> Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...
NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing.
Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.
Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.
Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.
As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.
I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems.
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That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call competition) is... interesting.
And I wasn't advocating for Sanders personally or his policies specifically, just using him as an example of a conviction politician who might have had the chutzpah to take on and dismantle the business-lobbying-politics establishment.
In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
In housing, for example, NIMBY laws have for decades restricted all kinds of new housing being built. In capitalism, developers would be allowed to build. So we've very much had the opposite of capitalism.
Cities that are waking up to this and allowing new houses to be built are seeing rents fall across the board.
I'd challenge whether for complex topics like healthcare, there truly ever could/would be a market that would deliver the savings you envisage.
When someone is diagnosed with cancer, you'd expect them to do everything in their power to give the best outcome, right? Wrong. Most people just go to their local hospital, and sadly the quality of physicians, surgeons, treatments offered, and overall care varies tremendously. There are various data to suggest that joining a clinical trial may offer improved outcomes (and of course, in extremis, clinical trial participation is the only way to access experimental treatments) and yet a very small percentage of patients ever do. Anecdotal experience suggests that many patients can barely understand the details of their disease and treatments (which are becoming more technical with time).
My point? For reasons that require further exploration, healthcare "customers" typically aren't sufficiently informed, discerning, engaged, or mobile in the way that would be necessary for a genuine competitive market composed of for-profit providers to function effectively to drive down prices and improve outcomes.
You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?
And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.
Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html
https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-h...
A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.
Having people see how other countries work on a regular basis really opens your eyes.
And then you have travel and expensive healthcare to pay for.
We are involved in ex pat groups on Facebook, have gone to meet ups, and are having dinner with a few people we have met.
Narrator: "In fact, they did not"
In our case, we tend to hit the max out-of-pocket pretty fast.
Likely not for many, but I definitely did all this math annually.
It was a good change, but it needed the individual mandate to function successfully. That got removed.
The difference being that if you don’t need to use your HSA in a year you keep it - unlike low deductible plans.
I have never known a health care provider that you can’t negotiate a payment plan with. Even if your HSA isn’t funded, they could probably have a payment plan = HSA monthly contribution and then take it out of the HSA.
Yes I understand that a lot of people making $40K would be deftly afraid of doing that. But they would still statistically come out ahead
ACA plans and LG/SG plans are not the same, and pretending they are is, frankly, a large part of why healthcare in this country is such a dumb discussion - those discussing it have no idea what they're talking about.
I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.
I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.
California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]
Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.
[1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...
You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.
I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.
Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
The median household income in the US is around $85K
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
The median individual household is $55K
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
Neither are living on the streets.
> By my estimate, about 60% of Idahoans don't earn a livable wage
Sure boss it’s all fine and dandy.
Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.
If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.
The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.
Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system.
Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else.
More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.