We did this years ago, but it’s time for a refresh for new readers. You make a bet with a bookie. You don’t want X to happen, where “X” can be anything you don’t like. Perhaps your favorite sports team losing. Or a meteor crashing onto your car. Or having a woman elected governor in your state. Or BLM
Health insurance is essentially a scam when applied to the entire population, since the lifetime probability of getting very sick and dying is, if not 1, very close to 1. It only makes sense for those below retirement age. For seniors, health savings accounts would be more sensible, although frankly, the most sensible policy would be to recognize that we are not immortal, and expensive heroics to obtain an extra month or six of agonizing "life" aren't really worth it.
More broadly, I haven't yet seen a health care system that really satisfies everyone. Expense is built in: it requires pricey equipment and extensive training for which few have the aptitude, so there is really no way to do it cheaply. The choices are expensive services paid at point of use, or high taxes ... or the worse possible answer, which is the American system of rent extraction by ranks of superfluous administrators via regulatory capture.
Probably the best system would be paying at point of use, directly to service providers. When we did that doctors made house calls, and everyone was much healthier.
This is the key to everything: the entitlement, the false expectations and the inevitable let down.
It's like the mandatory seat belts and the idea that the seat belt (and other overly hyped security devices and systems) causes people to not evaluate risk properly, and therefore the are more reckless and the risk of accident increases.
Perhaps it's easier to see the problem with the relationship between a cyclist and a car driver. If the cyclist wears a helmet and those yellow shirts, and many reflector devices and maybe kevlar reinforced clothes, like the motorbike riders do, then the car driver would think the cyclist is less fragile and will relax the attention that he needs to not hit the cyclist.
Some of the insurance products probably are causing people to behave worse. They feel too secure. Particularly with health insurance.
There is also the problem of the fraudulent expensive machines that are overpriced an cannot diagnose or cure anything. Insurance plus expensive medical tests and novel treatments are a racket. The worst is that most people who live in countries with State controlled medicine, or socialized medicine, think that scheme protects them from the extortion racket and iatrogeny, when it is the opposite: in such countries, people are more exploited than in other countries.
This is a good cover of the issue. Sometimes very obvious things need to be stated over and over so here I go: Anything that people are forced to buy will be crap. Any mandated purchase will be a loser. Auto insurance, Health insurance, anything ever period. And having the government fix the prices obviously just makes it worse. Looking at drivers, assuming that we can't get rid of the death trap resource drains, the sensible thing would be to require everyone to keep in an escrow some fraction of the amount of damage that they are likely to do. It would save us all money. Would you rather fork out $1000 every six months for life or $20,000 once? If you plan to live more than 10 years I hope that you know the answer.
It all started with Reagonomics (and Thatchernomics) , the greatest scam pulled on the voting dopes. The populace paid taxes in the expectation that they would receive certain benefits.
Before and especially after WW2 taxes increased and various social services eg schools and hospitals, law, justice, social housing and infrastructure were built. This led to US (and to some extent UK) being ideal countries. These assets belonged to the people. Trains, post offices, roads etc. however with all these services were being provided at a low cost and the money recycled to the government reducing the tax burden and improving the country. The rich (ie bankers) were excluded from the economic cycle, yeah right, they were going to sit bye and let that happen.
So Thatcher/Reagan decided (under duress) to 'privatise' the country's assets so that they ran better, as everyone 'knew' that private enterprise was more efficient than government.
What was not advertised and was buried, was that private enterprise has only ONE objective, make as much money as possible for the owners, end of. Not customer welfare, not customer service not community but always and only the owners.
Obamacare was never wanted or proposed or pushed by anyone but the healthcare providers, and the bastards have made out like bandits.
It is not insurance it is banditry, however like road banditry that is a hard sell, so "safety', for the children, for the poor, for the elderly, yadda yadda yadda, and even though the majority of people did not want i, it got pushed through. There is zero risk! Like Banking it is underwritten by the taxpayer, it is a 'bailout' with guaranteed never losing a cent.
Now the Pharma, who get 90% of their money from 'Government' and hospitals who get 99% of their money from government are as happy as pigs. All those politicians who supported the ideas got share options and are all multi millionaires, all those lobbyists who paid over the 'incentives' are millionaires and you and I are slaves to the banks who financed the takeovers.
In the past it was expected that the government would, in return for taxes, provide service now they can point to others and say, 'We did not evict you, we did not deny service, we are not overcharging you, we are not responsible for your crappy lives, it is the private companies.'
Every single service! Police are crap? get private security. Schools are crap? go to a private school. Roads are crap? complain to the contractors. Transport is crap? talk to Amtrak and the airlines. Healthcare is crap? not our problem.
There was no chance of it being "Insurance" it was and is pure banditry.
> So Thatcher/Reagan decided (under duress) to 'privatise' the country's assets so that they ran better, as everyone 'knew' that private enterprise was more efficient than government.
It is.
> What was not advertised and was buried, was that private enterprise has only ONE objective, make as much money as possible for the owners, end of. Not customer welfare, not customer service not community but always and only the owners.
And the way to make as much money as possible in a market system is to serve the government.
> Obamacare was never wanted or proposed or pushed by anyone but the healthcare providers, and the bastards have made out like bandits.
No, it was pushed by socialist such as yourselves. Now that it's a disaster, you're attempting to rewrite history. Not that the healthcare market was particularly free before, due to problems going back to FDR.
There is no evidence that private enterprise is more efficient, except in enriching shareholders. You cannot show any proof of your assertion.
You have read my comment on Bezos and Musk, but you are wrong, you do not 'serve' the government, you scam the government by ripping off the taxpayers.
Obamacare was never pushed by socialists. It was pushed only by politicians who were rewarded by lobbyists and the whole legislation was written by the medical corporations and delivered at a cost of millions to congress. Anyone who thinks that ANY US politician is a socialist is a moron.
So how many of those "Socialist" countries have you visited? How long did you live in them and how many of their citizens have you talked to?
Do you measure success purely by material wealth or possessions and if so why? Have you watched any "walk around" videos of Russia or China or Cuba? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bHpaAOpQcg Try watching that .
Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, talk to the 'peasants', the taxi drivers and nurses, who remember pre-1990, talk to Kuwaitis, Syrians or Iraqis. You want healthcare? Got to Russia, 'the old' Romania, Kuwait or Cuba. Compare Moldova to Transnistria they are 100 yards apart and two completely different worlds.
Tell me a single 'socialist' who pushed Obamacare. The only people who pushed Obamacare were Pharma, private hospitals and the Washington political machine of Democrats. Not a socialist in sight.
The Dem 'socialists' don't know the meaning of the word but pose as being for the poor and minorities which is why poverty and the blacks are doing so well in the USA.
The fact that you don't know the meaning of the word shows me that you are completely brainwashed and not capable of rational thought.
You are a Humpty.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Kuwait, plus 7 African countries, Belgium, Holland, France, Chile, USA, and UK.
Not 'visited' but lived and worked in them. USA was only two contracts, Dayton Ohio and Smithtown Long Island, but that was enough to make sure I never took another.
Born in the UK when it was socialist and family emigrated but have lived and worked there for 11 years in various contracts since.
Bernie Sanders is an out and out capitalist who merely wants to redistribute wealth to young people because that gets him votes. Like you, he could not define "Socialism" if his life depended on it.
He does not understand the basic premise of economics nor does he demonstrate any understanding of production of Rentier philosophy.
The insurance problem, and for that matter most contemporary difficulties, might be solved by turning it over to gamblers and bookies and their organizations, as C.M. Kornbluth suggested 70 years ago in the subversive and satiric science fiction novel, "The Syndic". After the collapse of large organizations on account of bureaucracy and corruption, the American people (at least in the East) drove out the federal government, turned the country over to the syndicate and things ran a damn sight better than they did before, until the government agents and bureaucrats attempted to come back from Iceland, where they had been exiled.
And let's not forget the incentives given to firms to be providing employees with plans in the first place: The 1943 decision to not tax "employer-based health insurance" along with the wage controls of Nixon that led to employers dangling health insurance out in front of the noses of employees because they could not offer them wage increases.
The IRS system is corrupt, and work by Buchanan on Public Choice Theory shows corruption inherently expands. Amendments that enlarge bureaucracies and central control become guaranteed. That's why clear demarcation of what is a federal issue and what isn't, is sorely needed.
We (the USA) began with just 4 federal departments and just 3 federal laws (no treason; no printing of thine own money; no godforsaken piracy on the High Seas). Now we have over a dozen departments, untold federal agencies, and a Code of Federal Regulations that would snap a table in half if dropped from the right height.
Health insurance is essentially a scam when applied to the entire population, since the lifetime probability of getting very sick and dying is, if not 1, very close to 1. It only makes sense for those below retirement age. For seniors, health savings accounts would be more sensible, although frankly, the most sensible policy would be to recognize that we are not immortal, and expensive heroics to obtain an extra month or six of agonizing "life" aren't really worth it.
More broadly, I haven't yet seen a health care system that really satisfies everyone. Expense is built in: it requires pricey equipment and extensive training for which few have the aptitude, so there is really no way to do it cheaply. The choices are expensive services paid at point of use, or high taxes ... or the worse possible answer, which is the American system of rent extraction by ranks of superfluous administrators via regulatory capture.
Probably the best system would be paying at point of use, directly to service providers. When we did that doctors made house calls, and everyone was much healthier.
This is the key to everything: the entitlement, the false expectations and the inevitable let down.
It's like the mandatory seat belts and the idea that the seat belt (and other overly hyped security devices and systems) causes people to not evaluate risk properly, and therefore the are more reckless and the risk of accident increases.
Perhaps it's easier to see the problem with the relationship between a cyclist and a car driver. If the cyclist wears a helmet and those yellow shirts, and many reflector devices and maybe kevlar reinforced clothes, like the motorbike riders do, then the car driver would think the cyclist is less fragile and will relax the attention that he needs to not hit the cyclist.
Some of the insurance products probably are causing people to behave worse. They feel too secure. Particularly with health insurance.
There is also the problem of the fraudulent expensive machines that are overpriced an cannot diagnose or cure anything. Insurance plus expensive medical tests and novel treatments are a racket. The worst is that most people who live in countries with State controlled medicine, or socialized medicine, think that scheme protects them from the extortion racket and iatrogeny, when it is the opposite: in such countries, people are more exploited than in other countries.
This is a good cover of the issue. Sometimes very obvious things need to be stated over and over so here I go: Anything that people are forced to buy will be crap. Any mandated purchase will be a loser. Auto insurance, Health insurance, anything ever period. And having the government fix the prices obviously just makes it worse. Looking at drivers, assuming that we can't get rid of the death trap resource drains, the sensible thing would be to require everyone to keep in an escrow some fraction of the amount of damage that they are likely to do. It would save us all money. Would you rather fork out $1000 every six months for life or $20,000 once? If you plan to live more than 10 years I hope that you know the answer.
💬 —laugh at that—
😂😁
You have complicated a pretty simple operation.
It all started with Reagonomics (and Thatchernomics) , the greatest scam pulled on the voting dopes. The populace paid taxes in the expectation that they would receive certain benefits.
Before and especially after WW2 taxes increased and various social services eg schools and hospitals, law, justice, social housing and infrastructure were built. This led to US (and to some extent UK) being ideal countries. These assets belonged to the people. Trains, post offices, roads etc. however with all these services were being provided at a low cost and the money recycled to the government reducing the tax burden and improving the country. The rich (ie bankers) were excluded from the economic cycle, yeah right, they were going to sit bye and let that happen.
So Thatcher/Reagan decided (under duress) to 'privatise' the country's assets so that they ran better, as everyone 'knew' that private enterprise was more efficient than government.
What was not advertised and was buried, was that private enterprise has only ONE objective, make as much money as possible for the owners, end of. Not customer welfare, not customer service not community but always and only the owners.
Obamacare was never wanted or proposed or pushed by anyone but the healthcare providers, and the bastards have made out like bandits.
It is not insurance it is banditry, however like road banditry that is a hard sell, so "safety', for the children, for the poor, for the elderly, yadda yadda yadda, and even though the majority of people did not want i, it got pushed through. There is zero risk! Like Banking it is underwritten by the taxpayer, it is a 'bailout' with guaranteed never losing a cent.
Now the Pharma, who get 90% of their money from 'Government' and hospitals who get 99% of their money from government are as happy as pigs. All those politicians who supported the ideas got share options and are all multi millionaires, all those lobbyists who paid over the 'incentives' are millionaires and you and I are slaves to the banks who financed the takeovers.
In the past it was expected that the government would, in return for taxes, provide service now they can point to others and say, 'We did not evict you, we did not deny service, we are not overcharging you, we are not responsible for your crappy lives, it is the private companies.'
Every single service! Police are crap? get private security. Schools are crap? go to a private school. Roads are crap? complain to the contractors. Transport is crap? talk to Amtrak and the airlines. Healthcare is crap? not our problem.
There was no chance of it being "Insurance" it was and is pure banditry.
> So Thatcher/Reagan decided (under duress) to 'privatise' the country's assets so that they ran better, as everyone 'knew' that private enterprise was more efficient than government.
It is.
> What was not advertised and was buried, was that private enterprise has only ONE objective, make as much money as possible for the owners, end of. Not customer welfare, not customer service not community but always and only the owners.
And the way to make as much money as possible in a market system is to serve the government.
> Obamacare was never wanted or proposed or pushed by anyone but the healthcare providers, and the bastards have made out like bandits.
No, it was pushed by socialist such as yourselves. Now that it's a disaster, you're attempting to rewrite history. Not that the healthcare market was particularly free before, due to problems going back to FDR.
There is no evidence that private enterprise is more efficient, except in enriching shareholders. You cannot show any proof of your assertion.
You have read my comment on Bezos and Musk, but you are wrong, you do not 'serve' the government, you scam the government by ripping off the taxpayers.
Obamacare was never pushed by socialists. It was pushed only by politicians who were rewarded by lobbyists and the whole legislation was written by the medical corporations and delivered at a cost of millions to congress. Anyone who thinks that ANY US politician is a socialist is a moron.
> There is no evidence that private enterprise is more efficient, except in enriching shareholders. You cannot show any proof of your assertion.
Look at the socialist countries to see how well government control of the economy works.
> Obamacare was never pushed by socialists.
Yes, it was. Granted they wanted to go even further.
So how many of those "Socialist" countries have you visited? How long did you live in them and how many of their citizens have you talked to?
Do you measure success purely by material wealth or possessions and if so why? Have you watched any "walk around" videos of Russia or China or Cuba? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bHpaAOpQcg Try watching that .
Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, talk to the 'peasants', the taxi drivers and nurses, who remember pre-1990, talk to Kuwaitis, Syrians or Iraqis. You want healthcare? Got to Russia, 'the old' Romania, Kuwait or Cuba. Compare Moldova to Transnistria they are 100 yards apart and two completely different worlds.
Tell me a single 'socialist' who pushed Obamacare. The only people who pushed Obamacare were Pharma, private hospitals and the Washington political machine of Democrats. Not a socialist in sight.
The Dem 'socialists' don't know the meaning of the word but pose as being for the poor and minorities which is why poverty and the blacks are doing so well in the USA.
The fact that you don't know the meaning of the word shows me that you are completely brainwashed and not capable of rational thought.
You are a Humpty.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
> So how many of those "Socialist" countries have you visited?
I was born in one.
> Tell me a single 'socialist' who pushed Obamacare.
Bernie Sanders for starters. And no, lying doesn't help your case.
Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Kuwait, plus 7 African countries, Belgium, Holland, France, Chile, USA, and UK.
Not 'visited' but lived and worked in them. USA was only two contracts, Dayton Ohio and Smithtown Long Island, but that was enough to make sure I never took another.
Born in the UK when it was socialist and family emigrated but have lived and worked there for 11 years in various contracts since.
Bernie Sanders is an out and out capitalist who merely wants to redistribute wealth to young people because that gets him votes. Like you, he could not define "Socialism" if his life depended on it.
He does not understand the basic premise of economics nor does he demonstrate any understanding of production of Rentier philosophy.
If you want to carry on, then define your terms.
The insurance problem, and for that matter most contemporary difficulties, might be solved by turning it over to gamblers and bookies and their organizations, as C.M. Kornbluth suggested 70 years ago in the subversive and satiric science fiction novel, "The Syndic". After the collapse of large organizations on account of bureaucracy and corruption, the American people (at least in the East) drove out the federal government, turned the country over to the syndicate and things ran a damn sight better than they did before, until the government agents and bureaucrats attempted to come back from Iceland, where they had been exiled.
Great points!
And let's not forget the incentives given to firms to be providing employees with plans in the first place: The 1943 decision to not tax "employer-based health insurance" along with the wage controls of Nixon that led to employers dangling health insurance out in front of the noses of employees because they could not offer them wage increases.
The IRS system is corrupt, and work by Buchanan on Public Choice Theory shows corruption inherently expands. Amendments that enlarge bureaucracies and central control become guaranteed. That's why clear demarcation of what is a federal issue and what isn't, is sorely needed.
We (the USA) began with just 4 federal departments and just 3 federal laws (no treason; no printing of thine own money; no godforsaken piracy on the High Seas). Now we have over a dozen departments, untold federal agencies, and a Code of Federal Regulations that would snap a table in half if dropped from the right height.