Comment by tchalla

Orphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"

there is no trolley

This framing is disingenuous. We're meant to say "tear down the orphan-crushing machine!" But in this case there's no machine, only human mortality. You're substituting a simple question ("why are we crushing orphans?") for a complex one ("who should pay for poor children's healthcare?")

Also, the scale seems much larger than $20k.

Incentives don’t remove agency. They might have incentives… but these are awful scum who deserve nothing but contempt

Taxes: the price one must pay for civilization.

> The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.

Why is it always "the general public" and not "I". Do you have enough information about decisions? Can I take away some of your rights? No, of course not. Everyone else is dumb except me.

I'm sorry but I refuse to believe some unelected, anonymous bureaucrat has my best interests in mind or can even know me anything about me such that I want to allow them to make health decisions for me.

Because if something sucks, someone comes up with something better and sells it for a profit. This is the history of pretty much every other good or service that is not heavily influenced by regulation and artificial barriers to entry

> Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down.

Collusion and cartels never work on the long run. It's an unstable equilibrium, the incentive to reduce prices to capture more market is too great.

> What is it that still makes you believe

Competition. It's the only force keeping humans honest. That's why we must treat any barriers of entry in a market with extreme care. The only "failed" or "captured" market is a strongly regulated one.

Okay, you have no bargaining decision when you have N providers, so we should get rid of all providers with a single provider because only then you'll be in better bargaining position.

And now your death will have a meaningful change to the career bureaucrat or politician that made the decision that led to your death.

Because power of an individual vote is much more powerful than the power to take your business elsewhere. That's if you can find out the responsible party that makes these decisions and they're not appointed but elected, otherwise you'd have to mount an influence campaign on the politicians with 90% re-election rate to change said bureaucratic leader.

Makes a lot of sense.

Even if you never personally needed health insurance (which is unrealistic), you’d still benefit from a better, safer, less cut throat society.

Same with education. I am more than happy to pay taxes for an education system, even if I do not personally have children.

But charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.

The fact that ACA is an insurance scam as opposed to healthcare reveals who is in control.

This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history... it has not been.

“

Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.

This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.

This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.

If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time. ”

--Franklin D. Roosevelt

Trickle-down bread!

> To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.

It's dubious to say Google "competes" with Mozilla, because they pay Mozilla to develop Firefox to avoid antitrust issues, but it's easy enough to find CEO compensation for public companies.

https://www.sec.gov/answers/execcomp.htm

Of course people have published the numbers for well known companies:

https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/highest-paid-ce...

Also, "Other companies pay their CEOs ridiculous amounts, so we're going to," is a poor justification, and just shows Mozilla execs are there to enrich themselves, and don't really care about the browser or community. But I guess they can't spend all of the money on Pocket and AI.

Hmmm. But who can audit the reporting? Evidently, this looks like something they can manipulate.

Is the bottom line roughly:

Money received: 1000

Money used for good: 800

Labor: 200

Is that it?

Because I can assure you, that will not turn out well.

With 2 month long plus waits for basic scans in countries like Canada

Those cutting edge cancer treatments come usually out of universities from publicly funded research.

But don't worry your free market friends are killing it right now, for tax reductions

https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-killed-cancer-research...

Even in a pure unadulterated market economy that doesn't publicly fund healthcare you would expect to be able to protect yourself from high-impact low-likelihood events by means of an insurance. I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure

> Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.

You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.

"the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others"

This allows decentralised decision making for large grained resource allocation - for example should we build a factory for shoes, or for toothbrushes? - and is a good thing, as central planning has been demonstrated to not work if applied to the whole economy. (the converse, no central planning to any of the economy, has also been demonstrated to not work!)

However that accumulation can be (and nowadays usually is) orchestrated by a corporate entity, which in an ideal world would be almost entirely beneficially owned by retirees on an equitable basis.

What has gone wrong, is that the benefits of productivity enhancements (since 1970?) have flowed to capital more so than to workers - which not least prevents them from forming capital themselves (savings/pensions), hence rising wealth inequality.

Thanks. I never understood why intelligent people, comparing for example the German to the US system can even blink and decide that the German system doesn’t work.

Yes, there is quite a bit to improve in the German system. No doubt there. But if I compare it to the abysmal situation in the richest country on this planet, I am left standing awestruck asking myself why. I really, genuinely cannot wrap my head around.

That doesn't say how you would fund it, only what form of insurance is in place.

If the US were to shift to that model today, a country already heavily in debt would have to either take on more debt PR increase revenues in a manner that they wouldn't have been willing to in order to fund our already growing debts.

The debate over whether public or private healthcare is better is all well and good, but first we should be debating how the US would pay for it in the first place.

There's also an often-overlooked issue, which is that some of the crowdfunded treatments are for things deemed "experimental" or whatever other label and thus not covered for even an insured person. This situation exists in both public and private healthcare systems. I'm not arguing in favor of a for-profit system with this, but people often miss this when they haven't personally run into uncommon health problems.

Expensive health treatments can easily bankrupt any western government. None of those developed countries can afford to spend their money indiscriminately on them. So instead they turn to waiting lists, death panels and very often saying no but not in your face (since that is politically frowned upon) but thought delays and countless committees and bureaucracy until the patient expires...

Unfortunately "cancer" is a very broad brush that covers a multitude of diseases.

Plus the phrase "cure" does a lot of heavy lifting. People seem to see a win here as being "here's a tablet, all cancer is gone."

So yes, we have spent an insane amount of money that can be ascribed to "cancer". (We've Also spent a lot on heart disease, diabetes and so on.)

But yes, we have got an extraordinary return on money spent. Treatments and survivability of common cancers (breast, prostate etc) have gone through the roof. Better screening, better education and much better Treatments lead to much (much) better outcomes.

Not all cancers are the same though. Some are harder to treat. Some rare ones are hard to investigate (simply because the pool is too small) but even rare cancers get spill-over benefits from common ones.

In terms of "cure" - that's not a word medicals use a lot anyway. Generally speaking we "manage" medical conditions, not cure them. "Remission" is a preferred word to an absence of the disease, not "cure".

In truth, we all die of something. Cancer is usually (not always) correlated with age, and living longer gives more opportunities to get cancer in the first place. So it's not like we can eradicate it like polio.

Imagine if those trillions would be spent on research and healthcare

That's on the same level as terraforming Mars to escape climate problems on Earth.

Removing cancer from a body is tremendously simpler than making a new body.

The brain cannot function outside the body. The brain needs your bone marrow to make red and white blood cells. The kidneys and the liver to filter and break down metabolic waste. Various other hormonal systems that affect how the brain works (c.f. the HN favorite "gut-brain axis"). A brain separated from the body could survive for a few weeks, but long term it would certainly die from neuron loss (i.e. dementia).