Sometimes, it feels like we’re min-maxing ourselves to death over here.
I knew of certain defunct malls that decided to get rid of things that doesn't make money and only keep the high profit inventories.
Soon people stopped coming and they went under..
It's a bit harder for me to see this as an acceptable approach to health care. Not every segment of the economy needs to be a constant drunkard's walk in search of maximum profitability in the aggregate. Sometimes what the public actually desires is stability and reliability.
I had a friend who ran an unprofitable arcade for some time. His trash was nothing but food and drinks from other local businesses, particularly piles of bubble tea cups from a place across the street. It seemed rather likely it was worth paying him a bit to stay there.
Businesses exist to give us what we want. Those that do it well are profitable, those that don’t aren’t.
Keep in mind that the effort spent to make healthcare more stable could have instead been used to provide more healthcare overall. Or something else entirely, like shoes or haircuts.
All services are not as good as they could be, because the effort beyond “good enough” gets shifted to some other more valuable purpose, where things are not good enough yet.
Given that the USA pays higher-than-average prices for poorer-than-average outcomes, I'd say this is a spurious hypothetical, mostly useful for helping to demarcate the point where economics ceases to be an empirical, scientific pursuit and instead becomes a sort of low-rigor offshoot of moral philosophy.
But, back in the realm of epiricism, we know that this is one of those situations where closer government regulation can produce higher quality of service at lower cost, because the rest of the developed world has figured out multiple successful formulae for doing so. The only clear downside, if you can call it that, is that their hospital administrators don't seem to have quite such large collections of luxury watches.
Most people realize that a business will only change if a significant portion of buyers change their spending habits, and individually choosing to not support a business out of ethical concerns only hurts themselves.
Then there ends up being a lot of people who buy products from businesses they hate, and would support collective action against those businesses, like passing laws.
People like that aren't dumb, they are just trying to work around how their next best option is so much worse than buying the original product.
> Soon people stopped coming
Ah, yes. Why didn't we think of this before? By increasing the cost of (geriatric) healthcare, we can destroy demand. That's how supply/demand curves work right? In this way the invisible hand delivers unto us a fountain of youth ;)
But why? Are elderly clients underserved in that area? Are they going to ditch their original care provider and all come here?
Old people in the USA are EXTREMELY wealthy in terms of healthcare purchasing power. All retired people have medicare. Many retired people have additional healthcare coverage from their former employers (doesn't exist anymore -- disappeared along with pensions -- but this benefit used to be common). Many retired people have significant savings in addition to medicare and private health insurance.
Most new parents have little to no government assistance, do not have significant expendable income, and have little to no accumulated wealth. Children, of course, are even poorer than their deadbeat parents.
Or by cutting the cost.
The first, mentioned already in this thread, is that maximizing profits should not be the ultimate yardstick in all cases.
The second is that we are not setting incentives correctly in healthcare: preventative care still plays second fiddle to curative care. If the healthcare industry were purely free market, this could be attributed to individuals not understanding the long-term benefits of preventative care, or overly discounting the distant future. But the healthcare system is not purely free market. The largest payers, public and private, could do a lot to correct the incentives by setting their reimbursements accordingly.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/private-equity-fi...
I hate every part of it.
The WWII generation fixed the ozone hole, but their kids didn’t lift a finger for global warming.
Subsequent generations are scrambling to pick up the pieces for our kids, while crap like this, and our rapidly collapsing democracy keep sabotaging our efforts. Heck, in California, we’re actively causing psychological harm to an entire generation of kids (with masks) because of a tiny minority of anti-vaxxer school teachers.
Of course, progressive boomers exist, as do idiotic younger people. However, the current generation of leadership in the US has completely failed us.
Anyway, it’s not surprising to me that that crowd decided to shunt healthcare resources away from their (great) grandkids and into elder care.
It's really crazy that the only way it seems like we can get these senators/congresspeople out of office is death from old age.
The fact is, your mind DOES deteriorate when you get older. That's why so many phone scams are special built to target older people.
A change I'd make to the constitution is that "nobody over the age of 70 can hold a governmental position".
They won't live long enough to have to deal with their consequences of their actions, and they clearly don't care if they burn the planet down before their kids inherit it.
I think this translates to an age limit of 65-75.
More importantly, I think this should be applied to voters as well.
I agree, someone with a compromised ability to evaluate risk is probably more than capable at doing most desk jobs. However, the last thing we need is politicians who's aging brains have been compromised in evaluating future risks. Putting someone most likely to send scammers gift cards in charge of foreign policy and assessing climate change risks is simply a recipe for disaster.
It doesn't seem all that crazy to demand that the ~300 people running the US not be at an age where mental decline is common.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-older-adults-... [2] https://neurosciencenews.com/ventromedial-prefrontal-cortex-...
Here are some problems that _don't_ prevent people of any age from becoming a congressman or woman:
- Alcohol abuse
- Narcissism and/or sociopathy
- High debt
- Cult membership
- Most importantly: Personal financial interest in specific policy changes
Why not start with these? Banning elderly because they on average tend to be more gullible seems like a weird way of addressing governmental issues.
On a different level, I find the idea of banning people from governmental positions based on a specific trait deeply undemocratic, and a slippery slope. Principiis obsta.
We DO!
Testosterone production peaks at 18/19.
The minimum age for Congress is 25, for the Senate 30, and for the president 35.
> Why not start with these?
This is a false dilemma.
I've said we would limit age, I did not say there shouldn't be other limits or that it was the most important limit.
oh man, I choose to laugh so I don't start crying hahaha.
I want to turn this into an argument of why age-reversal and other longevity research is such a bad idea (personally, I think it's kind of evil; but maybe I've seen too many villanous cartoon characters throwing everything under the bus so the can live forever).
There's also the fact that science might lock up, since old scientists have more reputation at stake in the old theories (there's an adage "science advances one funeral at a time"). We're not ready as a species for immortality
"X advances one funeral at a time".
Let's not pretend these are comparable challenges.
> our rapidly collapsing democracy keep sabotaging our efforts.
When people say stuff like this, are they being hyperbolic or do they actually mean it? How long is the democratic tradition in the US that is collapsing?
This isn't some outlier event either, democracy has been receding around the world for years. I really, really hope the trend reverses itself, but am scared at how real the threat is.
> democracy has been receding around the world for years
I am skeptical. Majoritarian democracy in the US has only really existed for 40-50 years and I perceive it as continuing to expand both here and abroad.
If enough states had sent contested election results (eg a county or state’s election board is tied in approval or does not approve the results because of one die-hard) then the matter would have gone to the house of reps.
How many of those reps voted not to certify the election results? Now, in the event of contested state results, each state in the house of reps would get one vote. There’s more red states than blue states…how many unscrupulous representatives, who already voted not to certify the results, would it have taken to grant Trump the election?
For what it’s worth, many of the key states in the election had narrowly certified election results. In some cases it came down to a single individual who could have flipped the other way, and the results would have been contested.
You do not realize what a narrow path democracy treads. The anti-democratic forces do understand this, and the last few years have been empowering to them.
And that’s an easy scenario that doesn’t even take into account the very real possibility of political violence - don’t forget that people showed up to the US capitol with weapons and tools for kidnapping.
Honestly I find your take to be either naivety, denial, or willfully obscuring the truth to promote anti-democratic goals.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/j-michael-luttig-op-ed-ja...
Not only that, but global warming was an already known problem at the time CFCs and ozone were being solved.
Campaign finance restrictions.
Referenda that can't be overriden by legislature should require 50% of eligible voter population to support, not 50% of voters in that particular election.
No special elections.
What about things like AirBnB? Limiting those is a form of NIMBYism as is limiting where factories and polluting buildings can be placed and/ran.
that is the whole point of owning land and being a member of a community
If it's entire purpose was to provide pediatric healthcare it should probably have registered itself as a not-for-profit.
If your purpose isn't to return a profit to stakeholders, but to serve some social purpose eligible for charity nonprofit status plus like “pediatric healthcare”, registering as a nonprofit gives you more surplus revenue because of tax exemption and the ability to accept donations that are tax deductible for the donors.
It’s also often good PR.