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[return to "Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance"]
1. lvl155+rl[view] [source] 2025-08-02 16:40:02
>>wallfl+(OP)
Healthcare in the US is broken and they won’t let you fix it because the money is too good. Think about the fact that PBMs, which is there to save and manage on pharma is incentivized to promote drug price inflation. That’s just one “small” piece of this clusterf*k. It’s layers and layers of these convoluted system of incentives.

As to OP, the simplest solution is to move out of the US early enough or become “poor” enough and be in a wealthy blue state by the time you get to this predicament.

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2. silisi+lP[view] [source] 2025-08-02 20:00:36
>>lvl155+rl
Healthcare is little more than a jobs program at this point.

I believe it is the largest industry by employment in every single state now.

That compounds the problem even further. Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work. I'm all for it, but I can see why politicians are hesitant.

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3. wahern+701[view] [source] 2025-08-02 21:15:22
>>silisi+lP
> I believe it is the largest industry by employment in every single state now.

This made be curious, so I looked around. FWIW, healthcare constitutes ~11% of the workforce in the US. It's ~16% in Germany, ~10% in the UK, and ~5% in France.

As a percentage of GDP healthcare is far higher in the US, of course.

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4. silisi+341[view] [source] 2025-08-02 21:38:56
>>wahern+701
It's actually a really hard thing to track, and BLS does a poor job of it in my opinion. That 11% covers most but not even all people at a clinic or hospital. It counts people from doctors to records specialist, but not say, janitors or IT, and nothing outside of that like insurance. And that's not necessarily wrong to do, but makes it hard to grasp the whole size.

If you add in everyone in insurance, pharma, devices, and the jobs those support, that number seems to be closer to 17% of the workforce from what I could put together.

Not sure if those in Europe do it similarly, but it just feels like a huge number of people. Maybe that is the result of demographics and a topheavy population, though.

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5. victor+ha1[view] [source] 2025-08-02 22:27:37
>>silisi+341
Doubt european numbers count insurance (public or private) pharmacy etc or all the jobs that support healhcare in general (powerplants, construction workers, restaurants, etc)
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