US Politics Mega-thread - Page 579

On October 30 2013 00:05 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Normally capital chases yields, but that dynamic can break down when liquidity crunches emerge.

On October 29 2013 18:58 Velr wrote:
I work at a health insurance company here in switzerland. You wouldn't believe how stupid many people are when it comes to this stuff (i'm serious, you wouldn't).

What happened is:
AMA defines what an insurance plan has to cover.
Some plans don't do that and therefore have to be ended.
People that had one of the above plans now have to get a new one.

Sorry, that sounds pretty reasonable to me or what point am I missing?

There is plenty of stuff to go, with good reason, after Obama, but this just doesn't strike me as one of them?

On October 30 2013 00:17 Introvert wrote:


You once again display that in your mind, you know better.

The administration flat out lying about the law is of no concern to you because now these people will be forced to have "good" insurance by your standards. And they are clearly too inept on their own to decide which plan they want.

"Some are being 'scammed,' guess we better screw them and everyone else over, since they are unable to get what they need."

On October 30 2013 00:21 oneofthem wrote:

well, liquidity usually also makes itself available when there's the yield, outside of systemic credit crisis anyway

On October 30 2013 01:11 TheTenthDoc wrote:


The worst part about this is that many health insurance companies are going to use this as an excuse to cancel plans that are no longer profitable for them. This gives them a way to claim they're doing it because of Obamacare.

If only some sort of "public option" had been created...

On October 30 2013 01:42 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

What would a public option do to address that issue?

On October 30 2013 01:22 DoubleReed wrote:


Danglars is the one that referred to those people as "dumb", and you just called them "inept", and yet you think I'm the one who acts like I know better?

I'm trying to understand what it's like to have no self-awareness, but it's hard.

On October 30 2013 03:23 Thomas Sowell wrote:
Price controls! If you don't like the price, just change it!

Let's just use our imaginations for a minute. Whenever I see huge inflated prices, the first thing I think is, "well, there is a real profit to be made undercutting those prices!" After all, the cost of keeping a patient in a room for a night should be nowhere near $760. I'm sure it could be done for less than half that cost.

But what would happen if I were to open my own hospital? Can you even imagine the avalanche of paper work and regulations and lawyers and health inspectors that would hail down upon me, either resulting in me shutting down completely or forcing me to massively raise my prices?

Of course we will be told that all of these regulations and controls and permits and certifications etc. etc. are for the public safety, but what it effectively creates are massive barriers to entry into the market, which is what keeps costs so high. That $68,000 bill buys the illusion of safety.

I've given people IV's before. It took a couple hours of training and about 5 minutes to administer. The solution itself is pretty cheap. You could give people IV's for a couple bucks a day in base cost. The other $1480 comes from where? Laws, regulations, lawsuits, permits, certifications, middle men... People will always point to the uninsured but that's been shown again and again to be a small percentage of the costs associated with health care.

On October 30 2013 03:10 Introvert wrote:


Then let me explain.

I took Danglers to be making a point about Velr. Velr said that the administration's lie was fine, because now it will force people to buy "actual" insurance. Danglers was pointing out that was an absurd statement.

He didn't actually say these people were too stupid to choose (if he did, I would ask he correct me). That's the position he was mocking. You came to defense of Velr, and seem to agree. "Even smart people can be scammed." The implication being, they are being scammed now, don't realize it, and thus should be forced off of what they have for their own good. Now that last bit was slight extrapolation, but it seems reasonable given my previous interaction with you.

My point is proven because my comment about being inept was a restatement of what was Velr's premise. Everything else I have said on this topic contradicts my statement on ineptitude, if you take everything seriously.

Read with the context in mind instead of having a knee-jerk response.

On October 30 2013 03:23 Thomas Sowell wrote:
Price controls! If you don't like the price, just change it!

Let's just use our imaginations for a minute. Whenever I see huge inflated prices, the first thing I think is, "well, there is a real profit to be made undercutting those prices!" After all, the cost of keeping a patient in a room for a night should be nowhere near $760. I'm sure it could be done for less than half that cost.

But what would happen if I were to open my own hospital? Can you even imagine the avalanche of paper work and regulations and lawyers and health inspectors that would hail down upon me, either resulting in me shutting down completely or forcing me to massively raise my prices?

Of course we will be told that all of these regulations and controls and permits and certifications etc. etc. are for the public safety, but what it effectively creates are massive barriers to entry into the market, which is what keeps costs so high. That $68,000 bill buys the illusion of safety.

I've given people IV's before. It took a couple hours of training and about 5 minutes to administer. The solution itself is pretty cheap. You could give people IV's for a couple bucks a day in base cost. The other $1480 comes from where? Laws, regulations, lawsuits, permits, certifications, middle men... People will always point to the uninsured but that's been shown again and again to be a small percentage of the costs associated with health care.

Because of medical insurance, co-pay reductions, and expanded access programs for the uninsured, relatively few Americans pay more than a few thousand dollars per year for even the most expensive drugs. The primary customers in the United States are not patients or even individual physicians, although physicians can drive demand for a drug; rather, the customers are the government (through Medicare and Medicaid) and private insurance companies. And since the insurer or government is picking up the check, companies can and do set prices that few individuals could pay. In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is “price inelastic”: increasing the price doesn’t reduce how much the drugs are used. Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug to which there is no alternative. And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. “It is not a science,” the veteran drug maker and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer told me. “It is a feel.”

On October 30 2013 03:49 zlefin wrote:
I'd like to remind people of that wonderful expose in time in the past year or so about chargemaster rates in hospitals using costs that just make no sense at all.

Sowell; you should really read up more on the 1800s and all the bad things that happened then with capitalism; it sounds like you're unaware of them.

On spying, I came up with a nice sounding lie, pity they can't use it for cover, as it doesn't really fit perfectly:
"we were testing the security of their systems, and were preparing reports to send to them about their vulnerabilities and how to fix them."