Annual 'winners' for most egregious US healthcare profiteering announced (opens in new tab)

> household disposable income

That doesn't matter a slightest if people can't afford housing. Income is indeed disposed, without much to show off.

Both positions can be true - what you said, and what the parent said.

The problem with what you said is that it's a statistic lumping all households together. As such it's largely meaningless because it lumps Elon's household with some person living in a trailer park in Montana. They are unlikely to have similar disposable income.

Equally, while health care might represent 17.6% of GDP, this of course provides no limit on any one person or group. Indeed, assuming that most billionaires are not spending 17.6% one can assume the real cost to many I'd much (much) higher than that.

No to the parent's statement about "poorer". There are many things to measure here beyond just "cash in the bank". And there are terms like "middle class" and "majority" which are imprecise.

Nevertheless the point, as an anecdote stands. While America the country is rich, not all the people in it are. Indeed it seems to be increasingly split into rich and poor - the middle class is shrinking.

The good news though is two fold. Firstly most Americans seem happy with this setup (presumably because it maintains the illusion that they can obe day be rich.)

Secondly the majority of (not rich) people believe that having rich people in charge will benefit them. No doubt the incoming government of billionaires is something to look forward to.

Which is all yo say that each country gets what they want. The US _wants_ for-profit health care. They believe it is the best in the world. Other countries think its bonkers and have other approaches. That's perfectly OK.

Indeed this is democracy in action. We vote for people who will best do what we want them to do. Who guide us, not just by their words but their actions. We clearly understand the actions of the incoming guy (he's been there before). He's clearly pro-health-company (not pro health consumer) so this is (quite literally) what people want.

The future looks very bright indeed!

The us is rich in pride, which if you divide it by baseballstatistic books and multiplicate by the size if the country is the only ritches that matter..

Bangladesh isn't in Southeast Asia, so not sure why you picked that.

might be referring to Malaysia, Thailand, Indo or the PI

Your overall point still mostly stands, but per capita GDP isn’t super helpful when talking about middle class Americans because of wealth inequality. The median US income is less than half of that. And the cost of living in Bangladesh is probably something like a quarter of the COL in the US. So while there’s still a pretty stark difference in wealth, it’s not quite as stark as you’re implying.

And yet somehow Bangladesh has the same life expectancy as U.S. Virgin Islands.

As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding. -Sloman and Fernbach

> For instance, a friend in Europe had to do a 250K GoFundMe campaign to pay for a life-saving treatment for his daughter because well, the only place in the world that performed the surgery she needed was... Guess where? The US.

Interesting, do you have a link? It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of such a case.

That article is based on 1) disposable income, which is the wrong metric to use (because it doesn't account for the fact that the US has much higher expenses in health care and education than places like the EU, Japan, etc.), 2) housing size as a metric -- which is due to population density (Western Europe has nearly 5 times the population density of the USA) and the fact that US cities are built around cars, and 3) vehicle ownership, which is both a cultural hallmark of the US and due to the fact that you can't really live without a car (2 if you're married) in the US due to the way its cities are built.

In short, laziest article ever.

While I appreciate the collection (LGBTQ) I'm not sure it's always helpful to put that all in one box. Within that group there are wildly different lifestyles and social experiences.

Being gay for example is largely mainstream in the US - being trans, not so much.

That said, there are indeed lots of countries in the world that at a local, social level (as well as a constitutional level) are very accepting of all life styles.

Moving country though is not trivial, even for US citizens. It's not like you can up sticks and just move anywhere that best suits you.

> but federally about to go to hell

If that were going to happen, then it would have already happened. It hasn't, and it won't. It's not healthy to worry about things you have been conditioned to believe by people that don't have your best interests at heart but will say anything to get your vote.

On the other hand maybe this demonstrates a strength of living in the US, the ability to leave a deteriorating region for a better one (if someone wasn't as lucky as you) more casually than if you had to emigrate to do so.

The pop discourse is myopic and sensationalist. I've never personally dealt with an outright denial. When I've called "insurance" companies, they've been generally helpful. However, this is what I have experienced:

Primary care repeatedly rescheduling appointments further down the road, 2-3 months at a time. At one point it got so bad for my elderly aunt that I straight up asked if they were just trying to "run down the clock".

Primary care doctors saying they will put in a referral to a specialist. Then a month later just getting a photocopied list of specialists in the mail for us to call directly. Go down the line and most are closed or not accepting new patients. Some were even straight up dead (... like rigor mortis, habeas corpus).

One of the two remaining specialists booking 8 months out for an initial consult, the other 5 months.

Billing departments that don't feel it necessary to do the work of completing insurance claims, yet feel entitled to still continue sending fraudulent bills to us personally instead.

Medical equipment providers outright lying about the validity of their fraudulent bills even when challenged with concrete reimbursement rates, and then doubling down with bullying - aka willful fraud.

Needing to put in a bunch of paperwork, then follow up with appeals, merely to see the second geographically closest in-network provider (closer one was having issues) due to living near a state border.

And none of this covers the harder-to-capture dynamics of getting shortchanged on time talking to a doctor because the bureaucrats have deemed that 15 minutes is enough time for an appointment, or having to continually make sure the ball doesn't get dropped on care due to the proliferation of different moving pieces.

The problem isn't all on insurance companies themselves. The real problem is the entire system is broken due to poor incentives where these gigantic entities have been allowed to pass blame back and forth instead of having to own any responsibility themselves. This puts patients in the middle (often when they're in pressing need of healthcare), to get ground up in an ever-growing runaround, rather than any of these businesses having an incentive to minimize the administrative complexity. The "approval/denial" charade for in network care is just one of the most galling games they've made up, so it gets focused on.

Why would working in tech shield someone from our healthcare system?

“Most bankruptcies occurred in middle-class citizens with health insurance” https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-93430900525-7/fulltext

If you haven’t been harmed by our system, it’s not because you’re immune. It’s because you’re lucky.

> Why would even need an immigration policy if this was true?

Do you think Southeast Asian countries don't have an immigration policy?

And it's still this much of a mess! It's almost like you can't regulate sanity into a for-profit healthcare system.

Nobody has ever devised a bureaucratic rule that cannot be gamed.

Here, the test providers get paid by the test. Easy enough to kick back test payments to the doctors.

As for paying by capitation, why would they work extra hours to serve more patients? Or just see fewer patients and relax?

Is crime dysfunction? I suppose it is if Medicare is so incompetent that fraud on that scale is possible.

> De la torre is unrelated to UNH.

Well, obviously. He was CEO of Steward Health Care. I suspect you have misread my comment.