zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition.

Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".

>>rchaud+592
this is private capital. yes, we are in an era of big projects and big capital deployment. is that synonymous with centralized autarky? i don’t agree

>>whimsi+Ba2
This is an amount that would be a meaningful change to most US states' gross annual economic output that we're talking about, and a few people control it. Sounds pretty centralized to me.

The fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars to throw at something that may or may not work while working people can pay the price of a decent used car each year, every year to their health insurance company only to have claims denied is insane.

>>lenerd+hb2
Free movement of capital and the ability to identify promising projects and allocate our resources there are why our society is prosperous and why we are able to devote more resources towards healthcare than any society that has ever come before us.

This money is managed by small amounts of people but it is aggregated from millions of investors, most of these are public companies. The US spends over 10x that amount on healthcare each year.

>>whimsi+Xc2
Having to spend thousands for insurance every year (even if you’re totally healthy) and not having it even be remotely effective, is not my definition of “prosperous”.

>>bbqfog+gi2
Individual insurers pay out tens of billions of dollars in claims every year, frequently have non-profitable years, and are the counterparty on pretty risky contracts.

There are lots of problems with our current approach to healthcare, but insurers aren’t charging you way more than the cost to counterparty on that contract should be.

>>whimsi+fj2
The United States spends more per capita on socialized medicine than any other nation on earth[0]. US socialized medicine spending per capita is more than any other nation spends total between both public and private in fact, it just fails to provide it to anyone but the very poor, very sick and elderly.

You'd think the healthy working population wouldn't be that much of a burden to care for as well, but they have to go out of pocket and get insurance to provide for themselves after providing for everyone else.

There is a lot of graft going on for this to be the case. It may not be the fault of insurance companies but someone is stealing a great deal of money from the American people.

Now here's the million dollar question; are you aware of this obvious fact? Have you ever heard someone frame the socialized medicine debate in this way: "If we could be as efficient as the UK we could give you free healthcare AND cut your taxes!". If not, why not?

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

>>willci+Mw2
graft but also overutilization/misallocation, ie. we will publicly spend massive portions of our GDP treating old people who are slowly dying but little on younger people who have some crippling illness, mostly because older people vote and triage is an uncomfortable concept to people

>>whimsi+Lx2
Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to deal with that. Given the US is 48th in life expectancy[0] behind all these other nations that spend much less, that explanation doesn't seem to hold much water.

[0]https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

>>willci+4z2
> Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to deal with that.

well not every other nation, but i know what you mean.

other nations are much better at managing overutilization by denying care where it is not needed. the US insurance system shields people from cost and encourages overutilization due to a number of stupid policy choices (aka refusal to have 'death panels' like in Canada/UK but also refusal to do away with massive publicly subsidy for health expenditure).

for a personal story, my parents basically get free MRIs from the state for little reason whereas people I know have to pay an arm and a leg for MRIs because their insurance is worse. at minimum, we could at least also make my parents have to pay an arm and leg for useless MRIs and doctors would stop encouraging them or lose patients.