Ultimately, the problem with single-payer is the same as the problem with student loans: when the buyer doesn't see the actual prices, they have little incentive to care how much something costs.
Imagine, if you will, a single father with a couple of teenage daughters. One is a senior, very popular, and has been asked by a popular boy. Dad has no interest in spending time in a dress shop, so hands her a credit card, asking only that she be reasonable. So she takes her best friends, and winds up buying a spectacular gown suitable to her social status at the school - and has a great time. It's not her money, so doesn't really pay attention to the price.
Then Dad gets the bill - $750 for a gown she will wear once - and hits the roof.
It's younger daughter's turn the next year, and Dad will not be fooled again. Again, she expects a prestigious dress, but Dad goes with her and steers her to the under $100 collection. In the end, she is too embarrassed to be seen in such a cheap gown and stays home in tears.
In a health market, buyers use their own money to pay for what they want. Any dollar they spend on one thing is not available for them to spend on something else. That leads to massive resistance against prices that are too high. But when somebody is (or seems to be) footing the bill, price resistance goes out the window. That's why college tuition has soared over the past 40 plus years - students are borrowing to pay for it, so it feels almost as though it's free. Add to that the claims that a degree will always more than pay for itself, and the price resistance is very low (as in the case of the elder daughter). The focus is all on the perceived benefits.
Similarly, employees don't generally recognize that they are paying for heath insurance, not only higher medical bills, but also in lower salaries - the employers need to get those premium payments from somewhere. And that is why health care costs have soared. And of course, when it comes to pay the bills, the health insurance companies have every incentive to be cheap and refuse to cover them certain procedures, or procedures that cost too much (as in the case of the younger daughter). The value for them is not the patients' health, but the employer's willingness to keep paying premiums.
Health insurance makes a lot of sense when it is about spreading risk for low probability (and expensive) procedures. It makes no sense when it is the primary way for paying normal expenses. It messes up price signals and adds massive costly layers of bureaucracy.
There's a really good healthcare system the UK could emulate. It's the one in the country due south on the other side of the English Channel. As you say it's weird Europhiles don't mention this
(Is it perfect? of course not, but statistically it seems to provide better service at lower cost than most)
BTW Different European countries have different systems. My recollection from a couple of decades ago was the German system was far less impressive and the Italian system varied widely by region
Glad to hear you felt the interview went well. Still praying for you.
Little boys also love pictures and while it's not reading, they will read the text that describes the picture and the details in it. I hated reading as a kid, but I would spend hours going back and forth between the text that described the crosscut depiction of a space capsule, lunar module or dinosaur guts for that matter. Boys are visual, so playing off that may help.
The single most important investment I ever made was when I was 8 years old and purchased for 50 cents (from my paper rout) my Libarary card at Lauren Roger's Libarary in Laurel MS.
What I read then was age appropriate classic science fiction full of rocket ships and aliens, many of which had kids as the heros and protagonists.
Later came the books about the sea in the Hornblower series and Munity on the Bounty and Moby Dick.
All those taught boys valuable lessons about honor, courage, determination, dedication and perseverance........and a love of reading and the value of a good book.
Getting boys to read brought back the memory of a parent/teacher meeting when our son was in 7th grade. The teacher had 4 novels for the children to pick from for a book report and told us our son wasn't doing the reading. I told her he had zero interest in novels but had some technical books on electricity that he could use for a book report. She refused and told us he would get an "F." I told her I didn't care, and she was very unhappy with me. She was a fool. He did later read Harry Potter and the Kane Chronicles, but he's not going to become a fiction reader any more than that arrogant teacher is going to become an electrician. I have mixed thoughts on the delivery of healthcare, but I know I don't want a single payer system for adults. I do think there would be a benefit to having taxpayer funded medical/dental coverage for all minors. I went through about an 8-year period of severe itching in the ears, eventually impaction and 3 ENTs and other medical personnel telling me they couldn't find anything wrong and chiding me on ear hygiene. I finally saw an ENT that within 20 seconds told me I had eczema in my ears and this was causing my problems. I had even been trying various ear cleaning kits from the pharmacy. He told me to stop using those products as they make it worse, and just use a vinegar/water drench with a peds bulb twice/week in the shower. Problem solved. Rooting for you from our little farm!
My spouse and I early on took our sones (now in their early 40's) to the library and let them pick out what they wanted to read. For birthdays of Christmas, especially if they got started on a series of books and really liked them, we would purchase the next 2 or 3 books in that series.
My parents read to me when I was young. They believed, and I tend to agree, that the ability to transform words, written or spoken, into mental images is acquired. I brcame a voracious reader, as did my 5 younger siblings
Adventure was what got me hooked on reading as a youngster. I think I read The Hobbit and LotR both before I was 10 - but TBH, I skipped a lot of the poetry and singing back then; I was interested in fighting orcs and dragons and whatnot. Call of the Wild, Conan the Barbarian, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer. Probably every book L Frank Baum had written in the Wizard of Oz series (seems like there are 7 or 8 of them).
Both of my sons got started early with Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and The Inheritance Cycle (Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr). I read those as well just so I could stay abreast of what they were reading.
Reading Harry Potter as an educated adult is a vastly different undertaking. We can call them "YA" books all we want, but there were deep, dark themes in them. In addition, if one happens to know some Latin and a good deal of Roman mythology, then much of the mystery and assumptions in that series is a lot less mysterious, and there is much that doesn't need to be assumed because she's telling you in the language exactly what's what. Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom. If you knew that going in, you'd know precisely what to expect when you were introduced to Professor McGonagal. "Severus" is the Latin word for "strict." While it's true he didn't care for Harry because of James, he loved Harry because of Lilly. Only a man of deep character can not like somebody but still love them and do right by them.
Of course kids would be unaware of those things, but the fact is they were exposed to it, even if they didn't know it. But there are lots of things we can learn as kids that come back to us as adults - "Bugs Bunny of Seville" (among several others in the opera/classical genre) was one of those things for me.
I also think a one-size-fits-all single payer medical system has big potential problems. At the least we need to have competition for who keeps the most up to date on medical knowledge and what are the ways to provide service that truly meets the needs of patients. I am 80 years old, and I happen to like Kaiser Permanente. They've been my medical care provider since the mid 1990's. I like the integrated care model they are, and I love the ease of mail order pharmacy service. Still, they are a human organization and all human organizations are imperfect. For that reason alone I am glad there are viable option for people to choose from.
Yes. There's a reason why nearly all the great medical innovations happen in the US. Because profit motives matter. Our system is pretty fucked up, but it still is a lot better than the risks of trying to institute single-payer here.
I also know what it is like to search for a job and have many times over my life. I wish you the very best in your search, and hope you find a job that goes beyond meeting your economic needs. I hope it will be personally and professionally fulfilling as well.
Back in the 1940s (i.e. 3/4s of a century ago) the NHS was a huge improvement for most British people compared to what they had before. I recently reread parts of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier so I could write a "Road to Clacton Pier" and I was reminded how incredibly poor people were back in the 1930s. Compared to how things were then the NHS 10-15 years later was massive. But guess what? we aren't in the mid 20th century anymore and other countries have also introduced healthcare payment solutions. The NHS doesn't stack up well against its closest neighbor - France - let alone dozens of other rich nations
Many people don't know that when all the dust up over Obamacare was shaking out, there was already a ready-made model, sitting in the wings. No need for that hideous technical catastrophe, the roll-out that consumed millions of taxpayer dollars aaaand worked for $hit - "The Health Insurance Marketplace". Yes, indeed - our federal employees have their own "health insurance marketplace". Neat, huh? 🙄
i am 64 but when young the flashman books caused me to understand true history and why the west was ok whilst not being ok. George MacDonald Fraser should be mandatory reading for all males and most females aged 14 yrs. and over.
I’m not sure how old I was but the Tarzan books grabbed me when I was a kid. The John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novels are great books. Kind of adult books that twelve year olds and up would love.
A friend of mine taught summer school English for 9th graders who failed the class and had to make it up (about 80% of the kids were boys). He said they were going to read a novel as a class. One boy got pretty snarky: "Let me guess: it's about a girl who has like five kinds of trauma and she has to talk about her feelings to her friends, who then reveal they also have a bunch of trauma." The boys had figured out what they were asked to read, over and over again, in school. Now, in this case the book turned out to be something like Jekyll and Hyde, so the boys were pleasantly surprised.
There really are types of books that boys tend to enjoy. This doesn't mean that ALL boys only like these types of books. Nor does it mean that ONLY boys enjoy them. But boys tend to like novels with violence, physical conflict, survivalist books, war stories... that kind of thing. Of all the novels we read in my class together (we read 10), the one the boys almost universally love the most is a little novel I wrote and published with a friend of mine called "Santa Claus is Dead." It opens with the discovery of Santa's brutally murdered body, and it's a classic style murder mystery where the suspects are Rudolph, Dasher, Mrs. Claus, etc. The girls often enjoy it, but the boys eat it up. It's so fun to them to read stuff like this.
It makes me sad that so many people have a hard time accepting girls and boys tend to like different kinds of things and that's okay.
We wrote it nearly 20 years ago, and I was still a very young and developing author. But I am proud of it. It's published under my friend's name (Jason Twede) since he's the one that actually thought up the story.
Ultimately, the problem with single-payer is the same as the problem with student loans: when the buyer doesn't see the actual prices, they have little incentive to care how much something costs.
Imagine, if you will, a single father with a couple of teenage daughters. One is a senior, very popular, and has been asked by a popular boy. Dad has no interest in spending time in a dress shop, so hands her a credit card, asking only that she be reasonable. So she takes her best friends, and winds up buying a spectacular gown suitable to her social status at the school - and has a great time. It's not her money, so doesn't really pay attention to the price.
Then Dad gets the bill - $750 for a gown she will wear once - and hits the roof.
It's younger daughter's turn the next year, and Dad will not be fooled again. Again, she expects a prestigious dress, but Dad goes with her and steers her to the under $100 collection. In the end, she is too embarrassed to be seen in such a cheap gown and stays home in tears.
In a health market, buyers use their own money to pay for what they want. Any dollar they spend on one thing is not available for them to spend on something else. That leads to massive resistance against prices that are too high. But when somebody is (or seems to be) footing the bill, price resistance goes out the window. That's why college tuition has soared over the past 40 plus years - students are borrowing to pay for it, so it feels almost as though it's free. Add to that the claims that a degree will always more than pay for itself, and the price resistance is very low (as in the case of the elder daughter). The focus is all on the perceived benefits.
Similarly, employees don't generally recognize that they are paying for heath insurance, not only higher medical bills, but also in lower salaries - the employers need to get those premium payments from somewhere. And that is why health care costs have soared. And of course, when it comes to pay the bills, the health insurance companies have every incentive to be cheap and refuse to cover them certain procedures, or procedures that cost too much (as in the case of the younger daughter). The value for them is not the patients' health, but the employer's willingness to keep paying premiums.
Health insurance makes a lot of sense when it is about spreading risk for low probability (and expensive) procedures. It makes no sense when it is the primary way for paying normal expenses. It messes up price signals and adds massive costly layers of bureaucracy.
There's a really good healthcare system the UK could emulate. It's the one in the country due south on the other side of the English Channel. As you say it's weird Europhiles don't mention this
(Is it perfect? of course not, but statistically it seems to provide better service at lower cost than most)
BTW Different European countries have different systems. My recollection from a couple of decades ago was the German system was far less impressive and the Italian system varied widely by region
We ARE rooting for you, Miss Holly! "Break a leg!"
Glad to hear you felt the interview went well. Still praying for you.
Little boys also love pictures and while it's not reading, they will read the text that describes the picture and the details in it. I hated reading as a kid, but I would spend hours going back and forth between the text that described the crosscut depiction of a space capsule, lunar module or dinosaur guts for that matter. Boys are visual, so playing off that may help.
The single most important investment I ever made was when I was 8 years old and purchased for 50 cents (from my paper rout) my Libarary card at Lauren Roger's Libarary in Laurel MS.
What I read then was age appropriate classic science fiction full of rocket ships and aliens, many of which had kids as the heros and protagonists.
Later came the books about the sea in the Hornblower series and Munity on the Bounty and Moby Dick.
All those taught boys valuable lessons about honor, courage, determination, dedication and perseverance........and a love of reading and the value of a good book.
Getting boys to read brought back the memory of a parent/teacher meeting when our son was in 7th grade. The teacher had 4 novels for the children to pick from for a book report and told us our son wasn't doing the reading. I told her he had zero interest in novels but had some technical books on electricity that he could use for a book report. She refused and told us he would get an "F." I told her I didn't care, and she was very unhappy with me. She was a fool. He did later read Harry Potter and the Kane Chronicles, but he's not going to become a fiction reader any more than that arrogant teacher is going to become an electrician. I have mixed thoughts on the delivery of healthcare, but I know I don't want a single payer system for adults. I do think there would be a benefit to having taxpayer funded medical/dental coverage for all minors. I went through about an 8-year period of severe itching in the ears, eventually impaction and 3 ENTs and other medical personnel telling me they couldn't find anything wrong and chiding me on ear hygiene. I finally saw an ENT that within 20 seconds told me I had eczema in my ears and this was causing my problems. I had even been trying various ear cleaning kits from the pharmacy. He told me to stop using those products as they make it worse, and just use a vinegar/water drench with a peds bulb twice/week in the shower. Problem solved. Rooting for you from our little farm!
Good luck with your endeavor!
If you were an Engineer I’d have you in a job tomorrow.
Accounting and Engineering have always been and continue to be ‘career’ degrees. Although the Data science stuff you do should be valuable.
My spouse and I early on took our sones (now in their early 40's) to the library and let them pick out what they wanted to read. For birthdays of Christmas, especially if they got started on a series of books and really liked them, we would purchase the next 2 or 3 books in that series.
My parents read to me when I was young. They believed, and I tend to agree, that the ability to transform words, written or spoken, into mental images is acquired. I brcame a voracious reader, as did my 5 younger siblings
Adventure was what got me hooked on reading as a youngster. I think I read The Hobbit and LotR both before I was 10 - but TBH, I skipped a lot of the poetry and singing back then; I was interested in fighting orcs and dragons and whatnot. Call of the Wild, Conan the Barbarian, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer. Probably every book L Frank Baum had written in the Wizard of Oz series (seems like there are 7 or 8 of them).
Both of my sons got started early with Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and The Inheritance Cycle (Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr). I read those as well just so I could stay abreast of what they were reading.
Reading Harry Potter as an educated adult is a vastly different undertaking. We can call them "YA" books all we want, but there were deep, dark themes in them. In addition, if one happens to know some Latin and a good deal of Roman mythology, then much of the mystery and assumptions in that series is a lot less mysterious, and there is much that doesn't need to be assumed because she's telling you in the language exactly what's what. Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom. If you knew that going in, you'd know precisely what to expect when you were introduced to Professor McGonagal. "Severus" is the Latin word for "strict." While it's true he didn't care for Harry because of James, he loved Harry because of Lilly. Only a man of deep character can not like somebody but still love them and do right by them.
Of course kids would be unaware of those things, but the fact is they were exposed to it, even if they didn't know it. But there are lots of things we can learn as kids that come back to us as adults - "Bugs Bunny of Seville" (among several others in the opera/classical genre) was one of those things for me.
I also think a one-size-fits-all single payer medical system has big potential problems. At the least we need to have competition for who keeps the most up to date on medical knowledge and what are the ways to provide service that truly meets the needs of patients. I am 80 years old, and I happen to like Kaiser Permanente. They've been my medical care provider since the mid 1990's. I like the integrated care model they are, and I love the ease of mail order pharmacy service. Still, they are a human organization and all human organizations are imperfect. For that reason alone I am glad there are viable option for people to choose from.
Yes. There's a reason why nearly all the great medical innovations happen in the US. Because profit motives matter. Our system is pretty fucked up, but it still is a lot better than the risks of trying to institute single-payer here.
I also know what it is like to search for a job and have many times over my life. I wish you the very best in your search, and hope you find a job that goes beyond meeting your economic needs. I hope it will be personally and professionally fulfilling as well.
Regarding the UK's "world leading" NHS
Back in the 1940s (i.e. 3/4s of a century ago) the NHS was a huge improvement for most British people compared to what they had before. I recently reread parts of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier so I could write a "Road to Clacton Pier" and I was reminded how incredibly poor people were back in the 1930s. Compared to how things were then the NHS 10-15 years later was massive. But guess what? we aren't in the mid 20th century anymore and other countries have also introduced healthcare payment solutions. The NHS doesn't stack up well against its closest neighbor - France - let alone dozens of other rich nations
Many people don't know that when all the dust up over Obamacare was shaking out, there was already a ready-made model, sitting in the wings. No need for that hideous technical catastrophe, the roll-out that consumed millions of taxpayer dollars aaaand worked for $hit - "The Health Insurance Marketplace". Yes, indeed - our federal employees have their own "health insurance marketplace". Neat, huh? 🙄
https://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/
i am 64 but when young the flashman books caused me to understand true history and why the west was ok whilst not being ok. George MacDonald Fraser should be mandatory reading for all males and most females aged 14 yrs. and over.
I’m not sure how old I was but the Tarzan books grabbed me when I was a kid. The John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novels are great books. Kind of adult books that twelve year olds and up would love.
A friend of mine taught summer school English for 9th graders who failed the class and had to make it up (about 80% of the kids were boys). He said they were going to read a novel as a class. One boy got pretty snarky: "Let me guess: it's about a girl who has like five kinds of trauma and she has to talk about her feelings to her friends, who then reveal they also have a bunch of trauma." The boys had figured out what they were asked to read, over and over again, in school. Now, in this case the book turned out to be something like Jekyll and Hyde, so the boys were pleasantly surprised.
There really are types of books that boys tend to enjoy. This doesn't mean that ALL boys only like these types of books. Nor does it mean that ONLY boys enjoy them. But boys tend to like novels with violence, physical conflict, survivalist books, war stories... that kind of thing. Of all the novels we read in my class together (we read 10), the one the boys almost universally love the most is a little novel I wrote and published with a friend of mine called "Santa Claus is Dead." It opens with the discovery of Santa's brutally murdered body, and it's a classic style murder mystery where the suspects are Rudolph, Dasher, Mrs. Claus, etc. The girls often enjoy it, but the boys eat it up. It's so fun to them to read stuff like this.
It makes me sad that so many people have a hard time accepting girls and boys tend to like different kinds of things and that's okay.
OMG that sounds amazing!! goes to Anazon
We wrote it nearly 20 years ago, and I was still a very young and developing author. But I am proud of it. It's published under my friend's name (Jason Twede) since he's the one that actually thought up the story.