No, government money is found in either case. Europe obviously controls their monopolies more, which is what you have to do once your government creates the monopolies in the first place.
Of-course in both cases the people are worse off than if free market was allowed to operate health care and insurance.
the fact you have money does not mean you created value represented by that money
- if taken out of context, then having money cannot be said to mean absolutely anything.
Managers qua managers do not create wealth.
- why, are things managing themselves?
Investors do not create wealth.
- of-course they do. Have you ever saved portion of your income and then after that have you invested the saved money into a business?
If you have, then you might have ended up with more wealth than you have started, if you are lucky/good (or you could have lost it, if you are not very lucky/good).
Savings are the only legitimate investments, as opposed to for example currency counterfeiting, which is what the Federal reserve is busy doing. Savings is underconsumption.
Once you earn your paycheck, you may consume it all or you may under-consume, sacrifice something and save the earnings. Eventually you may invest your earnings into a business. Whether you started the business with your earnings or you invested into somebody else's business, if the business ends up generating profit, this means you HAVE CREATED WEALTH.
Without your investment that business would not have existed. Managing capital, land and labor is what allows a bunch of separate resources to be put together in a meaningful way in order to extract value from it. Having an engineer sitting on a street does nothing to increase wealth, but saving some money, hiring that engineer and paying for rent of an office/utilities, and then paying for a sales team may in fact generate wealth, if you applied your savings correctly and the engineer was able to create something.
Engineer can just as well create something without an outside investor, engineer can be his own investor.
So here I am, working on my own product line for 2.5 years, using up my own money to do so, there comes you and says: you are not creating any wealth with your investments.
Hello. How else do you think wealth is created? By government decree?
No, the power resides in the political establishment. The preferred monopolies/corporations are part of the political establishment, that's true. What is needed is to remove the power from the political establishment, so that the corporations wouldn't have access to that sort of power and would have to compete based on merit of the product they provide, not based on amounts of cash they can spend in campaign contributions and lobbying to turn themselves into monopolies.
Without FDA destroying the competition and causing the prices to go through stratosphere (well, and without gov't provided health "insurance" as well), the competition would be real and would push costs down.
I have stated here that costs of medical procedures must come down over time, not increase, due to the fact that there is money to be made, so more operators would come into the market and all of the technological innovations and discoveries, and all of the new machines that were created, new drugs, everything that people come up with, would push costs down.
Instead you have costs going up all the time, which makes no sense and is only happening because of government money and regulations in the field.
There are people here arguing that costs must go up since new technologies are invented and new machines are created and medicines, but this is nonsense. It does not work that way in any industry and health care is no different from car or computer industry in that regard - the more technology you have, the cheaper you can make your processes and the cheaper you can make the entire system (and quality goes up). If this didn't work that way, the computers and cars and TVs and phones of today would be completely inaccessible by non-billionaires.
There was no CAT scan before CAT scanners, no MRIs, no gene therapy
- all of these are supposed to make health care cheaper, not more expensive, as all of those are replacing something that is more time and labor consuming, require exploratory surgeries and resulting intensive care, etc.
The cost of the machines is negligible and goes down as they pay for themselves and they are becoming cheaper to manufacture.
Your argument is demonstrably false simply by pointing out that computers, aircraft, cars, machines of today do more than ever and cost per unit is always coming down, not increasing.
Didn't you turn the conversation to total government spending? Thus I must point out that in USA the total government spending and debt are the largest in the world, and the amount of bad debt owned publicly is also the largest in the world, and this includes Freddie/Fannie/FHA debt.
As to who 'fucked' America - the American people, when they bought into the idea that the government must be the entity providing them with stuff rather than remaining free in economic and political sense to provide for themselves.
The only thing that makes this economy thrive is spending.
- the US economy is not thriving, it's nowhere near thriving. The only thing that makes any economy thrive is production capacity, and USA has an unsurmountable debt and a 53Billion USD/month trade deficit. That's not thriving, when you are vendor financing all of your purchases.
Who is getting richer when you spend counterfeit currency to buy Chinese made products? It's not the Chinese, so they will come to their senses one of these days and then what?
One person having a billion dollars in the bank isn't going to make Target's quarterly numbers,
- USA doesn't need more consumption, it needs real recession to kick in and it needs underconsumption and savings so that real capital can be once again accumulated to restart production.
A rich person is NOT benefiting from his wealth when he is NOT spending it, the rest of economy IS benefiting from his wealth, because he is not just holding cash in a bank, he is investing that money.
How and where the money is invested is a function of political and economic freedom, but the fact remains: nobody who has billions is actually benefiting from that money until they really spend it, when they are not spending that money, that's the total investment capital available to the market.
The answer right now is that people in higher income brackets are paying most of their taxes at their marginal rate.
Nobody ever paid 91% taxes, people modify behavior not to be abused that way, and at the time when taxes were that high in USA nominally, people were able to write off all of their expenses from their corporations, and the IRS couldn't really check anything, since there were no integrated computer records.
The truth is that USA is on top of the world in terms of taxation levels, but it is also at the very top in terms of spending.
Class warfare never works for the benefit of the lower classes, because the truly wealthy will always make sure their wealth is untouched, any new taxes that are enacted, will only be a concern to the dwindling middle class.
Gov't caused the wealth to accumulate at the top, with all the inflation, regulations, subsidies and bailouts and taxation that creates monopolies and destroys competition and causes capital to leave.
The reality is that without middle class normal economy and society cannot exist, but the government is not capable of creating the middle class by any actions. The only action that can create the middle class is disassembling most of the government and allowing the market to restructure the debt and repatriate the capital, which will then be used to restart manufacturing.
Nope. Not even close. Just by the amount of deficit spending and trade deficit, the amount of total debt, including Freddie/Fannie/FHA, all of the bailed out banks, all of the outstanding SS and Medicare benefits, students loans and all of the WARS. What are you talking about? USA is the front runner in all of these categories and everybody else is thousands of miles behind.
Well yes, there are products that are better or worse, what's the best way to figure this out than to have market look into it? The more people are involved in voting with their wallets basically, the greater are the chances that best quality product (whatever it is) is selected for.
The problem comes when government distorts this market process and just pumps money into the system. When government is the entity that is paying, then you can't figure out what is better and what's worse, and I think this is done by design.
However if you take into account that government should not be limiting liability of company management either (we had this discussion), then it stands to reason that personal responsibility will be increased, not diminished as it is today.
well, if you do the math then having some corner cases, where people have no insurance and are paying for extra-ordinary work done by medical professionals out of pocket or even declare bankruptcy, while having the majority of society have a good economy, which can help the unfortunate individual through charity is better. Especially if you do the math.
Having a policy that is created to cover corner cases, while destroying the economy in the process, will just corner everybody into an economic collapse, which will have the effect that nobody will be get any health care.
I said that health care is a product, you can argue it's a service, but the point stays. Be it a product or a service (and it's both, as medicines and various instruments and machines and hospitals are products, but actual work that is done by physicians, surgeons, professionals are services.) It's the same thing with a restaurant or with facebook - they are products and services, market rules apply regardless.
There is nothing as regulated and government financed as what is found in USA.
SS, education loans, bank bailouts - these are things that are done in USA specifically in order to transfer funds from government to the preferred corporations, that lobby the politicians with the money, and the money that is transfered is ALWAYS greater in total amounts than what is found anywhere else in the world.
What is the exact mechanism that prevents the abortion pill from entering the US market would not be possible, were it not for FDA.
when you asserted that "the market" will determine efficacy more quickly and cheaply than a clinical trial...
- what do you think happened before FDA?
Look at the way doctors have cooperated in the past to pass the information they gathered about treatment of different conditions and different cases. Private market provides huge exposure to any type of treatment, and if it is safe of-course, it will quickly be understood whether there is enough evidence that the treatment works. People exchange information without government, did you know that?
Look at the way Mayo clinic was established - people were exchanging information and that made that clinic very competitive, people used to come to USA from all over the world to visit Mayo clinic because of CREDENTIALS, that were EARNED, not dictated by any government.
It was competition that drove people to that clinic, which quickly disseminated similar approaches to treatment and information sharing among professionals everywhere in the world.
It's like an iPhone - once one exists, everybody is going to emulate it based on success, which is measured in sales and profits.
Profits are the feedback mechanism, which is the way the market tells the entrepreneur that he is on the right track. This is the same with iPads and health care.
What about clear violation of their very policies on SAFETY? Nonsense?
But if you worked in "health insurance industry", you'd never want FDA to stop doing what they do, after all, any government involvement is beneficial for large corporations, who gain monopoly/oligopoly power by restricting access of small competitors, by forcing any innovator to seek sponsorship of large pharma company, by having government money in insurance, which is the reason that insurance premiums are as high as they are and climbing, having insurance attached to people's jobs, which is the reason there is a problem of "preexisting-conditions" in the first place, because once you change your job and if you have a "condition", it's that much harder to get coverage again.
In a free market an American would have been able to buy health insurance privately from any provider from ANYWHERE in the world.
Why can't an American buy health insurance from Singapore?
Medical treatment and insurance are products, just like any other products, funding this by government covers corner cases but does a terrible disservice to the overall economy - the people.
Thank the Food and Drug administration for this. We had stories on/. about this before.
Government money in health care and insurance is the reason why these are so expensive now, when technology should have made all of the health care much cheaper (unlike many people believe, technology increases efficiencies and makes things less expensive, not more. Think about imaging methods that replaced exploratory surgeries. Think how many more patients a single surgeon can see today. Think cancer treatments done with drugs or machines, that would have required surgery. etc.etc. Increase in technology makes products cheaper, not more expensive).
But not only does FDA hurt you financially, they are a major reason for various techniques not getting timely approval, so again, as an example an abortion pill that was used for decades in Europe made it into USA decades later.
Of-course from my POV, FDA is just another government agency, standing in between you and your freedoms and liberties. Figuring out the safety of medical procedures is one thing, and it should be done privately too, by private competing certification agencies. Figuring out the efficacy should be left to the market because the market will do so much quicker and at a very low expense, when compared to the clinical trials that may last for decades and waste hundreds of millions of dollars to run them.
You think SEC cares about retail investors who are being destroyed by pump and dumps schemes? You think SEC cared about Madoff?
But you can't leave a comment on wikipedia, where it could REALLY be useful to people, who just may stumble upon an article about pumping and dumping stocks, a robot or a "live" admin will take the comment down.
What good is wikipedia then, if it cannot be used in creative ways to disseminate useful information?
No, my response is not that you shouldn't complain. My response is that customers who don't like the service should vote with their wallets, not try and destroy the free market by attacking it with government dogs.
Well, they will find out in a hurry that guaranteeing income is a quick road to unemployment and recession, and given the political system, that's a quick road to inflation and depression.
Slashdot Mirror
No, government money is found in either case. Europe obviously controls their monopolies more, which is what you have to do once your government creates the monopolies in the first place.
Of-course in both cases the people are worse off than if free market was allowed to operate health care and insurance.
the fact you have money does not mean you created value represented by that money
- if taken out of context, then having money cannot be said to mean absolutely anything.
Managers qua managers do not create wealth.
- why, are things managing themselves?
Investors do not create wealth.
- of-course they do. Have you ever saved portion of your income and then after that have you invested the saved money into a business?
If you have, then you might have ended up with more wealth than you have started, if you are lucky/good (or you could have lost it, if you are not very lucky/good).
Savings are the only legitimate investments, as opposed to for example currency counterfeiting, which is what the Federal reserve is busy doing. Savings is underconsumption.
Once you earn your paycheck, you may consume it all or you may under-consume, sacrifice something and save the earnings. Eventually you may invest your earnings into a business. Whether you started the business with your earnings or you invested into somebody else's business, if the business ends up generating profit, this means you HAVE CREATED WEALTH.
Without your investment that business would not have existed. Managing capital, land and labor is what allows a bunch of separate resources to be put together in a meaningful way in order to extract value from it. Having an engineer sitting on a street does nothing to increase wealth, but saving some money, hiring that engineer and paying for rent of an office/utilities, and then paying for a sales team may in fact generate wealth, if you applied your savings correctly and the engineer was able to create something.
Engineer can just as well create something without an outside investor, engineer can be his own investor.
So here I am, working on my own product line for 2.5 years, using up my own money to do so, there comes you and says: you are not creating any wealth with your investments.
Hello. How else do you think wealth is created? By government decree?
No, the power resides in the political establishment. The preferred monopolies/corporations are part of the political establishment, that's true. What is needed is to remove the power from the political establishment, so that the corporations wouldn't have access to that sort of power and would have to compete based on merit of the product they provide, not based on amounts of cash they can spend in campaign contributions and lobbying to turn themselves into monopolies.
Without FDA destroying the competition and causing the prices to go through stratosphere (well, and without gov't provided health "insurance" as well), the competition would be real and would push costs down.
I have stated here that costs of medical procedures must come down over time, not increase, due to the fact that there is money to be made, so more operators would come into the market and all of the technological innovations and discoveries, and all of the new machines that were created, new drugs, everything that people come up with, would push costs down.
Instead you have costs going up all the time, which makes no sense and is only happening because of government money and regulations in the field.
There are people here arguing that costs must go up since new technologies are invented and new machines are created and medicines, but this is nonsense. It does not work that way in any industry and health care is no different from car or computer industry in that regard - the more technology you have, the cheaper you can make your processes and the cheaper you can make the entire system (and quality goes up). If this didn't work that way, the computers and cars and TVs and phones of today would be completely inaccessible by non-billionaires.
This argument is demonstrably incorrect.
- then demonstrate it.
There was no CAT scan before CAT scanners, no MRIs, no gene therapy
- all of these are supposed to make health care cheaper, not more expensive, as all of those are replacing something that is more time and labor consuming, require exploratory surgeries and resulting intensive care, etc.
The cost of the machines is negligible and goes down as they pay for themselves and they are becoming cheaper to manufacture.
Your argument is demonstrably false simply by pointing out that computers, aircraft, cars, machines of today do more than ever and cost per unit is always coming down, not increasing.
Didn't you turn the conversation to total government spending? Thus I must point out that in USA the total government spending and debt are the largest in the world, and the amount of bad debt owned publicly is also the largest in the world, and this includes Freddie/Fannie/FHA debt.
As to who 'fucked' America - the American people, when they bought into the idea that the government must be the entity providing them with stuff rather than remaining free in economic and political sense to provide for themselves.
The only thing that makes this economy thrive is spending.
- the US economy is not thriving, it's nowhere near thriving. The only thing that makes any economy thrive is production capacity, and USA has an unsurmountable debt and a 53Billion USD/month trade deficit. That's not thriving, when you are vendor financing all of your purchases.
Who is getting richer when you spend counterfeit currency to buy Chinese made products? It's not the Chinese, so they will come to their senses one of these days and then what?
One person having a billion dollars in the bank isn't going to make Target's quarterly numbers,
- USA doesn't need more consumption, it needs real recession to kick in and it needs underconsumption and savings so that real capital can be once again accumulated to restart production.
A rich person is NOT benefiting from his wealth when he is NOT spending it, the rest of economy IS benefiting from his wealth, because he is not just holding cash in a bank, he is investing that money.
How and where the money is invested is a function of political and economic freedom, but the fact remains: nobody who has billions is actually benefiting from that money until they really spend it, when they are not spending that money, that's the total investment capital available to the market.
Here is a good question asked at just about 16:30 in that video.
The answer right now is that people in higher income brackets are paying most of their taxes at their marginal rate.
Nobody ever paid 91% taxes, people modify behavior not to be abused that way, and at the time when taxes were that high in USA nominally, people were able to write off all of their expenses from their corporations, and the IRS couldn't really check anything, since there were no integrated computer records.
The truth is that USA is on top of the world in terms of taxation levels, but it is also at the very top in terms of spending.
Class warfare never works for the benefit of the lower classes, because the truly wealthy will always make sure their wealth is untouched, any new taxes that are enacted, will only be a concern to the dwindling middle class.
Gov't caused the wealth to accumulate at the top, with all the inflation, regulations, subsidies and bailouts and taxation that creates monopolies and destroys competition and causes capital to leave.
The reality is that without middle class normal economy and society cannot exist, but the government is not capable of creating the middle class by any actions. The only action that can create the middle class is disassembling most of the government and allowing the market to restructure the debt and repatriate the capital, which will then be used to restart manufacturing.
For a really excellent primer on this, here is a Congressional committee hearing about the Jobs Act.
I am not going to say much on this topic, just note another step in the wrong direction by Marxist government.
Nope. Not even close. Just by the amount of deficit spending and trade deficit, the amount of total debt, including Freddie/Fannie/FHA, all of the bailed out banks, all of the outstanding SS and Medicare benefits, students loans and all of the WARS. What are you talking about? USA is the front runner in all of these categories and everybody else is thousands of miles behind.
Well yes, there are products that are better or worse, what's the best way to figure this out than to have market look into it? The more people are involved in voting with their wallets basically, the greater are the chances that best quality product (whatever it is) is selected for.
The problem comes when government distorts this market process and just pumps money into the system. When government is the entity that is paying, then you can't figure out what is better and what's worse, and I think this is done by design.
However if you take into account that government should not be limiting liability of company management either (we had this discussion), then it stands to reason that personal responsibility will be increased, not diminished as it is today.
no, government is the establishment, so minimizing government involvement and deregulating industries is anti-establishment.
well, if you do the math then having some corner cases, where people have no insurance and are paying for extra-ordinary work done by medical professionals out of pocket or even declare bankruptcy, while having the majority of society have a good economy, which can help the unfortunate individual through charity is better. Especially if you do the math.
Having a policy that is created to cover corner cases, while destroying the economy in the process, will just corner everybody into an economic collapse, which will have the effect that nobody will be get any health care.
Here is FDA approved possible death in a bottle.
What do you think, no FDA approved drugs have death as a side effect?
I said that health care is a product, you can argue it's a service, but the point stays. Be it a product or a service (and it's both, as medicines and various instruments and machines and hospitals are products, but actual work that is done by physicians, surgeons, professionals are services.) It's the same thing with a restaurant or with facebook - they are products and services, market rules apply regardless.
There is nothing as regulated and government financed as what is found in USA.
SS, education loans, bank bailouts - these are things that are done in USA specifically in order to transfer funds from government to the preferred corporations, that lobby the politicians with the money, and the money that is transfered is ALWAYS greater in total amounts than what is found anywhere else in the world.
What is the exact mechanism that prevents the abortion pill from entering the US market would not be possible, were it not for FDA.
The rest of your comment is ad-hominem BS.
when you asserted that "the market" will determine efficacy more quickly and cheaply than a clinical trial...
- what do you think happened before FDA?
Look at the way doctors have cooperated in the past to pass the information they gathered about treatment of different conditions and different cases. Private market provides huge exposure to any type of treatment, and if it is safe of-course, it will quickly be understood whether there is enough evidence that the treatment works. People exchange information without government, did you know that?
Look at the way Mayo clinic was established - people were exchanging information and that made that clinic very competitive, people used to come to USA from all over the world to visit Mayo clinic because of CREDENTIALS, that were EARNED, not dictated by any government.
It was competition that drove people to that clinic, which quickly disseminated similar approaches to treatment and information sharing among professionals everywhere in the world.
It's like an iPhone - once one exists, everybody is going to emulate it based on success, which is measured in sales and profits.
Profits are the feedback mechanism, which is the way the market tells the entrepreneur that he is on the right track. This is the same with iPads and health care.
Oh really?
Nonsense, is it?
Nonsense?
Nonsense?
What about clear violation of their very policies on SAFETY? Nonsense?
But if you worked in "health insurance industry", you'd never want FDA to stop doing what they do, after all, any government involvement is beneficial for large corporations, who gain monopoly/oligopoly power by restricting access of small competitors, by forcing any innovator to seek sponsorship of large pharma company, by having government money in insurance, which is the reason that insurance premiums are as high as they are and climbing, having insurance attached to people's jobs, which is the reason there is a problem of "preexisting-conditions" in the first place, because once you change your job and if you have a "condition", it's that much harder to get coverage again.
In a free market an American would have been able to buy health insurance privately from any provider from ANYWHERE in the world.
Why can't an American buy health insurance from Singapore?
Medical treatment and insurance are products, just like any other products, funding this by government covers corner cases but does a terrible disservice to the overall economy - the people.
Thank the Food and Drug administration for this. We had stories on /. about this before.
Government money in health care and insurance is the reason why these are so expensive now, when technology should have made all of the health care much cheaper (unlike many people believe, technology increases efficiencies and makes things less expensive, not more. Think about imaging methods that replaced exploratory surgeries. Think how many more patients a single surgeon can see today. Think cancer treatments done with drugs or machines, that would have required surgery. etc.etc. Increase in technology makes products cheaper, not more expensive).
But not only does FDA hurt you financially, they are a major reason for various techniques not getting timely approval, so again, as an example an abortion pill that was used for decades in Europe made it into USA decades later.
Of-course from my POV, FDA is just another government agency, standing in between you and your freedoms and liberties. Figuring out the safety of medical procedures is one thing, and it should be done privately too, by private competing certification agencies. Figuring out the efficacy should be left to the market because the market will do so much quicker and at a very low expense, when compared to the clinical trials that may last for decades and waste hundreds of millions of dollars to run them.
I gave up on wikipedia, there is no way to make it into a truly useful tool.
Here is history of a comment I was making as an example, this is more of a public announcement about a pump and dump scheme that is in process. SEC is notified, they are doing absolutely nothing about it, they don't care.
You think SEC cares about retail investors who are being destroyed by pump and dumps schemes? You think SEC cared about Madoff?
But you can't leave a comment on wikipedia, where it could REALLY be useful to people, who just may stumble upon an article about pumping and dumping stocks, a robot or a "live" admin will take the comment down.
What good is wikipedia then, if it cannot be used in creative ways to disseminate useful information?
No, my response is not that you shouldn't complain. My response is that customers who don't like the service should vote with their wallets, not try and destroy the free market by attacking it with government dogs.
I should have gone to a German site to read up on this, this wikipedia page doesn't have anything like that. You are right, they are more Marxist than anything else.
Well, they will find out in a hurry that guaranteeing income is a quick road to unemployment and recession, and given the political system, that's a quick road to inflation and depression.