For example, Abrahamic religious leaders have made the concept of god toxic. But if you go by their dogma, then their god is responsible for the state of things.
Many of the non-abrahamic religions in the USA don't even have a god in the same sense, or they see their (equivalent to) god as the fabric of the cosmos and thereby not able to be abandoned.
I agree about the money though. It is the leading religion now.
https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/16-tips-to-help-y...
I am not a fan of the American healthcare system. Navigating it takes brains and effort that shouldn't be required. But if you have them it is essentially not possible to die here from lack of healthcare, and it's possible but surprisingly difficult to go bankrupt (except from lost wages, which is also a leading cause of bankruptcy in the UK).
That's a false myth.
https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-American-citizens-livin...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/health-insur...
The anecdotes in your links (that I read - can't get through all of them right now) have a common theme, which is that people died because they either needed very expensive and/or experimental treatment that probably would not be affordably provided to them under any plausible healthcare system, or else they got a bill, decided they couldn't pay it, and did without or tried to self-ration their healthcare.
The correct course of action in that case is to call the healthcare provider and negotiate A) a 90+% discount and B) a payment plan, both of which are pretty readily available in the American system. You have to know that's possible, and you shouldn't have to, but it is possible. Then you reach out to the charities, government programs, and/or nonprofits from my original link to cover what you still can't afford. Same deal if you get screwed by an insurance company as in the Guardian article.
This is, again, not something I'm trying to defend. It's not the way a sane healthcare system would run. But it is a system that works, more or less, for those who know how to work within it.
The anecdotes show that this is not an 'occasional' or 'edge case' thing but a systemic thing. The statistics show that at least 40,000 people die a year for not having enough money for healthcare and these are the people we know. The statistics don't include those who never go to the hospital to avoid risking medical bankruptcy for their families even if they die themselves. Just being in a hospital bed for one night without anything being done costs $3000/night, whereas waiting in the ER without anything being done can cost $100/hour.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/woman-gets-688-35-er-bill-...
This is a systemic thing. Its not 'not a sane healthcare system'. Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit. And it became like this only because people let it and justified this or that other thing in the system.
No, it doesn't. It costs whatever you can negotiate it to cost. I've been without insurance; one experience isn't data, but in my experience just telling the hospital you haven't got insurance is, again, good for 90+% off by itself.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/you-can-negotiate-your-medic...
Hospitals (ed: non-profit ones, but I'm pretty sure similar rules apply elsewhere) in particular are required by federal law to have 'well-publicized' financial assistance policies.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/financial-assistan...
> Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit.
If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit. It's not even that good. Healthcare margins in the U.S. are 0.7%, which sucks. If you're the proverbial evil billionaire or whatever you'd rather own almost anything else.
https://www.nadapayments.com/blog/what-is-the-average-profit...
The whole reason I started this thread is because it bugs me when we attribute to malice what is obviously stupidity.
That's a really surreal proposition. People who are sick cannot 'negotiate' anything. People who are recently treated and are recovering from an illness are the same. Something that is life-critical cannot be up for negotiation to start with, but lets allow it for argument's sake.
What if you 'negotiate' and the hospital and the insurance company just reject? Do you have pockets deep enough to fight with their lawyers for years? Do you have the time? One person against corporate behemoths. That defies logic.
> If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit
It does. It keeps both the availability of doctors and hospital beds to create artificial scarcity. It does vertical integration and ensures that whatever you do in healthcare ranging from getting insurance to going to hospital, from medicines to secondary care stays within the corporate shareholdership network that owns the entire conglomerate.
> when we attribute to malice what is obviously stupidity.
The reason that the system gets away with murdering people for profit is that people attribute to stupidity what should be attributed to malice. If large corporations are killing people for profit like they are, malice should be attributed to the actions of all the upper echelons of the corporate world rather than any kind of incompetence.
If you are sick and can't negotiate, and no one can negotiate on your behalf, or the provider won't negotiate, and if they sue, and if you have no charity assistance, then you will be one of the folks who goes bankrupt from medical bills. I said it was hard, and you can see from that chain of conditionals that it absolutely is, but of course it does happen.
The effects of bankruptcy in the U.S. last seven years, at least as far as credit rating is concerned. Not great, but this is not serious in the way that killing people would be serious, if that happened, which again, it basically doesn't if you can navigate the system.
> It does.
0.7% is an absurdly low profit margin. It just is. The rest of your paragraph is basically true, but doesn't change that. At the same time, the U.S. spends a much higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than most developed nations. Ergo, what the U.S. system is really optimized for is wasting money
Since that is not a rational goal for anyone, it's stupid. Evil at least achieves something for the evildoer. I'll leave it at that.
Where do you pull out that profit margin. The healthcare sector does vertical integration - they keep the patient inside their services - from insurance to hospitals - and milk them.
Your system is not inefficient. It is. The efficiency is for the shareholders. Not for you.
From the link I provided.
> The efficiency is for the shareholders.
It's probably worth pointing out that some of the largest American insurance companies are mutuals. They don't have shareholders, or profits. Admittedly this is rarer in health insurance than some other kinds, but State Farm, for example, does a huge health insurance business and sends its excess revenue, if any, back to its policyholder-owners as dividends.
Insurance companies that do make profits do much better than 0.7%, but then imagine how much worse that means doctors and hospitals are doing in order to drive the average down that far. And this was originally about hospital bills. Americans with insurance don't typically get bills from the insurance company, just statements of what they aren't going to pay.
> The healthcare sector does vertical integration
Here you have a point. American antitrust hasn't been good for some time, and tends to be less effective on vertical than horizontal integration. Nevertheless, while I can't immediately find a number on what percentage of American providers are owned by insurance companies, I'm pretty confident it isn't high.
My understanding is that directly charging a different (higher) amount for insurance is considered to be fraud.
And even if I'm wrong about that, when lacking insurance I didn't encounter a medical provider, including big ones with big compliance offices, who wouldn't do it. But others' mileage may vary.
What if your problem is with your mental health?
It's not like mental health problems are fringe lately.
It feels to me like you're speaking as though you are in the middle of the bell curve, but from my perspective people who can navigate this system are an exception.
If your question was actually serious, this is a non-exhaustive list.
I'd venture that drugs that cost hundreds of dollars or more per month in the US are all cutting-edge stuff. I mean, sure, you have stories of people getting charged $10 for a pill of acetaminophen at a hospital, but that's a separate matter unrelated to the fact that you can get a bottle of 500 pills for single-digit dollars at your local Walmart.
> The uninsured. The underinsured. People on the "wrong" insurance plan.
Plenty to criticize about the US healthcare system, but let's remember that countries with nationalized medical care also suffer from their own ills, mainly in the form of long wait times. Ultimately, no place has enough doctors per capita that every sick person can be treated promptly and cheaply; so care must be gated one way or another. In America, you pay with money; in most other countries, you pay with time.
[0]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/371090/WHO-MHP-H...
I believe you're referring to the ACA's "individual mandate", which imposed a federal tax penalty for being uninsured. I won't argue whether that makes it illegal or not, but I can say that the individual madate was eliminated by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2019 [1]. There's no longer a federal tax penality for being uninsured.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pe...
How many more $ trillions and how many fascist medical bureaucracies would achieve your ends comrade?
They of course noticed and certainly tried to reinforce that message, because they indeed became aware of the split. But the initial reason was a lack of trust in media and domestic politics and not some external propaganda channel.
And expect this to get much worse if you now increase surveillance. That said, NPR just suspended a journalist that did notice some form of propaganda from domestic sources, which might explain why people were distrustful in the first place.
In fact, you might be a victim of propaganda. Maybe read up on it.
It is wise for you too to read up on state sponsored disinformation campaigns. Obviously the U.S. and others are involved in such campaigns. Obviously the U.S. government and institutions like the NYT have collaborated to sell a version of events. For instance the NYT endorsing the invasion of Iraq.
That is has returned to developed countries has probably other issues instead of propaganda. But there aren't any propaganda campaigns in western nations that disincentive vaccination that would create the need for government to spy on your devices. These alleged propaganda campaigns would be easy to find, no? Since they target a broad audience?
That people like you are willing to rationalize anti-vaccine sentiments on the polio vaccine is quite illuminating. And you suggest of me that I’m the victim of propaganda!
You make the argument that because there are people believing X, we must allow the surveillance of our devices.
And your first paragraph above was to rationalize why some people are opposed to the polio vaccine. You just couldn’t equivocally state that this is an example of people being duped into believing something that is entirely idiotic. It’s not the main point you are trying to get across but it’s worth addressing this since you suggested I might be a victim of propaganda. I think, in our exchange, you are more likely to be a victim of propaganda since you can’t just say, “yeah those people are being duped”.
And, the investigations into election meddling ended with finding out that external forces spent some $100,000 on bad Facebook ads before the 2016 election. Not even a drop in a bucket. A simple blog network that the American conservative capital funds among the tens of thousands that they fund has more reach than such an ad.
What is even worse, even non-conservatives do it for money and make millions out of such activities:
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...
Says the Democratic side. They are a party in the political fight in the US and they cannot be taken as an objective source. This includes all the 'inquiry committees' that are propped up in the congress and senate whenever the party that wants to persecute the other side has enough majority.
And yet they do interfere. We've seen plenty of evidence, from Russia, Iran, China and (I still can't believe how they got competent at this, but there you go) North Korea.
And in some cases they've been successful at destabilizing formerly fairly sane and stable democratic countries. The social divisions that the UK And US currently find themselves in could be attributed in part to this steady drip of caustic interference.
However, as a "short term pessimist, but long term optimist" (Hitchens), I'm optimistic that we will start to introspect a bit more as societies and begin to be less easily manipulated. It will take a while, but I believe even now the tide is turning.
Please look away from the curtain hiding rising wealth inequality, cost of living, and the financialization of daily needs. There are no material explanation for the rising contradictions. It is simply our boogymen misleading our population.
It is good we as a society make bets on housing! Who needs to sleep under a roof when you can own shares!
But I have the feeling that that well of constant culture wars has run dry, and people are becoming more wary of being drawn into endless fruitless debates about these things. And after looking up form their smartphones they've finally seen all of the signs for Food Banks, noticed that the weather has gone insane and that the price of biscuits is inhumane and asked themselves 'how did we get here?' 'how do we get back to a better place?' and will hopefully agitate again for a better society.
Swings and roundabouts.
Honestly, I don't believe that statement. I think many people equate the culture war issues to the issues later in that second paragraph with the economy and climate (if they even see an issue there). If our leaders are failing at [insert culture war issue here], then that explains why they're failing at [insert economic issue here].
It's odd how people are trying to divide politics into "culture war" and real problems; it wasn't that long ago climate change was considered a culture war. Labeling something a "culture war" is just the first kneejerk reaction from the right when they appose something.
"loonie lentil eating lefties", "greenies", "mad Greta" (I'm making these up, but I'm sure I'm sure there's plenty of similar examples). People used to be comforted by these ad-hominems, and it allowed them to continue buying aspirational 4x4 off-road vehicles and 3 flights abroad a year without touching their conscious. They could laugh, share memes, ignore news stories about forest fires in Canada in December or massive loss of ice shelves in Antarctica and carry on as usual.
But as the pot starts to boil harder I get the feeling people are looking away from these distractions and beginning to look more critically at the information they're getting, and beginning to wonder if it's not such a funny joke after all.
You can look to old propaganda from the early 20th century in Italy and Germany where characters would speak to this. They would deny class lines based on wealth or capital holdings and insist the true class was defined by in and out cultural identifiers.
These culture wars we've been seeing are not organic. They're seeded by orgs that can make money off the outrage. It might be dramatic sounding to say, but the increasing prevalence of culture wars is indicative of the rising tide of fascism. Our societies have done a lot to weaken unions and redefine the meaning of class.
Because we redefined class boundaries to be cultural, we've created an artificial alignment, where say a working class queer urbanite and and a working class non-queer rural worker get shafted by many of the same mechanisms, but are seen to be in different stations because one has access to a bus and the other drives a pickup.
At the end of the day, material issues are what hurt people, but now the rural working class will blame the urbanite, rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their town, and the urbanite will blame the backwards bumpkin rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their city.
Doesn't seem too terrible to me?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUURA101SEHA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ENUC356240010SA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/STTMINWGNY
In the US, averaging falls short due to said inequality. A smaller group of people have vastly increased wealth, while others stay stagnant. This moves the needle for certain statistics that don't give a full view of the issue.
Its easy to say "hey the average is fine" when you're talking about NYC where stock brokers and high end real estate really drags up that average.
From the 2020 census, the average income was 107k, where the median income was 67k.
It increased from 25%->27% from 2001-2024 [a].
Far from a catastrophe, though there is an upward trend since 1999 [b].
There are spikes upwards and downwards, and I'd guess the upward spikes make much better clickbait.
[a] https://cre.moodysanalytics.com//app/uploads/2024/02/image-1... , from [4]
[b] https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/about/insights/data-stories...
--
Yeah, I couldn't find localize median wages, so I thought minimum wage would be a decent lower-bound.
Nationally, the easiest numbers to find are Wolfram Alpha's [1]:
Median wage (2001-2020): $27060 -> $46310 (2.9%/yr)
Mean wage (2001-2020): $34020 -> $61900 (3.2%/yr)
Bottom 10% wage (2001-2020): -> $18140 -> $27340 (2.2%/yr)
Mean->Median gap isn't too large, but the bottom 10% is pretty bad.
I think there was a temporary spike in rent burden [2] [3] which quickly reversed [4].
[1] eg: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=median+US+wage+2022
[2] https://www.moodysanalytics.com/about-us/press-releases/2023...
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DP04ACS006037
[4] https://cre.moodysanalytics.com/insights/market-insights/q4-...
I still can't believe how readily so very many people continue to fall for it time and again, despite the lessons of history.
“The bigger the trick, the older the trick, the easier it is to pull.”
“You believe it can’t be that old, and it can’t be that big for so many people to have fallen for it.”
But just to be clear, my surprise at their abilities stems from the fact that their country is so insular, tightly controlled and technologically backward* (look at a night picture of N. Korea, for instance, 80% dark, with no basic streetlighting), that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country.
The Doublethink needed to pull that off must be staggering (thank you Orwell for giving us a vocabulary to express the concepts and experience of living under totalitarianism).
*I know they have ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, also I'm pretty sure their internal surveillance tech is also top notch.
A totalitarian country can invest billions of dollars from the federal budget into propaganda in another countries. You don't need technological supremacy to pour money into something. Tight cotroll and insulation makes the task easier, not harder.
> that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country. Isolation and elimination of infected individuals helps prevent the spread of the disease through hte population
Just look at catastrophes caused by PG&E in 2018, ERCOT in 2021, or First Energy in 2003. Not a single one was caused by an attack on critical infrastructure, they're just cutting corners!
Dictatorships though have a more macroscopically sinister agenda against successful democratic rivals.
Sure, there is propaganda and attempts to influence certain topics, but I wouldn't want to give up privacy because I don't like some content on TikTok.
I think the divisions are of domestic origin and this argument is more or less FUD.
And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.
Propaganda messages are quite easy and public. And yet I don't think you can name a single instance where such a message would have influenced the beliefs of a significant portion of the domestic population. If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?
I think an example of propaganda is that you need to give up your freedoms for security because of "disinformation". A wrong statement on the internet became a threat to democracy.
I agree, many divisions are definitely of domestic origin. However we definitely know that foreign interference has been at play to identify and amplify those divisions.
>If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?
5G - weird one I know, but agitators gonna agitate.
Climate - Russia was a massive oil exporter, de-carbonizing efforts threatened that.
Atomic power in Germany - Russia definitely didn't want Germany achieving independence from their gas imports.
BRICS - China would love to de-dollarize the world.
>And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.
And this is the advantage of democracies, big shifts can happen. With Dictatorships however it usually takes violence. A lot of violence.