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US Life Expectancy Declines For the First Time Since 1993 (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States. Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans. Its findings show increases in "virtually every cause of death. It's all ages," said David Weir, director of the health and retirement study at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Over the past five years, he noted, improvements in death rates were among the smallest of the past four decades. "There's this just across-the-board [phenomenon] of not doing very well in the United States." Overall, life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.8 in 2015, according to the latest data. The last time U.S. life expectancy at birth declined was in 1993, when it dropped from 75.6 to 75.4, according to World Bank data. The overall death rate rose 1.2 percent in 2015, its first uptick since 1999. More than 2.7 million people died, about 45 percent of them from heart disease or cancer.
On the bright side, the deaths due to depression due to overbearing election coverage will tail off.
Someone had to do it.
This kind of arbitrary date picking cause and effect game also works great with the economy! Try it at home, kids!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Hmmm...
The morbidly predictable long-term effect of the seemingly unstoppable tidal wave of fatassery sweeping the nation, or President Black Man's fault?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm...
80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013. the US defense budget in 2015 was 637 billion dollars. However, The US Health and Human Services budget for 2015 is 1.3 trillion dollars. How is it we as a nation can outspend ourselves as the largest military power in the world, and still be faced with a declining life expectency rate?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Considering one of the major contributers is "unintentional injury deaths, such as overdoses and car accidents, increased by 6.7 percent" much of the blame likely sits on the pain pill problem. Cancer deaths actually went down, so health care is working for that disease. Alzheimers deaths rose a lot... but they say this is due to the medical establishment just recategorizing that as a cause of death... woner what those were usually listed under.
The ars article has some useful charts, if, unlike 3 out of 5 of trump supporters, you know how to read them.
Someone had to do it.
On the even brighter side, Trump is already 70. Unfortunately his father lived to 93.
that you was...
Oklahoma?
High
Fructose
Corn
Syrup
Follow the money.....
If other diseases don't get you, the depression will.
Have you met the Vice President.
That's a good thing.
TFA links to some summaries, but some of the categories (particular deaths due to accidents) are aggravatingly unspecific. Alzheimer's and accidents (unintentional injuries) had the largest year-over-year increases, at +4.0 and +2.7 deaths per 100,000. The other causes were all +1.5 or less. The increase in these two exceeded the increases in all the other top-10 combined.
I'm really curious to see what the breakdown for unintentional injury deaths looks like for 2015. We're in the middle of a prescription painkiller addiction epidemic which is going largely unreported by the media. Two years ago, overdoses displaced motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental death - a position it had held for over a half century. This year we lost more famous people to overdoses than to gun violence, even though the media spent a vastly disproportionate amount of time focusing on the latter. The day of the UCLA shooting (1 murder, 1 suicide), there was a synthetic drug poisoning incident at a concert in Florida which killed 2 and sent 60 to the hospital. But the media concentrated almost entirely on the UCLA shooting.
Yes, I'm sure taking away subsides of millions of people will work great, they can stop paying $150 per month and start paying $1500 per month, their health will certainly improve.
Because no one's Insurance Company ever told them what doctor's were covered before Obamacare.
Oh wait, it still is up to the insurance company in the fact based world...
Once natural selection takes care of the scum like you, rates will rise again.
Unlikely. Humanity doubled in size twice in the 20th century. It won't even double once in the 21st century.
Have you met the Vice President.
No ... googling ... Oh dear. This guy becomes president if Trump dies? No new election?
I wish the Donald a long and healthy life.
For the plebs, it's been dropping. Reason #2458 why raising the age for SS or Medicare is fascist BS.
What kind of fake news are you smoking? healthgrad.com ? lol
of course there screwed...
Get up!
If they think it's bad now, just wait 'til Herr Trump gets those immigrant "recreation camps" open with the "community showers".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It's a bright future.
If you handle snakes, speak in tongues, and still view women as chattel, yeah, Pence is your guy.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
When did we socialize medicine?
Linking to your own blog does not provide any support for the false narrative that you are pushing.
The question was not about the Sisters paying for abortions. It was about the Sisters filling in a form stating that they would not provide cover for abortions, so that the government could pay for those abortions.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
All you idiots blaming this tiny decrease on the ACA should look at what happened in Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian system went from fully public to private, and life expectancy plummeted from numbers similar to those in most developed countries to 3rd world levels (i.e. as low as 50 years for men)! It was only after your hero Putin RE-SOCIALIZED the Russian medical system in the early 2000's that Russian life expectancy has crept back up into the 70s.
Subsidies just drive up prices. What we need is to do away with insurance completely, make people pay for their own health care. Then you'll see how people start actually looking at their bills and questioning prices. When that happens there will be an end to hospitals charging $100 an aspirin and the other medical nonsense that we have now.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
four more words!
"American life expectancy declines..." Yeah, electing a hothead with his finger on the red button will do that to you.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The dumbest thing Americans do is assume that consumers act rationally, never-mind should be expected to act rationally. Health care is an insurance product that you want everyone to be forced to pay into so that they take the quickest path to getting back to contributing towards the GDP. None of this should be up to "consumers" in so far as somebody who needs health care gets to shop around if they're sick, blind, alone, or otherwise disadvanted in a miriad of other ways - nor providers, who shouldn't be looking at competition and profit margins for the kind of work they're in.
But I get it - you grew up with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Under Obama care faceless bureaucrats will decide who lives and who lives and who dies.
Who decides who lives and dies under Trump care? Maybe it can be a reality show.
We did it without telling anyone. About half of all healthcare spending comes from Governments. Another 20% is from businesses, and that is overwhelmingly regulated and required by Governments (meaning - they aren't directly spending it but forcing it to be spent). So about 30% is left for consumers. Meaning - the vast majority of healthcare spending is driven by Government. That's a socialized system.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I would imagine Alzheimers deaths were categorized as "old age" or something similar. I think it's a relatively recent realization that while many people develop mental problems as they get older, this is not an absolute certainty and often there is a disease involved (so they blame the disease instead of just "that's the way people age").
Oh, also we might be getting better at looking after the various illnesses and problems that come more easily with Alzheimers, so that instead of dying of pneumonia / flu / breaking a hip (and the subsequent physical downward slide) / etc, people are living long enough with the disease that it gets to the truly critical systems (breathing and such), where it can be the primary cause of death instead of just an invitation for a different cause of death.
So what you're saying is, maybe I shouldn't be drinking the mercury that comes out of those old school thermometers, and playing with those discarded fire-alarms inside that off-limits shack with the peeling lead paint?
Over the last five years life expectancies in the U.S. have gone up, so I presume you're looking for something that happened five years ago to make overall life expectancies go up, right? Or does your twisted logic only work one way?
Looking at the individual cases, I don't think it is as bad as it sounds.
Cancer deaths, the second most common cause, went down.
Hearth diseases went up, which is troubling, but in a lot of cases caused by bad life choices.
Another is unintentional injuries. Which I don't think has much to do with the healthcare system, and probably in part also due to higher average age.
The other causes which took a bigger share are "old age" diseases.
A curious one to me is the increasing infant deaths due to congenital malformations. Any ideas about what is causing this?
None of the differences in causes of infant deaths were statistically significant (except for unintentional injuries) so I wouldn't put too much weight in it.
As for adults, most of those were statistically significant, and there seems to be a pattern.
Causes of death that are primarily health care oriented were either static or decreased (cancer).
Causes of death that are short term lifestyle oriented (injuries, suicide, and probably a lot of the chronic conditions) increased.
So it looks like there were a lot of people not taking as good care of themselves in 2015 and they were more vulnerable to several causes of death as a result.
I stole this Sig
Aging population is a problem here (EU) and some of the psot mentionned (mental degeneration like alzeihmer, accident) are stuff which happens more likely to old population. Looking at the median age , US population became older. Could it be simply the median age rising it finally "catch up" with the death toll (e.g. you have two factors going against each other, rising quality of care and rising median age, maybe we did not see the rising median age effect before because it was covered by rising quality of care ?). Median age in years
1960 29.5
1970 28.1
1980 30
1990 32.9
2000 35.3
2010 37.2
2015 37.8
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The problem is that there is no incentive for corporations to have people live healthy lives. As a result of this people are slowly being killed by the things they eat and the medicines they take. The obvious solution is to create feedback loops that discourage damaging profit motives.
For example, if you sell a product and a customer become ill as a result, your company has to contribute to their rehabilitation. This of course has the caveat of needing to record what people buy (already done by most companies) and relying on statistical analysis. As more and more data correlates a product to illness, the heavier the monetary burden is put on the corporation making it.
Corporation have already fubar'd a lot of people so the burden is going to be quite heavy for them for many years but if they correct the products they know are hurting people, it will decrease over time. If they decide, "fuck it, sell it anyway" then the monetary burden will increase until it drives them out of business.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If the population in a region increases over several decades because of a high birth rate, deaths per 1000 will be lower even when the life expectancy is 60 years or less. If you have many young people and not many old ones, deaths per 1000 are very low.
Causes of death are often complex, especially in older people, who may be suffering from a variety of issues simultaneously. Nonetheless, one underlying cause should not be overlooked: increasing obesity in the US drives a lot of other health issues.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I can not even begin to tell you how dumb this idea is. Are you seriously going to haggle with the emergency staff, as they're about to treat your heart attack? What about when your s.o. finds a lump in their breasts/chest? What are you going to tell your kid, when they get lymphoma? "Sorry sweetie. You deserve the best, but we can only afford to send you to that guy that operates out of a dumpster." And what's the point of scrutinizing your medical bills when the medical insurance companies in your area are monopolies.
Fact: Under Obama care, life expectancy declines. In addition, there are many news articles detailing how coverage cost as gone way up and services have gone down.
Conclusion: It is trumps fault.
You sir, are the stuff retards are made of.
But of course! After eight years of Obama, life expectancy drops... and you already prepare to blame Trump!
In actual fact, one of the biggest contributors to lower life expectancy is obesity, and one of the biggest identifiable causes of obesity is government policy: corn subsidies and bad federal nutritional guidelines.
Theocracies are hell and are up there with fascist dictatorships and totalarian communism in the really really shit ways to run a country stakes.
Bright future, if goosestepping whilst clutching a bible , is your thing.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
It's sure to drop further once he repeals health care.
That's one rationalization of the future.
Another one is that life expectancy has gone down because more people are impoverished.
If you don't have a lot of money, you tend to scrimp and cut corners. You might not be able to purchase a new winter jacket, might not be able to take a day or two off of work when you're sick, and might not be able to recover from a burglary.
If the economy picks up in a way that benefits the people instead of businesses, more disposable cash might lead to longer life expectancy.
But hey - don't let me interfere with your narrative. The "and replace it with something better" thing will *never* **ever** happen.
Because... Trump.
That may end the $100 aspirin but what about lung/heart/joint surgery? Diabetes? Hemophilia? ...
Health care spending as a percent of GDP is double what it is in all advanced economies and we have worse outcomes by several measures. THE SOLUTION IS NOT TO SPEND MORE MONEY! WE ALREADY DO THAT BY A HUGE AMOUNT! The fix involves getting the drug, hospital and insurance prices down and that involves spending LESS money.
That's great if you need aspirin, but what happens when you need major surgery or expensive long term treatment? Most people can't get hold of tens of thousands of dollars at short notice, especially when they sick.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Only 80 killed in 10 years, sounds like the defense was working for the most part.
The problem with healthcare is there is no ceiling to the cost and the end result is always the same, everyone dies eventually. Most of the early deaths appear to be lifestyle related anyway. Any reasonable person should prefer money to be spent on preventing unnecessary deaths (like terrorism) and just take care of themselves better to handle the longevity part.
The US now has 10 aircraft carriers, 2 under construction, and 1 planned. (source)
Military spending is 54% of our national budget, which is more than the amount of our deficit. More than the combined spending of the next seven countries.
What was that you were saying about spending ceilings?
Maybe the post WWII "baby boomers" are getting old, and we reach a step where these people just start to die. Thus, despite progresses in medical science, statistics are skewed.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Give people quality healthcare and they'll live longer.
The dumbest thing Americans do is assume that consumers act rationally, never-mind should be expected to act rationally.
Yes, people never make the choices *I* think they should make, so I want the government to *force* MY choices on everyone else with the threat of imprisonment or death to back it up.
Health care is an insurance product that you want everyone to be forced to pay into...
Ain't Fascism great?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Yeah, all those mass shootings causing people to die from heart disease.
It's sure to drop further once he repeals health care.
Nah, he's gonna replace it with something amazing!
In a country with... The highest levels of obesity in the world. Where the citizens carry lethal weapons and shootings are a daily occurrence. Has a privatized health care system that many people can not afford to be part of. Why would anyone be surprised that the average lifespan is decreasing?
The disturbing part is not the fact that longevity is in decline.
The disturbing part is the likelihood that it is by design.
Every government has a responsibility of resource management, and when a population continues to increase, policies and procedures must be put in place to help execute that responsibility.
If you take a look at our policies and legal products, it paints quite an alarming picture. Tobacco is a legal product. From a health perspective, it makes absolutely zero fucking sense, as it kills 450,000 Americans every year, while providing zero benefit for a human body.
That said, it is a legal product because it kills 450,000 Americans every year. It also is a leading cause of cancer, so government also gets the benefit of ticking off the "creates jobs" box with all of the related diseases caused by tobacco, namely the highly-profitable Cancer Industrial Complex. You really believe we're searching for a cure to eradicate an industry that generates well over $100 billion a year in profits, along with the twisted side benefit of population control? Think again.
And tobacco is but one example of resource management. Think marijuana is still considered "deadly" per DEA Schedule standards? Hardly. It's not legal because it's not deadly enough to benefit resource management. It also helps fund the War on Drugs, creates thousands of jobs in the DEA, and feeds the Privatized Prison Complex. The only downside is we've earned the illustrious moniker of The Incarcerated States of America, but clearly maintaining an illegal status is worth it.
Big Pharma has legalized the opium den in quite an elegant and profitable way, creating addicts, jobs, and deaths. And every study says HFCS is bad for you? Yup, let's ensure we put that shit in as many food products as possible while minimizing health risks. Carcinogens in makeup? Sure, why not. All examples of policy feeding the resource management responsibility.
TL; DR - Death is by design, backed by policy, because every government has a responsibility of resource management.
Excellent plan. So now when someone gets say cancer, unless they happen to have tens or possibly hundreds of thousands stashed away for cancer-day, they can either try to apply for a loan or go the way of walter white. Advanced health care is so expensive, there is no practical way for most people to pay it out of pocket and the demand is inelastic (people who have a serious condition requiring immediate care do not have the time or the capabilities to compare prices and go to the other side of the country to get their treatment slightly cheaper) which make market based solutions terribly inefficient at providing it cheaply.
Moreover, since the demand is fairly static there's no way of effectively competing in a market with existing hospitals. Take something as simple as X-rays for example: a given area will have a fairly constant demand for xrays that's directly tied to the size of the population, let's say 10 000 as an example. But the machines and the staff to run x-ray machines cost a lot. The price of a simple machine is around a million. If we assume a life-span of 10 years for the device, that factors down to roughly 10 dollars an image as the base cost (+ staff costs + margins for the hospital). If someone else buys a device to compete with the first one, they too will have to try and recoup their costs, which will drive the base-price of an image up in both hospitals, raising the costs overall. If demand is split evenly between both it means the base-cost will double.
The infrastructure to provide advanced medical care cost enormous amounts of money, which acts both as a barrier to entry to the market, as well as making sure that increasing competition will lower the general efficiency of a system once you start getting more capacity than you'd actually need to satisfy the needs of a given population.
Or, you could just do what most other developed economies have already done and institute direct controls on pricing. Just having a public option for insurance allowing the government to leverage its size and negotiate down prices would be a start. There's no justifiable reason for allowing companies to rake in gigantic profits on a life-saving service that pretty much everyone will need at some point in their life.
To this day, I've never understood why the richest country on the planet allows its citizens to be left to die or saddled with massive debt over medical issues when there are several existing models of providing first world level advanced care at a much cheaper cost per capita (in fact, every single existing medical system is cheaper than the US one)..
But that requires treating health care as a right of citizens, not as a commercial commodity, which goes against the divine mantra of 'the free market is the solution to everything' that seems to dominate american politicians' discussion on health as if the only way to keep people healthy is to sell them health.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Do you have a practical example of anywhere in the world where this works?? Because all west world countries that have working health care systems have the exact opposite of what you suggest. I live in Sweden with completely free health care. There's no $100 aspirin here.
The horrors do not end there.
If Air Force one crashes into the atlantic tomorrow with both Trump and Pence on board... the presidency goes to the speaker of the House. In this case Paul Ryan - a man who has run several times and was never able to get the nomination. He's saner than either the president- or vice-president elect but his own brand of ultra-selfcentered, classist asshole.
When he accepted the speakership it was only on condition of being allowed a minimum number of weeks a year to spend with his family - he is clearly in favor of the idea of family vacations... for rich people, because he also repeatedly fought and voted against making America NOT be one of the only countries on earth without protected, paid family leave.
Only in America is a couple of weeks a year to spend with your family, rest up a bit, get out of town a bit - without worrying about losing your job or lost wages NOT considered an essential right for a well-functioning society. Paul Ryan has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that these things remain the privilege of the rich and wealthy - or at least those with rare enough job skills to be able to personally negotiate them contracts.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The dumbest thing Americans do is assume that consumers act rationally, never-mind should be expected to act rationally.
Yes, people never make the choices *I* think they should make, so I want the government to *force* MY choices on everyone else with the threat of imprisonment or death to back it up.
Health care is an insurance product that you want everyone to be forced to pay into...
Ain't Fascism great?
Strat
You do realize that this is how it works in most west world countries that actually have functioning health care systems? Would you say that the Nordic countries: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, with completely free health care, are fascist countries??
Oh it did, it's just that white folks ignored it or assumed it was justified. And they would've gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for those pesky cellphones.
If women were chattle they wouldn't come with a dowry.
Normally I don't answer to AC but your post is especially funny. If the report was coming from an insurance conglomerate, like alliance, you would have a point. But the CDC is only showing a health report... Which has nothing to do with actuaries. So maybe it pay to read the summary from time to time, even if you don't botzher read the article ?LOL.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I stubbed my toe walking around in the dark. I blame Trump!! Damn him!! :-|
No worse than the shit obama got blamed for.
http://files.explosm.net/comic...
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
But, you can't have poor people dying because they can't afford healthcare... and an individual cannot really negotiate with a large corporation - especially when the price for turning down their offer is to die.
So what can we do... mmm well we could pool a lot of people's money together. They could negotiate prices as a group - which can be on equal footing with the suppliers, and the group as a whole isn't "about to die" so the negotiations are no longer happening under duress. Then you can also use standard actuarial table structures to spread risk around so that those with little risk right now can help cover those with high risk - and get better results for all.
Of course, such systems work better the larger the pool - so you will want to get EVERYBODY in on it (that's a fundamental attribute of actuarial tables - they only WORK if they are BIG). Ideally - you want the pool to be available, in it's entirety, to pay for healthcare - so it should probably not be profit driven.
There was a system, very much like that, in Scottland in the 19th century - it was actually the first ever use of actuarial tables to spread risk, instituted by the Scottish church to help the wealthier congregations assist the poorer ones in their care duties.
But it doesn't seem ideal to have a religious organisation run this - after all, people don't all have the same religion and it would cause friction that would limit the pool of potential contributors.
Mmm we could set up a massive, non-religiously affiliated organisation to collect dues and manage the fund, handle the negotiations and take care of the payments when we need it !
Seems like a huge amount of effort to get set up and convince everybody to sign on though - and a bit of a chicken/egg problem since the greatest benefits (the negotiation power) only comes when you have lots of members, but to get lots of members you need to offer the benefits.
If only there was some organisation that was already established, had lots of negotiation power, the infrastructure to collect and manage dues with an already existing tiered-structure to scale your dues to your income, capacity to handle payments, no profit motive and no religious affiliation which we could leverage to run this national insurance scheme for us... I know we can use our government ! They're perfect ! This is EXACTLY the sort of thing we invented them for !
Oh wait, we just invented single payer healthcare.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And this is different from forcing everyone to pay for the military how?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
that you was...
Oklahoma?
Possibly Yorkshire.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Yes, certainly everyone will flock to those hospitals and providers who are the most efficient. "Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us".
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
So people will flock to the hospitals across town because they are cheaper? I wonder how many will perish along the way?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I didn't know the US had a left. I thought you had right-wingers and wacko right-wingers.
Ezekiel 23:20
Talk about willful ignorance, if there's only one hospital to go to then there's no competition. No competition means whatever price they want.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
you saying obama's health care caused all this decline? I agree with you.
Yes, yes we are saying that. All those cases of diabetes, heart disease and stroke developed in the past 8 years, to people who never had so much as a cold before Obama destroyed the healthcare system.
Under Obama care faceless bureaucrats will decide who lives and who lives and who dies.
Who decides who lives and dies under Trump care? Maybe it can be a reality show.
Yeah man, set up some premium rate phonelines and then they can use the profits from that to fund the next war then give the whole pay per view thing another shot.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
>In actual fact, one of the biggest contributors to lower life expectancy is obesity, and one of the biggest identifiable causes of obesity is government policy: corn subsidies and bad federal nutritional guidelines.
Something Obama made a serious effort to act on early in his presidency, he desperately tried to regulate that industry - make sure consumers are informed of what's in their food and encourage companies to improve the quality of what they sell. Only to have it scuppered by the republican congress.
So if there is any blame on government - then by your own reasoning - that blame lies with the republican party.
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There is no such thing as an abortifacient. No abortifacient birth control has been on sale in decades. And the pill was NEVER one.
If anything the pill PREVENTS abortions. Any sexually active women will naturally abort about 2 out of 3 fertilized eggs - only one in three fertilizations lead to successfull implantation. By preventing the eggs being released in the first place - the pill actually prevents these natural abortions from happening.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
A general increase in life expectancy over a century has also made alzheimers far more common - as a helluva lot of people live long enough to get it without being killed by something else at 40.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yeah, like you are going to start arguing prices with an hospital. Right. The ONLY ones who can do that are centralized healthcare systems like in Europe where they argue prices, enforce them and sometimes (rarely) fine establishments who won't play along.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
If you handle snakes, speak in tongues, and still view women as chattel, yeah, Pence is your guy.
I didn't know he was an Islamist. Those are all very pro-muslim things to be doing.
Om, nomnomnom...
If you don't think less health coverage will mean lower life expectancy, I'd love to hear your logic. Do Cubans live longer than Americans purely because of the healing properties of their cigars?
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Sure. One easy thing we can do is abolish ambulances and have the sick and injured find the cheapest uber fare to the most competitive hospital within 100 miles.
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It needs to be pointed out that Obama is still the president until mid-January. This news is happening during Obama's reign. Thanks for reducing our life expectancy, Obama.
Before the change, I hadn't been to a doctor in 20 years because I couldn't afford it, then this year I was able to go in for treatment. Let's hear your theory for how being able to see a doctor has killed people. Are doctors that incompetent? Is it all the legalized euthanasia from those death panels? Are Cuban doctors way better than American doctors since Cubans live longer being able to see them?
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The horrors do not end there. If Air Force one crashes into the atlantic tomorrow with both Trump and Pence on board... the presidency goes to the speaker of the House.
The Vice President doesn't fly on Air Force One, he flies on Air Force Two. In fact, the President and Vice President don't spend much time together precisely for this reason.
Trump could piss in a jar, say "Drink my urine to absorb my business power" and his supporters would be lining up to buy it.
And when he gets sued after somebody discovered he stopped pissing in jars after the first one and the rest were just really expensive lemonade they'll call the judge biased against urolagnia.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually... you're joke may be somewhat true. Stress is a major contributor to heart disease, and living in a country where mass shootings is a regular occurrence (in fact more regular than ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD -... actually that's selling it short, TWICE as many in 20 years as the next 10 countries COMBINED) and everybody has a fucking gun, with no real measure to determine if they even know where the safety is, would sure as hell leave ME permanently stressing out.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yeah I'm aware the standard versions are much cheaper, however this does not change the core of the argument: you cannot drive down cost by having several playes get expensive infrastructure for a service with a static demand while they all at the same time seek to make a profit on it.
I don't know about the US staff requirements, but in here radiological nurses go through around 4 years of training including physics having to do with radiation does calculations and so on. I'd say that's relatively highly trained. And again, even if you hire hobos from the street and pay them 5 $ an hour, this doesn't change the argument.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Fuckin A.....
Healthcare like Government are special edge cases so as a rule of thumb - it doesn't run like a market.
You're in a car accident ... you going to call around for the cheapest ambulance ? Internal bleeding, your choice, Two hospitals one a few miles over the next 30 miles. You going to call around for the cheapest ER ?
you're dead.
So people will flock to the hospitals across town because they are cheaper?
I did not say that. Why do you think that that will happen?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
You do realize that this is how it works in most west world countries that actually have functioning health care systems? Would you say that the Nordic countries: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, with completely free health care, are fascist countries??
The US had the most advanced medicine in the world for many decades. World leaders from across the world came to the US for serious health problems. That is not so true since the US has gradually and increasingly tried to mimic other nations' healthcare systems.
As to the Nordic nations you mention, the medical systems are mixes of socialist and fascist in structure and have never led globally in medical advances like the US.
Forgive me if I'd prefer the US stick to the principles it was founded upon and which are responsible for making the US a global superpower within 2 centuries of it's founding and the home of the most advanced medicine in the world. Why should the US mimic demonstrably-inferior systems?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If you don't think less health coverage will mean lower life expectancy, I'd love to hear your logic. Do Cubans live longer than Americans purely because of the healing properties of their cigars?
It might possibly be because their diet isn't 80% sugar.
I think those that sit in the Ivory Towers will get richer, those who provide bedside care will get fewer, and many of those who need care will die to increase CEO bonuses.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I've always opposed to the corn subsidies, I find it ridiculous we subsidize maize at a rate higher than any other healthier vegetable. When Bush started the ridiculously high subsidies is when we started having these 99cent heart-attack specials pop up everywhere. In essence we're paying taxes for farmers to produce the worst food crop, that goes in part to feed cows to make artificially cheap low quality corn-fed beef.
Not just that we're subsidizing the world. Our taxes are making everybody else fat too. as countries like us, and Argentina ship tax payer funded cheap fatty beef around the world.
Can't we subsidise cabbages, or peas, or lettuce, or ... I don't know anything else healthy instead of maize which is essentially just sugar with almost no nutritional value?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You realize how fucking asinine that opinion is, right?
You're saying that all these racist white people voted for Obama, because they.. Hated black people more back then?
It's also such a small change that I have to wonder if it's relevant and not washed out by margins of error.
Insurance has certainly played a large part in the explosion of costs, but it is not the sole or even the main cause as much as it's a catalyst. Insurance is an added margin on top of the cost of care itself, but there are numerous countries which do use a partially insurance based system coupled with a public option and pricing controls that still achieve costs way lower costs than those of the US on equal level of care.
The US health market, both hospitals as well as insurers, is dominated by private commercial entities. This means even without insurers, the system would seek an equilibrium where it can extract the most money out of people because that is what corporations do, Even without insurer-middlemen, if a corporation can double the price of treatment and end up making more money, the fact that some people will now die because they can no longer afford the procedure is irrelevant, from the standpoint of shareholders. This is why pretty much every country outside the US heavily limits and controls health business.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
or the jail / prison pop goes way up as they become doctors of last resort.
Birth rate in the US is currently below replacement level. At this point, the increase in population is entirely due to immigration.
Need to obey traffic lights? Fascism! Pay taxes? Fascism! Building permits? Fascism! Your idiocy? Freedom!
"Old man yells at systemd"
More precisely, the Republicans in Congress will repeal the ACA. Their plan is to replace it with something else that keeps the provisions they like, such as coverage for prior conditions and keeping sproggs on their parents' plan until age 26.
The problem for them will be that insurance companies are not going to support keeping those provisions as an unfunded mandate. That means Congress will have to cover the bill. Problem there is that Congress would have raise taxes which they pledged to that moron Grover Norquist they would never do.
A bigger problem will be that insurance companies are in it for themselves, covering people is only something they must do to stay in business. Government pulling back from the ACA means they have their privates hanging out there and so will pull back their plans. Congress figures they have 2-3 years to replace the ACA after they vote to repeal it, but the insurance companies probably won't wait and will start canceling policies early.
The only fix is to find money elsewhere in the budget to keep the wheels on. That will be difficult since they also wish to increase defense spending AND supply the jack needed for a large public infrastructure program, which the U.S. does need. They claim they will find the money elsewhere. But they've already cut discretionary spending quite a bit. Going after mandatory spending means mixing it up with the blue hairs and AARP and would take years.
Congress figures that relaxing regulations and fixing the tax code will increase GDP to such an extent that tax receipts will go up. Yet their plans will decrease tax receipts. During the Kennedy administration when taxes were relatively high, cutting taxes would get a big bang for the buck. Now it will only supply a whimper. Decrease regulations is all wonderful except that ignoring regulation and not properly regulating led to the last recession. And companies are not complaining about regulation except polluting companies. Relaxing regs on them means increased costs for the resulting pollution.
If the Republicans are correct and 95% of climate scientists are in on the global warming scam, then a bit more pollution won't matter. However, if they are wrong, then there will be increasing costs (regardless of deregulation) for droughts, stronger storms, etc.
And then there is the Black Swans out there. One really big national disaster, say a big California earthquake, means their budget projections will be very wrong very fast.
the US does not have the worlds most advanced medicine.
nor does it have the best system.
the systems in place throughout Europe are not "demonstrably inferior".
our quality, outcomes, and life expectancy are all below average, while our costs are the highest in the world.
most of Europe enjoys better outcomes, better quality of care, and higher life expectancies, for between 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of comparable care in the US.
All you've done is prove you don't know what you're talking about, nor do you know the definitions of socialism or fascism.
Again.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
...while having a heart attack...
sure buddy.
sure.
keep telling yourself that.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the fallacy here is in thinking that the health care industry hasn't been acting like a market.
IT HAS.
For decades.
And the result has been that the people who need the health care aren't the ones being served, not really, not in the classical economic sense, but rather its the insurance and provider industries that are. Because the simple fact is that when you are sick, you ARE NOT a rational actor in an ideal market.
If your doctor says you need this 300k$ surgery to survive, and then you need to take this $500 a pill medication every day for the rest of your life, or you will die...
you're not going to shop around. you're not going to say wait, hold on. you're gonna say "OK".
And they know this.
Prices are high simply because they can be.
Because market fetishists delude themselves into thinking it will sort itself out, even though all evidence says otherwise, and the majority of other nations have figured out that it IS indeed possible to reign in costs through the power of government. We (the USA) are the only self-deluded outlier in this subject.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I mean, did it actually show any rate increase when the law was implemented? Serious question, dunno the answer to it.
this shows a rather marked ignorance of how exactly insurance even came to be.
as medicine became more advanced (ie, moved past Doc Anderson hopping in his buggy to come give you liniment), costs began rising.
eventually someone figured out "hey, we don't all get sick at the same time."
"lets pool our money together."
"we'll all pay in. George, you'll pay in a bit more since you get sick more often"
"when one of gets sick and needs the doc, we'll pay out of the pool."
that's the origin of insurance in a nutshell....before it became a self-serving for-profit industry, with fees, "determinations" as whether you really need treatment, treatment denials, pre-existing conditions, etc.
the insurance industry exists because it, however ineptly and inefficiently, fills a need: specifically, that people CANNOT pay for their care on their own when tragedy strikes. medical bankruptcies would be even more common without insurance, than with it.
so no, you're wrong.
the way forward is not to go backwards.
the forward is to go the next step further than insurance and institute single payer or some other form of government level control.... like every other civilized nation that gets better care at half the cost .
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the cost isn't zero either, and standard xray machines are now also now rarely used for general diagnostics....because it's xrays. ionizing radiation that carried its own risks and so frequent usage is avoided.
for example MRIs and other machines are used much more commonly now, for the simple reason that they provide many times more information, and better diagnosis, than your "standard xray machine" canard.
and MRI machines ARE expensive.
and every hospital has one...or several.
in fact the installed capacity of MRI machines is incredibly high, far beyond what is actually needed in this country; the only country with a higher (and more inefficient) installed capacity of MRI machines is Japan.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It would be nice if people would actually try and research someone before they make bs claims about them. Ryan has only run for the VP once, as Romney's choice. He had the nomination handed to him. Other than that he's won every time he's run for Federal Office which have all been for his seat in the House. I get it, you don't like him because he is a Republican. But at least try to be accurate in your description of his political career.
Because if you can't get basic documented history correct how can we expect your claims on his positions to have any more credibility.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
It's sure to drop further once he repeals health care.
Why would you assume that? The correlation is that since Obamacare caused life expectancy has dropped for the first time since 1993. If it's repealed, maybe it will start going back up.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
meanwhile back in reality:
-the economy is in its best shape, basically ever
-the rate of premium increase is actually lower than it was pre-obamacare*
(*yes, your individual plan may have gone up a lot, but when you've got a super plan for super cheap, that's called a market correction. the fact remains, that on the aggregate, while premiums have always increased year to year, the increases under obamacare were smaller than they were before obamacare)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I wonder how the stats will change once he deports people and reduces immigration? We're not exactly taking people in for their prime health.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Obama derangement syndrome was real, but Trump derangement is an order of magnitude worse. In 2008 Obama just had to deal with occasional rumors about his birthplace and whatever remnants of open white supremacy still exist in the 21st century, not a year-long media campaign with open, unabashed attempts to portray him as a literal fascist and the second coming of Hitler. Every president gets compared to Hitler of course, but usually by random nutjobs, not major MSM outlets.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/mainstream-media-scream-cnn-compares-trump-to-hitler-stalin/article/2604155
http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/5-washington-post-writers-liken-trump-to-hitler/
etc.
BTW that voice in your head right now saying "Well that's different, Trump really is Hitler"? That's the TDS talking.
Then of course there is the constant effort to label Trump and everyone associated with him with every "-ism" they can think of. Freaking Ben Carson is a white supremacist; Steve Bannon is a nazi because Breitbart supports confederate flags and Bannon may or may not have said something weakly anti-semitic in a private conversation 20+ years ago; Trump voters are all KKKers because one attention whore neonazi threw a rally attended by more reporters than people and declared himself king of the alt-right.
(Oh yeah, and then there's this thread blaming him for shit happening before he's even in office. And wasn't Obamacare specifically supposed to do the opposite of things like this?)
reality:
-there are no taxpayer funded abortions
-there is no provision for it in the ACA
-abortions are dropping, in direct relation to increased availability of contraception, and better education
-the LSofP case involves contraception, not abortificants
-the ACA was not only not meant to fail, but it has succeeded rather well, within its limited abilities. the only better reform that could have happened would have been the public option, aka, Medicare for All, aka single payer.
-premiums increased before Obamacare too. the difference is, they are increasing more slowly now, than they did before (so once again: Obamacare is working)
-you're clueless, as usual
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Biology lesson: by your definition, women "abort" their eggs every month when they menstruate.
that makes you, and anyone who uses that definition, ignorant morons.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
once again you prove that definitions are hard for you.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
cant tell if satire, or moron.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
That proves your stupidity. Those are core values of all religions Abraham. That would be Jews Christians and Muslims all have the same core beliefs and foster a us versus them attitude.
Seriously Christians believe women should be fully covered though they replace burkas with bonnets.
Please actually look up your Christian beliefs some day. You might be depressed to know that woman rights are secondary to men. That slaves are allowed from neighboring countries and a few other things these are not just Islamist but fundamental beliefs of all religions of Abraham. Since they all share parts of the same book it makes sense. Yes the Koran and the Bible borrow and are heavily influenced by the Torah and other Jewish teachings.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
On the even brighter side, Trump is already 70. Unfortunately his father lived to 93.
Unfortunately his father lived to 41..
Before the change, I hadn't been to a doctor in 20 years because I couldn't afford it, then this year I was able to go in for treatment. Let's hear your theory for how being able to see a doctor has killed people. Are doctors that incompetent?
First of all, when I speak of change, I'm talking about the shift to socialized medicine within the US. Yes, this helped millions of people perhaps obtain insurance for the first time, but it sure as shit was not the golden egg that was promised with regards to choice, and a lot of those millions are finding it's worth it to pay the penalties rather than pay the insurance premiums. Ironically, families who do participate likely get sick more often because they're burdened with paying insane insurance premiums, and can't afford to put healthy food on the table. Starts to really make you wonder what the fuck the point of it all was, other than to put more money into the pockets of the greedy who lobbied for it.
As far as doctors being incompetent, that depends on how biased their decisions are to feed the Medical Industrial Complex. Chances are you won't escape a doctors office today without being prescribed something in a bottle, along with a half-dozen follow-up examinations which are 4 minutes long, just enough time to legally check the liability box, but not a second more. They're also being far more intrusive regarding those "standard forms" you fill out when you visit for a bad cough, asking questions about job performance and how depressed you are. Ignorance would deny the profits being driven from such statistical gathering. I made an appointment for a cough, and suddenly I'm getting my head shrunken, which of course is always fixed with a bottle of new-and-improved pills that we'll find wrapped up in a class-action lawsuit 5 years from now due to the negative impact.
If you want to dig deeper into the theory behind bias, I covered that in another post regarding resource management.
This is amazing. I was going to post something snarky to the effect that, had Republicans done some kind of major overhaul of national healthcare in recent years, they would've been blamed for the decline of longevity.
But reality is even stranger than what I imagined — although Obamacare was passed without a single Republican vote, the Democrats blame Republicans for nation's worsening health anyway. Because of something they may do in the future!..
Now, the Anonymous Coward may have been sarcastic. But the moderators, who've elevated him to "Score: 4, Insightful" (at the time of this typing), certainly weren't...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't think there is any denying that Obamacare has helped a certain segment of society. There exists a group that got access to care they did not have before. There is a much much larger group that now pays a great deal more for the care they already had access to and is being gradually priced out of consuming as much care as they once did due to the rise in deductibles and premiums they are paying. I know for example I am paying a little more than 3 times what I paid before 2010 in premiums and my deductible as doubled. If I were on a tighter budget the added cost of the premiums would lesson my ability to shoulder the higher out of pocket costs due to the rise in deductible.
There are a lot of families and individuals who are now choosing not to treat minor ailments because they can't fit the out of pocket costs into their budgets. There probably is a cumulative effect of living with these conditions. Although its a bit soon for that show up in life expediency I would think. Still its not at all hard to see how Obamacare has materially hurt far more people than it has helped. The issue is for a small group of people it has help a lot.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Even more unfortunately, his father had Alzheimer's Disease - which tends to run in the family.
We just have to hope Trump et al go ballooning.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This is part of the problem. The government prevents the building hospitals, and closely watches how many hospital beds are located in an area. Without the ability to build there isn't any choice thus no market pressure. This is one regulation that needs to go out the window. Let entrepreneurs build.
Our high end services are the best in the world. Not everyone can afford that, but it is available to some. People without money have a lower level of care. When you put those two groups together, it does average out to be less in some areas than other countries.
I've been following this story, and I expect we're not looking at the future, but rather stagnation in the status quo for the last fifteen years or so plus statistical noise.
Where things gets interesting when you start disaggregating the trends. If you look at the life expectancy data by county, the disparity is shocking: almost all rural and poor counties saw little or no improvement in life expectancy since the late 80s, but life expectancy has improved dramatically (5 years or more) in urban and wealthy counties. And here's an interesting fact: the gap between white and black life expectancy has narrowed, but this is largely due to stagnation in life expectancy among working class whites.
This indicates to me that poor access to health care advances for working class and rural whites has driven the overall stagnation in life expectancy. This is in part what Obamacare was intended to address, however it can't possibly improve the situation in rural counties without Medicaid expansion.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, the rich are living longer ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02... ) There are several reasons why overall longevity in the US is down.
- Cost of health care
- Life style: Americans are much more sedentary. Obesity rates and associated diseases are up ( high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol levels) . We're seeing 40 year olds in nursing homes due to obesity. Nursing homes are having to retro-fit equipment and make larger doors for Bariatric patients.
- The shift in wealth to the rich. As wealth disparity increases, there's less resources (money) for poor.
If your doctor says you need this 300k$ surgery to survive, and then you need to take this $500 a pill medication every day for the rest of your life, or you will die...
you're not going to shop around. you're not going to say wait, hold on. you're gonna say "OK".
Yes if someone else is writing the check you certainly will. If you had to pay out of pocket lots of people would say "I can't." At which point the medical providers are going to have to find a way to deliver for a lower cost if they want the work at all. They charge enough to basically wipe out the majority of their potential patients but no more. The problem is right now there is essentially no upper limit on what they can charge.
I would also argue that a lot of people might choose alternatives like 'make me comfortable as long as possible' at those prices. $300k I might find away to come up with but at say half a million I might decide it would be better to not bankrupt my family leave my wife and children with some of our aquired wealth and a hefty life insurance payout. I think a lot of people would
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
OK Ivan, crawl back to momma bear now.
Someone had to do it.
Pre-Obamacare, there were many plans that had a low annual cap. They were inexpensive,and popular for people who had enough money to afford insurance, because they were cheap.
I'm sure most people, if they were smart enough to realize what they had, assumed that they would still get care after their insurance ran out. They were often right. Who picks up that bill, isn't that just about the stupidest and least consistent way to handle a single payer system? Because all those bills eventually come back to the Federal government, if nothing else, as tax rebates for indigent care.
Cheap storage VM.
The huge benefit of the US system, which is immaterial to most of us, is that you can cut inline if you have enough money. It doesn't matter how important you are, it just matters that your check clears.
Cheap storage VM.
Truly insightful.
Cheap storage VM.
Healthcare is not a commodity. Do you feel that it's truly interchangeable no matter the source? Would you object to being shipped to a hospital in rural Iowa if the ones in New York were to busy? Do you think outcomes are the same? They aren't.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/559394
Cheap storage VM.
In the US, infant mortality generally includes any death of a human being (who is not intentionally aborted) from the time that human is "viable" but still inside its mom.
In much of the rest of the world (it varies by country) a child's death is not recorded as such if it has not reached some number of days, weeks, or even months after being born. Therefore, a child who dies from complications during child birth in the US would be added to the US infant mortality rate, but the same child dying the same way in many other nations would NOT be so recorded. This is how many governments make themselves look better, by monkeying with the stats instead of actually improving things.
That old infant mortality stat as a comparison of healthcare quality has been debunked many times, but it does not stop propagandists from using it.
Let me give you a better comparison re the US and Cuba: When Michael Moore (the sloppy-dressing millionaire guy who made the film "Sicko" praising Castro's heathcare system and probably influenced YOU to think Cuba's system is good) recently had a health crisis he did NOT go to Cuba for care..... he ran straight to one of those obviously inferior American hospitals. hmmmmmmm
Says the anti-human brainwashed globalist.
Not that I am in perfect health, mind, but I seem to have picked the slow burn variety, in any case. We could use more detail sometimes, as in couch-potato-gamer-and-big-gulp-soda-and-pasta.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
How so? Which specific attempts at reform did Republicans actually foil? And how did they do that "early in his presidency" when Congress was majority Democrats? How does "regulating the industry" fix the fact that the federal government has been telling Americans for decades to eat crappy foods? How are Republicans responsible for the fact that Obama did manage to change nutritional guidelines, from the crappy food pyramid to the equally crappy and useless "My Plate"?
Early in his Presidency? His party controlled both houses of Congress early in his presidency. Try again with the blame.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Yeah like how if you are rich here you can get that vaccine for lung cancer.... oh wait...
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
> Almost all Christians have reformed.
They haven't reformed THAT much. This is why extremist pro-abortion rhetoric can still help sink a presidential candidate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Yes, I'm sure taking away subsides of millions of people will work great, they can stop paying $150 per month
I don't know anyone like this and most of my family are the sorts of people that white knights like you claim to champion.
I'm not sure this mythical "obamacare beneificiary" even exists. Are you capable of describing what such a person should look like?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Because no one's Insurance Company ever told them what doctor's were covered before Obamacare.
Before Obamacare, the private insurance plans in my state were better. You could buy a proper insurance plan on the open market. Now those types of plans are gone. Can't buy them at any price.
That means that the best facilities are out of your reach if you're on Obamacare and have cancer.
I've actually had to go BACK to being on an employer provided plan because of Obamacare.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bright future, if goosestepping whilst clutching a bible , is your thing.
Remember, that's the TDS talking. Obama was lying just as shamelessly in the 2008 election as Trump (though perhaps not quite as poorly thought out), yet we didn't turn into goosestepping left-oriented fascists while clutching a copy of Dreams of my Father. I think we should care about real dangers rather than the imaginary ones.
Religious whackjobs from different religions are still religious whackjobs. News at 11.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The right thing to do would be to unilaterally end all food subsidies in the US and open our borders to free trade. That would lower food prices, improve food quality, and be the best foreign aid program to developing countries we can provide.
The military is both mandated by the Constitution and is part of the basic definition of a nation-state (provision for the national defense against external threats to the population). It is part of what the Constitution refers to as the "general welfare" - it applies to the overall nation and not to individuals.
You'll find that the basic definitions of a nation-state now include healthcare. The US's intransigence on that subject is meaningless obstruction, not principled counter-argument.
Healthcare, like food, clothing, housing, transportation, vacations, recreation, and education is about INDIVIDUAL, as opposed to general, welfare.
Nope, Healthcare is very much about the general, as is food, clothing, housing, transportation, and education. I'd even say conceptually, that the vacations and recreation also fit.
That's why the state mandates immunizations, regulates doctors, the food supply, works to be sure that people do have safe clothing, housing, and effective transportation, and why education is also part of the state's mandate.
The Constitution gives the government no role in these things, even though politicians (in BOTH parties) of the past few decades have ignored that and used lots promises of these things to buy votes.
Transportation is very much in the government's role in the US Constitution, and you should check out state constitutions, they do cover education expressly as well.
In truth, the more government gets involved in this sort of stuff the more expensive and less individual it becomes and the areas least-affected by government are where costs are best controlled - consider things like LASIK eye surgery which is generally not involved in government health "reforms": you can get it safely and rather affordably on short notice and often in a shopping center, with continual improvements and prices kept down by competition.
Consider all the people reporting injuries and having complaints about LASIK eye surgery. And hearing aids. And those teeth whitening services. And all sorts of scams from "detox pads" to "herbal pills" that contain sawdust.
Oh wait, you don't want to do that, do you?
Much of the rest of healthcare is partly under the thumb of government and you have waiting lines and spiraling prices (partly from all the cost-shifting) and you generally cannot even find out how much some medical procedure or test will cost until you have it and start getting the bills. I'm facing this right now...I was forced off of my old insurance and into the far-more-expensive Obamacare. I'm having surgery today and have been on a waiting list. I have not been able to get the price. I will start getting bills right after the procedure (actually, the surgeon billed me BEFORE the procedure for his expensive part of it) and it will be months before I know how many thousands of dollars I will be paying (thanks to Obamacare's sky-high deductibles that makes these plans nearly worthless)
Yawn, long lines? Because you don't instantly have surgery right now, since it's probably not good for an emergency surgery to just be done, so that's a good thing, meanwhile, you're complaining about them not knowing the cost of what they'll do before they do it! Damn, that's almost like contractors and auto mechanics, and lawyers, and every other damn professional you can name.
But hey, you had a chance to demand your insurance company not be able to rip you off, and don't pretend it's Obamacare's fault, it's the insurance company getting its beak wet, but you didn't.
So suck it.
He who spends the gold calls the tune...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Explain, please, how the dominant force in spending (which also has the ability to set laws and regulations about how that spending is used and what must be done to get that spending) does not significantly influence and shape the direction of healthcare. And given that dominant force is Government, please explain how healthcare is not effectively socialist (controlled by the masses as a whole - Government).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Guess what else got passed in the early 1990's?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You don't think doctors will become more risk averse in such a situation? Pay up front or get out. Sounds great.
Cheap storage VM.
no, but you can get that lung transplant way easier. You can also get surgery quicker, more care during recover, etc.
Cheap storage VM.
Let me guess, you live in one of the 19 states that declined to expand Medicare. You should put the blame where it belongs, with your shittty state government.
Alternatively, if your in rural area, there might only be afew options for hospital and insurers. That's your beloved free market at work.
Cheap storage VM.
It is a pity that this sort of reasoning is not available to Americans because their super rich have managed to use propaganda to fool the people into believing in Murcia, freedom and dog eat dog economics instead. Frankly if people are so stupid I say laugh at them dying, the world is better off without them. Just remember that they are the opposite of the actual free world. It is long past time that we stopped believing that American philosophy has anything useful to learn from.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I challenge you to do a true comparison of those plans. My guess is they were capped plans that would only last for a partial cancer treatment. You've off loaded your risk to the public, best case (for you).
This also ignores the millions who could never buy care at any price.
Let's pretend your plan actually manages to cover your cancer, you go into remission. You do realize that cancer usually re-occurs. Luckily for your insurance company, they can dump your expensive ass because you now are the proud owner of a pre-existing condition.
What is desirable about that?
Cheap storage VM.
It's satire, stupid
Given the number of strokes, heart attacks, and alcohol overdoses that occurred after the US election results, it makes sense that the yearly average was badly skewed.
You should read some history or foreign current affairs. Markets without food subsidies are chaotic with prices skyrocketing and plummeting based on crop yields. This drives farmers out of business and causes food to be unaffordable unpredictably.
There is a strong social benefit to giving farmers and consumers some price stability.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Health insurance is almost NEVER going to be a sound financial investment. You're probably not going to get a solid ROI from those dollars...
AND THAT'S A GOOD THING
If medical insurance does become a good financial investment for you, that means you're fighting cancer or diabetes, or maybe you lost a leg or went blind from too much fappin
We all need to accept this fundamental tenant of insurance. It's a bad deal for almost everyone to a very minor degree, because it's a good deal to those remaining few to an extreme degree.
Pre-obomacare, expensive insurance, high deductibles and co-pays, employer trying to force me onto a high-deductible plan, employer blames increases on insurance company greed.
After obamacare, expensive insurance, high deductibles and co-pays, employer trying to force me onto a high-deductible plan, employer blames increases on obamacare.
Cheap storage VM.
How Republicans want to end Abortion:
outlaw abortion, punish only providers
Effect:
Abortion available to wealthy under different names
black market abortions mean increased risk for poor
marginal decrease in actual abortions, large decrease in abortions on paper
How Democrats want to end Abortion:
Decrease povert, increase education, increase access to birth control
Effect:
actual decrease in abortions
Cheap storage VM.
What kind of reactions and side reactions will you form?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Completely free means you are perfectly oblivious about who is paying for it.
I'll give you a hint: there's a reason why the US far out paces Sweden's economy in every per capita metric:
http://www.nationmaster.com/co...
Americans don't think their paychecks will get mooched from so people can have freebie health insurance to the same extent the Swedish do.
Cuba supposedly has free health care (although no one can access it). Pay for public health care is the reason why the nation is so poor. Same thing in Fiji where the unemployment rate is twice as high as the US.
I assume that's on top of something else and they can't just drop out of HS and do it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Cash pay (where individual people "write the check") is the highest cost healthcare area and has the worst healthcare outcomes. Insurance companies (where someone else is paying) negotiate lower rates and know the value of individual procedures. Your average Joe on the other hand has no idea and will pay many times what an insurance company will for the same procedure.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
However, when it comes to management of many conditions, I have found that cost and quality varies greatly from provider to provider and it can be extremely rewarding to shop around. For instance, I drive six hours each way to see a sleep specialist. Why? First of all, he doesn't treat me like a freak like some other doctors I've been to. Second, he obviously knows his stuff. Finally, his clinic will observe you in their sleep laboratory for two nights for less cost than one night at the local hospital here.
I've heard from patients with the same condition in the UK who say that they have their assigned specialist and if they aren't satisfied with the care they receive, they are totally out of luck.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I also know of providers who will provide competitive prices for self-pay patients. Just to give an example, I saved $100 on an ear exam and wax impaction removal by calling around.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Countries with For Profit healthcare ALWAYS have a lower life expectancy, and they always spend more per capita. Maximizing for profit means higher cost and worse results.
Subsidies only drive up prices if you don't impose cost controls, as ALL profitable businesses do. Eliminating health insurance will kill any poor person who gets seriously sick or injured, as they can't pay and can't borrow and hospitals won't treat for free. Desperate people do desperate things. If the choice is rob the rich or watch your kid die, most poor people will target the rich. If you want a stable country you must ensure the poor have just enough so they don't need to do that.
Only one conclusion can be made from this: If you want to live longer, move out of the US.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
I am not arguing against socialized medicine. I think the "European way" is better.
But there is an argument in that an army is a public good, whereas health care is not* a public good.
If half the population pays for armed forces as protection from foreign invaders, the other half gets the benefit of not getting invaded without paying.
This is not the case with health care as you can easily not treat people that get sick if they don't have insurance.
Whether you are spending an appropriate amount on the military or not, is a different question...
* Vaccinations is a health care exception that actually is a public good. When others get vaccinated you benefit from a lower risk of infection
But, you can't have poor people dying because they can't afford healthcare... and an individual cannot really negotiate with a large corporation - especially when the price for turning down their offer is to die.
In fact from many americains i know. And how the bulk seem to vote and act. It seams the attitude is "fuck the poor, let em die". Even from some of the poor!
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
> I would also argue that a lot of people might choose alternatives like 'make me comfortable as long as possible' at those prices.
End of life issues are definitely adding to rising costs.
People seem to be moving away from the concept that death is inevitable, especially when making decisions on behalf of elderly loved ones who are unable to speak for themselves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09...
https://www.amazon.com/Knockin...
Getting free money from government is not the same as government control. Just ask the banks. The government is not setting laws or regulating the medical industry. They have the power but chose not to use it.
Pre-Obamacare, there were many plans that had a low annual cap.
That's because those rotten insurance companies didn't mandate their plans for males include pregnancy and breast exam coverage!
The sexist bastages!
Now, every male covered under Obamacare can rest easy knowing they're covered in case they get knocked-up. If it costs more that's OK because after all, all wealth is the property of the government and we're lucky they generously allow us to keep some of it for our own selfish needs like shelter, food, etc.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Maybe true for banks, but for health care? 109+ new regulations alone with 11 million words. That's a lot of regulations and restrictions that have been implemented in the last few years...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That may have been the case in the 19th century, it's not the case in the 21st century: farmers today have numerous means of ensuring price stability, from private insurance to markets.
Government subsidies are pure cronyism, protectionism, and vote buying, and they hurt consumers and developing nations. There is pretty much universal consensus about that among economists.
We're still below the 1999 peak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Real_Household_Median_Income_thru_2014.png
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
That proves your stupidity. Those are core values of all religions Abraham. That would be Jews Christians and Muslims all have the same core beliefs and foster a us versus them attitude.
Seriously Christians believe women should be fully covered though they replace burkas with bonnets.
Sorry, you're proving your stupidity. They *were* core religious beliefs of Abraham religions. Both Jews and Christians have for the most part moved far from those. You want to show outside of the samll and I do mean very small minority who believe that they should even wear bonnets? I'll wait. Because that group is smaller then even moderate muslims.
Please actually look up your Christian beliefs some day. You might be depressed to know that woman rights are secondary to men. That slaves are allowed from neighboring countries and a few other things these are not just Islamist but fundamental beliefs of all religions of Abraham. Since they all share parts of the same book it makes sense. Yes the Koran and the Bible borrow and are heavily influenced by the Torah and other Jewish teachings.
Sorry, I don't *have* Christian beliefs. It might surprise you to know though, that in the West which uses several of the main tenets of Christian and Judaic beliefs as foundational law--this is untrue. Unlike your muslim ones(see how easily I did that?). But now we can get to the good part. Between Christiand and Muslims and Jews, which out of the three still openly advocates the keeping of slaves and holds under tenet of law that a womens worth is less then a man.
If you answered anything other than Islam, you know far less of the world then you realize. FYI: Don't take a job in the UAE -- slavery is still legal there.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yes, sad but true. What the majority of the world calls "triage", Americans call it "government death panels".
Indeed.
According to this site:
How do I Become a Radiology Nurse?
The first step to becoming a radiology nurse is to become a nurse.
The first step toward a career in radiology nursing is becoming a registered nurse. In order to do this, you must first earn your degree in nursing. Although an Associate of Science in Nursing is usually acceptable, most employers prefer applicants with higher degrees, such a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing. After you’ve earned your degree, you will then need to pass the National council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses.
It goes on to say:
To be eligible to take the Certified Radiology Nurse exam, however, you must be a registered nurse with 2,000 hours of experience in radiology and at least 30 hours of additional education in radiology.
So, sure - it only takes 30 hours...after earning at least an Associate degree and spending a year working.
Why shouldn't males and females be in the same pool? All people should be in one pool for maximum efficiency. The only way insurance works is for healthy to subsidize non-healthy. That includes pregnant and non-pregnant.
Cheap storage VM.
Governments were invented for many purposes. Among them is, as per the US constitution: caring for the general welfare of society.
Note its not in an ammendment. Its in the original document itself. So fundamentally a part of the purpose of government that it was obvious to the founding fathers. Not even freedom of thought,speech and religion was that fundamental !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Why shouldn't males and females be in the same pool? All people should be in one pool for maximum efficiency. The only way insurance works is for healthy to subsidize non-healthy. That includes pregnant and non-pregnant.
Hey! You've got a point there!
Who needs individual plans to fit individual needs and widely-varying individual financial resources? One size fits all, right?
In the interests of state efficiency, we should also have everyone live in identical housing units, wear identical clothing, parse news sources down to one official source, eat identical meals, and have cars only made in one model and color!
Brilliant!
0_o
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Well if that is the GPs position I challenge him to come out and admit it and we can debate that argument. Its just dishonest otherwise.
The biggest flaw in that argument of course is that the only thing between Bill Gates and a homeless guy with no money is one day of terible luck. And since you are not Bill Gates you need a lot less bad luck. Even if you are sociopathic enough to think that way you should be smart enough to figure out it makes sense to cover the poor in case you join them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
How is that supposed to make sense?
Trump logic. If it's little, make it YUGE!
Abortion really depends on where you view the beginning of life. If you view it as starting with that first breath after exiting the birth canal then abortion is no big deal. I remember laying in bed with my wife during both her pregnancies and listening to our child's heart beat as I lay my head on her stomach. I could feel them move and kick. It's hard for me to think of a fetus as not human.
The US is not a theocracy and really there is no way to make it one without removing the US Constitution. Just because a leader has religious beliefs does not mean that he will be able to force others to adopt them. You just make yourself seem silly with such crazy statements.
You would think so wouldn't you. But alas. Even phrased explicitly like that and no. Still think if you can't afford it, you should go suck it.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Healthcare is not like government. The best known model to make government "competitive" is democracy, which still eventually tends towards corruption like any monopoly. For healthcare, better models are much easier to implement.
If you're bleeding out, you're going to take the first ambulance and closest hospital you can get, of course. That doesn't change competitive environment. The vast majority of patients will have time to choose their provider. That affects quality and price across the board, and even helps the guy who doesn't get to choose.
This goes much farther. In bustling free healthcare markets, more medical research is done. This makes it more likely we'll be able to actually start curing diseases in our lifetime, rather than just making "treat the "symptom" a free public right for another hundred years.
Are ya kiddin'? ObamaCare is what caused the decline.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Sure, because that's exactly the same thing. Every place with single payer has adopted such and now looks like whoville.
Cheap storage VM.
Not a Trumper, but I'm not seeing how that's my problem.
Our policies contribute to this instability and the rest of the world is perfectly capable of defending themselves.
Cheap storage VM.
meanwhile back in reality:
-the economy is in its best shape, basically ever
-the rate of premium increase is actually lower than it was pre-obamacare*
(*yes, your individual plan may have gone up a lot, but when you've got a super plan for super cheap, that's called a market correction. the fact remains, that on the aggregate, while premiums have always increased year to year, the increases under obamacare were smaller than they were before obamacare)
This is why you keep losing, by the way. The economy sucks for large parts of America. My home town has been devastated - it looks like a war zone. There are no jobs.
Now, yes, the GDP still looks good. It's because more money has been going to federal workers and the top 10% (of which I'm included), so from our standpoint it looks great.
If you have 100 people and each makes $100, everybody made $10,000 and they're happy. 5 years later 90 of the people made $60 while 10 of the people made $500. Wow, they're doing better, they all made $10,400! Yay!
Wait.
That's the situation we're in right now. I'm one of those 10. But I know a lot of the other 90, and their life sucks. Democrats like you (how'd I guess) tend to also be in the 10, so you have no idea what's going on in this country. You're being fed the aggregate number and believing it means everything is good and getting better. Or maybe you don't care, as in the case of Hillary. After all, those 90 people don't "donate" to the Clinton Foundation.
As for health insurance, you're delusional. I used to have a policy for my family through the Farm Bureau here in TN. It cost us $250/month, which is lower than what we pay for my wife's group plan at her work. Those policies went away under Obamacare and were replaced with policies costing many times that much. That's not a market correction. It's because of the screwed up law that was made to not fully kick in until next year when Obama is out. Remember how the Democrats in congress exempted themselves from Obamacare? Doesn't make sense given how great it is, right?
Wrong.
Do you have ESP?
Jeez, this progressive fantasy again? The Bushitler was allegedly intent on a Christian Theocracy for crissakes.
You righteous indignation filled "the opposition is evil beyond words" folks really need to get out more, and learn new things to be freaked out about, it's hard to get people's attention with the same old tired arguments year after year.
It's like screaming Nazi and Racist at everyone who you disagree with, it's so boring...
Murphy was an optimist
We subsidize corn to prop up the Ethanol Industry and Arthur Daniels Midland Corporation who gives HUGE donations to... Democrats.
The little farmers don't get squat. The big monopolistic evil corporations "agri-business" get the same sweet deal the Health Insurance companies got with the ACA - A guaranteed customer, for life, and if they don't pay the bill the government steps in and pays it for them.
It's one of the biggest pay to play scams ever perpetrated in the name of the environment, ever, and it's hysterical when folks who talk about how we need the gummit to regulate evil corporations defend ethanol...
Murphy was an optimist
Do you have any unbiased links? I'd be interested to learn more but a quick search yielded only clearly agenda-driven predetermined result "research" both pro and con. I'm basing my opinion on history and talking to farmers around the world, who clearly have a biased outlook.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.
You might look at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.
Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):
http://www.econlib.org/library...
http://www.econlib.org/library...
http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...
The Heritage foundation, of course, has a "conservative bias", whatever that is, but they also make a good argument:
http://www.heritage.org/resear...
For the harm that farm subsidies cause to third world countries, you can listen to both representatives from those countries and even the Guardian:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
https://www.theguardian.com/su...
Americans couldn't care less, however:
http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...
As for what farmers actually can do to mitigate risk, that's part of Farming 101:
https://www.extension.purdue.e...
It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.
I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.
This discussion comes up on Slashdot fairly often. I won a scholarship for economics and got a degree in finance. I also was in a corporate mentorship program where I was an intern to the president of insurance company. So here goes... I know this might blow peoples' minds, but in aggregate, and over long periods of time, "speculators" in every commodity from corn to coffee slightly subsidize producers (in aggregate they lose money). You could write a whole book on why, but I see insurance companies as speculators. They speculate on the probability of a given group's risk of a negative event. If there was unfettered competition, insurance companies would actually slightly subsidize their consumers. It amazes me how many people actually read an article and worry about the profits of insurance companies. Health insurance especially is a government protected oligopoly (monopoly or duopoly in many areas), and we are all suffering from the results of worse health outcomes and higher costs. The only reason insurance companies profit is because of government intervention, and you can assume any government intervention was written by and for the insurance companies that will profit. Insurance companies could never function without books worth of government regulation and legal precedent that functions about the same (there are literally libraries in most insurance company offices). Otherwise, insurance companies would never be able to stay in business. I wouldn't mind living in a world without insurance, but that's a political opinion. Insurance benefits people who have good lawyers the most and sick and dying people who can't fight the least.
It's hubris to think that you can 'know' when life begins. Every line I have heard is completely arbitrary.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Thank you, looks like some good reading. One interesting article I found talks about three different approaches where Norway has high targeted subsidies that seem quite effective and New Zealand has no subsidies without harming the farming industry. The US clearly has a horrible approach, but politically difficult to remedy.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Cuba 79.1
USA 79.0
World Average 71.0
Conclusion. Socialized medicine does just fine. And you don't have to continually worry that you might go bankrupt if you get sick.
Sounds like a good deal.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?