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Comment by jkartchner | Hacker News Reader

You believe the top 60% of the nation skew in the upper income levels? Median pay is $61k a year for the entire country. The top 1% skews to the upper income levels. The rest are charged $30 for a dose of aspirin and can't afford it.

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There are numbers on this, and their comment is probably directionally correct; the median household with private insurance earns more than 400% of household FPL (KFF). By subtracting Medicaid and fixed-income seniors from the picture, you are sharply biasing the median upwards.

I would say if you ignore the poorest 40% of the population, you've got quite the slim margin to go before you are no longer talking about "Most" Americans, which the OP was pretty explicitly talking about.

He was saying "Most people in the US" don't make 100-200k more, and that they probably don't even make 100k. This was in response to the generalization that "people from other countries ... underestimate how well paid people in the US often are".

Now there was talk of getting the political motivation to change things, so I guess everyone is assuming Medicaid/Medicare/VA recipients don't want to change the system, but that wasn't really established, nor was that really being refuted.

I don't think I could be any clearer that I am (1) talking about Americans with private health insurance and (2) not making a normative judgement about which system is better, but rather a positive claim about the political challenge of changing the system (its large group of stakeholders who are better off under it).

Oh I'm clear about the demographic you are trying to discuss, my point was I'm not sure this all stemmed from a discussion about that specific demographic. It started at "people in US", then went to "most", then by the time you got involved in the thread you were defending a statement about people with private health insurance.

I could have made this comment at the level where it went off the rails, but I thought making it at the leaf level would help everyone involved see the deviation between what was said and what was being argued.

People in the US can't afford aspirin? Where do you live? It's just not true

They are referring to the price that hospitals charge for aspirin, which is massively inflated, not the off the shelf cost of aspirin

Where in their comment do you see them referring to hospital care?

The article, talking about a patient's hospital visit, mentions "the $31 low-dose aspirin, of which they'd given him four."

Ahh, good callout. Thanks!

i think in this case, if you're at all familiar with what US hospitals charge for the small stuff, it's a safe assumption that when someone says aspirin costs $30 a dose, they're not talking about buying it at a CVS. of many folks on hacker news dot com i trust you to bridge that gap instead of nitpicking!

That's an odd argument to make in this thread, because whatever the drivers of burdensome consumer health spending are, they're not overpriced hospital aspirin.

maybe so; it's a symptom, not a cause.

I'm capable of understanding context.

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