle". What a load of crap. No economist would make a claim like that. Any economist knows there are a hoard of factors that determine economic development. Poverty traps come in all shapes and sizes and have a vast literature analysing them. The paper discussed here might be a decent contribution to that literature.
Granted, the summary and title are lifted from a blog (The Physics arXiv blog), not made up by the slashdot contributor, but that just shows idiocy on another level. You need to be able to critically assess what you read before submitting it to slashdot. Don't just send something because it sounds cool; it makes you look like an idiot.
Slashdot should focus on what its good at, which tech and nerdy stuff. Posting articles like this just embarrasses yourself.
If a country has its own fiat currency, it can use that currency to make the local economy reach full employment, and take up as much of that labour for public use as is desired (by contracting the private economy with taxes) - you don't need foreign money i.e. foreign debt, because that is what cripples countries (particularly when it's denominated in a foreign currency).
Standard economic 'common knowledge' is bullshít guys, the current mainstream economic theories (neoclassical), get macroeconomics completely wrong; check what the Post-Keynesian economists teach (who are entirely different to regular neoclassical 'Keynesians'), it's much more intuitive/informative to learn, and it better fits the empirical data of how economies run.
In order to make real-world use of this model, the health care industry would have us load catapults with doctors and medicines and fling them into Africa.
They're on the right track but with their health care model they're backing the wrong horse. How and when exactly did that endemic sickness that must be countered, arise?
Let's take a look at the world according to cholera [cases reported to WHO 2007-2009]. Cholera flourishes where masses of people have converged on areas without sufficient infrastructure to support them. They often do this in an attempt to escape rural poverty. It also flourishes along major rivers, such as the Ganges and historically the Thames, again where infrastructure for water filtration and sewage treatment is lacking.
Now look at the world according to (lack of) access to electricity [Numbers in Millions and % of People without access to Electricity, 2008. Source: WHO & UNDP]
Electricity means clean water and waste processing.
Cholera hates electricity.
That is because with electricity comes deeper wells, better filtration, distribution, active media filtration of surface sources and sewage treatment with water effluent ready for discharge into rivers -- along with the basics such as refrigeration for food and medicine. It was infrastructure and not better health care that eliminated the threat of cholera in North America, and other diseases besides.
And by electricity I mean real base load electricity, the power to run distribution and filtration plants and whole villages and cities. A full square meal of energy, not the 'energy happy meal toys' that are too often envisioned by North Americans as gifts to Africans -- a solar panel here or a wind turbine there, to run some tiny apartment fridge in some clinic somewhere, or a single LED light, sometimes. Solutions we could not and would not tolerate for ourselves.
The human race (at our favored levels of population density) has evolved past the point where a natural state of good health can be maintained without access to bulk electricity, which equates to drinkable tap water. This is a greater factor than access to doctors or medicine.
Obama is making the right noises about Africa with his $7 billion pledge to help Africa lift itself out of darkness with new sub-Saharan infrastructure. Remember -- this $7 billion is is NOT your hard-earned taxpayer dollars, which are all going toward repayment of interest on our national debt. This is magical unicorn money that will come from World Investment Funds and Bank perpetual money machine that is backed by International Corporate Banks that bought shitloads of worthless paper that were bailed out by Bushobama with the Fed minting virtual money that saved the banks' balance sheets from ruin, and Treasury Bonds purchased by the Chinese who have said fuck-it and have decided to give Africa their time and especially their money directly, some of which would ultimately come from us as repayment on debt to China with China becoming Africa's direct partner in infrastructure instead. This does not make sense on so many levels.
I think the United States is presently screwed on Energy but not in the conspiracy sense. It is this awful mental condition where we have lost sight of 'big electric' and 'big water' infrastructure as something we are truly vested in, regardless of whether we personally own stock in it.
I think it is why discussants in these forums never seem to discuss topics of coal, nuclear and natural gas production of electricity at any length -- and spend so much more time on the minutia
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
What a load of crap! Free the market to innovate and capitalism will lift those out of proverty.
Sweden is a much better comparison, they have no oil at all. Norway, well we've hit the jackpot in terms of oil. The oil-related jobs are creating an income level which makes a host of service industries (Like, who cuts the hair of the oil workers? Who serves them beer?) which is entirely out of touch with everyone else. We're leading the McDonald's index and I'm quite sure we have the highest pay for being a McDonald's employee anywhere in the world as well, even post-tax. The government is sucking up most the oil revenue, first the oil companies pay a huge tax on oil (I think 50% + 28% of any profit), the the workers pay their income tax and finally everyone else pays as they get their oil-inflated income tax. In short, it's easy to be Norway
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If your complaint is one of their listed conditions you can have a doctor visit over the phone or webcam in minutes without coverage. It costs $49.95 on your credit card. I did it today and they are legit. Alas saying that I also have to post AC. Excess personal medical disclosure and all.
memd.me - I have no association other than as a patient.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A computer model reveals that spending other people's money is the answer?
Nice work if you can get it ...
The article is faulty for reasons already covered in other posts. Then again, remember it is supposed to be based on a computer model. Everyone knows computer models usually are faulty. I guess the researchers should have realized this model is awful.
rage rage :)
In other words what they're saying is there is no escape, you can't pick yourself up by your bootstraps, you're stuck on the ground UNLESS you get a subsidy, a gift, a grant, a guardian angel who will lift you out of poverty and you cooperate.
Not quite true as there have been plenty who have gotten out of poverty without being uplifted. Yes, many kick, scream and fight even being helped but some make it without help.
That 15% of the healthcare would represent at least 12% of the total budget in some countries. That's really, really big investment with a payback which requires building a whole set of heavy industries in the country of concern to meet a payment plan of few years. How many countries with low level natural resources and high level of corruption can build such an infrastructure? Let's be honest and say none.
Most "poor" countries to which we send aid, are being plundered just as hard, or even harder. Every time we send food aid to some poor African or central American country, the local farmers get no money for the little food they produce and the local market is ruined, stopping local production of food instead of encouraging it.
You are right, except it's not the West that causes it. In most cases it is the government (both state and local) that causes economies to get worse even as aid increases. In many cases these governments are corrupt to some degree, so the aid intended for local farmers or communities never gets there. The aid tends to go either to the military (purchasing soldiers is a lot more expensive than one would think, and it pays to keep soldiers happy-notice how many undemocratically elected third world rulers have military ranks?) or in the case of a tame military to personal residences and bank accounts.
In political science there is a theory that is known as the resource curse, whereby a state that has an abundance of a natural resource finds its growth hampered by that resource, so that it is poorer than one would expect. This is caused by a number of problems, such as a failure to diversify the economy or internal conflict (ie, war) over the revenue. However, a major cause of this is government corruption and revenue mismanagement. The government either diverts the proceeds to their own pockets or, expecting the revenue to continue at high levels, fails to invest the money back into the economy and spends it on pet projects to remain in power.
Now, this is kind of perverse, but think of poor people as a natural resource. As long as the people remain poor, the aid continues to come in. If the aid continues to come in, the local political elites are able to allocate that aid in ways that continues to enrich themselves while allowing them to remain in power (paying off cronies/the military/subsidies). If they invest the aid properly, then the economy grows, the poor get less poor, and as they get less poor they have more energy and resources to invest in things such as politics, demanding a greater say in how they are governed. This demonstrates a direct threat to the ruling elites, who as a general rule are not strong leaders, as they rule by economic coercion or the threat or actual use of military force. So, essentially, in order for them to remain in power it is in their own self interest (not a fan of rationalism, but sometimes it just fits) to keep their population poor. In a nutshell, this is one big reason why Third World states tend to remain poor even when they receive large amounts of foreign aid.
Ideally, the aid given to these states should be neither financial nor edible. The investment should be in infrastructure (roads), and in raising the standard of living (water filters, solar panels/crank generators, farming equipment, etc). Investments such as this help the poor and are much harder to divert or misallocate (can't exactly wire a shipment of solar panels to a Swiss bank account). You are correct that these people are perfectly capable of helping themselves given the right tools. The problem is getting the tools into the hands of the people who need them, not those who want them.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I used to hate Bill Gates. Then one day I realised Gates had "grown up". He's still a businessman, but he's using his business "prowess" to increase his ability to help people in Africa with his vaccination programme. Which is why he set up his charity with family, and uses investment in businesses like Monsanto to offset his expenditures (and who's not to say to direct the firm away from GM crops?)
Whether my "naive" optimist side is coming out or not remains to be seen. Either way, what Gates is doing for Africa fits this model perfectly, you'd have to say.
The UK was in a similar situation but blew all that money, killed their manufacturing industry, and were left with little other than very rich bankers and a huge unemployed underclass. Norway seems to be running things better than Thatcher did before her own party stabbed her in the back as a liability.
You do realize that the most expensive single-payer systems in the world cost half of what our care does, right? The experiment has been run, the results are in. Free market health care has failed to deliver its promised efficiency. It's time we copy the successful model and move on.
Also, having private insurance companies dramatically increases the amount of time doctors spend filling out paperwork, because each one has a slightly different system and all of them are designed to be convoluted enough so that the insurance company can find "problems with the paperwork" and delay/deny payment.
I know that this goes against the "free market is always more efficient" party line, but it's the truth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_%28PPP%29_per_capita
If you want to know why the health care market in particular throws the free market for a loop and why its one of the things government actually can do better, here's a good place to start: http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources
They needed a computer model to reach those incredibly obvious conclusions? WTF? You can figure that out with a little bit of logical thinking (as has been done many times in history)!
"We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap" A Report presented by the Instutute for Slowly and Meticulously Finding Out the Bloody Obvious...
many of our problems in Education go away when one addresses the poverty issue that makes education impossible rather than constantly trying to change the education system that has otherwise worked for generations
Worked towards what goal? We've become more and more complacent, and I can't help but believe that a substantial portion of that is through the indoctrination received in the public education system, which is a series of lies — both outright, and through omission. You're told a bunch of rosy bullshit about how things are meant to be, but it's not explained to you how corporations get to write laws and decide which ones are passed. The general framework is described, and it's left for you to figure it out on your own, the subtext being that you're not supposed to actually figure it out. If you ask questions you become a nuisance and the teachers will deprecate you so that you are bullied in an effort to cause you to become withdrawn so they can do their job of pretending to educate the excessive number of students they've got.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is just silly. So they think that if you just say the obvious in fancy words, then it counts as new conclusive evidence. I dont think a single person really thought that if foreign countries invested into a developing economy that the best place to put the investment for the people would be in building banks, airports, military based and so forth, they did that because the health of the population was irrelevant. Any clear thinking human can come to the conclusion that directing VC to the health industry instead of overspending your own currency on it would be the best thing for the peoples health. This is neither new nor shocking.
So an outside infusion of money will break the cycle of poverty? How long were they working on that theory?
And where, exactly, is this 'outside' infusion of money to come from? Will it ever be repaid, or must it be a gift?
Who would have thought more money could end the cycle of poverty?! Brilliant!
Maybe now they can turn their big brains towards homelessness and hunger... Wait, let me take a crack at it - how about 'free housing breaks the cycle of homelessness'? 'Free food breaks the cycle of hunger'!
Ken
You can't simply give these poor countries a bunch of money and expect them to spend it properly on healthcare or any other necessity for that matter. There will always be too many sticky fingers and blatantly corrupt functionaries involved. The right way to do this is for some external organization to come in, set up the hospital, and administer treatment with zero local government influence. Of course, the eventual result might be that a healthy populace will come to realize that their totalitarian government is really screwing them over.
This is laughable. White people built successful civilisations, yet black people have NEVER done so - because the IQ of a grown black man is the same as that of a 14 year old white child.
to more vaccinations?
You need some external agency to give you lots and lots of money. This is genius! Who would have thought! Carry on with the research! Who knows, perhaps we can also solve world hunger with a similar solution.
...is they're not reality. And the problem with all economic models is that they only superficially resemble reality.
...inside its own petri dish. Most countries have a terribly broken society and government, preventing that infusion of capital from being properly injected.
Any patient on medicaid/medicare gets more treatments, pills, devices, etc. because the hospital, dr, or specialist can bill for it.
You grossly overestimate how much medicare (and medicaid) provide, and ignore the cost of what you receive. Being on medicare, a chunk of your Social Security income is taken for part A. For me, that amount is almost $200 a month. I only get an allowance of ~$630 dollars a month to spend on the hospital/PCP/specialist. A trip to the hospital, and I owe out of pocket. If I visit my PCP (primary care physician) AND have a psychiatrist appointment, or a physical therapy appointment in the same month, I owe out of pocket. Essentially, I get a "free" ~$430 to throw at my medical care and the rest is up to me to cover.
Medicare Part B (drugs) is optional. It can cost anywhere from $120 to $300+ dollars a month, depending on what and how much you want. It is only beneficial to have if you are on a regimen of costly drugs that would normally go above what you would pay without it. Even if you opt to purchase part B, not everything is covered, and you have a varying copay.
You have your parts mixed up. Part D is Drugs.
Bravo!!!
So the authors take a wicked problem and find the just one element that solves it. This is intelligence of the highest order. I wonder if they are even aware of the definition of a wicked problem. I guess I have this problem with theoreticians.
Using the authors' logic, then if one were to make everyone healthy in â" say Afghanistan, then that country will have escaped poverty and would get to be on the road to being a developed nation...
It doesn't matter how healthy, productive or motivated the Afghan citizen is. His/Her life is impacted by people coming over their border with a very clear agenda.
As an aside, US has pumped a huge amount of development money into that country and Afghanistan is still a pretty poor country.
Anyone can play these âoeintelligentâ math games...
This nonsense amounts to countries selling their output for more than it's worth.
Kinda like us borrowing 42 cents of every horrible dollar spent by our communist/socialist government.
85 billion per month to prop up the stock exchange.... LOL
Can't last forever... epic fail on the way!
The US Health Care System would be fine for the middle class if states didn't screw it up with all these mandates for stupid stuff like birth control.
This is my sig.
I live in canada where we have the evil socialist health care system where if you are sick and go to the hospital you don't pay anything. This is obviously a system where someone is trying to trick people. There must be a hidden cost somewhere..... Sarcasm if you didn't notice. I had cancer it did not cost me a dime! Yes I pay more taxes. I thank god I do because I love the fact that when I am sick I don't have to worry about the costs of my healthcare.
A computer model was required to tell that having more money is the best way to avoid being poor?
Clerp clerp...
Every time we send food aid to some poor African or central American country, the local farmers get no money for the little food they produce and the local market is ruined, stopping local production of food instead of encouraging it.
If the local farmers were producing enough food, then why would we be sending aid? If they are not producing enough food, then the aid is stopping them from gouging starving people. I fail to see the real problem here.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen