The evidence is quite clear that going to college doesn’t actually improve life outcomes very much at all. We mistakenly thought it did for a while, but what was actually happening is the people who were going to college were smart and very likely to succeed anyway.
If they weren't using this as an opportunity to pump some shitcoin, this might make sense. Bitcoin Lightning integration would be much less suspect, for example, because A) it's already well established B) they're not going to make a quick buck off it.
> I cannot comprehend why anyone would be against health care for all?
Then you probably shouldn't voice an opinion on the issue. If a lot of people disagree with you can't come up with a coherent explanation for why, then you almost certainly don't understand the problem space.
> Can someone help explain to me what the oppositions point of view is?
Government-run healthcare is not socially optimal.
Edit: The people downvoting me are salty because they realize that they can't form a coherent argument for an opposing opinion. Guess what - I already know all of your talking points. I would engage with you on them, but this shitty website won't let me post more than like 5 times an hour.
More people are in favor of universal healthcare than against it.
No one fully understands the problem space, those that do only understand the parts they care about. However, the current system just doesn’t make economic sense for 90% of current and future Americans.
Therefore, we should change the system, and given the success of universal healthcare schemes throughout the developed world, we ought to try it ourselves.
Perhaps some of our richest, urban, and politically left states could show us the way. It's not like they don't have enough money or political support.
Maybe unchecked immigration and a vast welfare state will work out just great. I'd just rather California prove it out first before we roll it out to the rest of us.
> More people are in favor of universal healthcare than against it.
In the US, you can get an answer in either direction depending on how you phrase the question. When you bring in the fact that this will cost money, people tend to flip. Most people in the US already have healthcare through the government or through their employer, so they don't actually really care enough for anyone to pull this off politically.
> Therefore, we should change the system
I agree, the current system is sub-optimal.
> given the success of universal healthcare schemes throughout the developed world
What success? Most countries with "universal healthcare" A) are poor relative to their demographic-imputed economic capacity B) have low-quality care compared to market-based healthcare systems, and even compared to the worst-of-both-worlds American healthcare system often have horrendous metrics on quality of doctors, procedure wait times, etc.
US healthcare isn't good. I never said it was. But the correct direction of reform is towards market-based healthcare, not to make it even more DMV-like.
> universal healthcare does not imply government-run healthcare
There is no practical way to implement one without the other in the US.
> But the correct direction of reform is towards market-based healthcare
I suppose if you subscribe to, say, the normative-over-empirical approaches of the Austrian school of economics. If you are concerned with universality and cost-effectiveness, instead of the doctrines of the free market cult, reform toward the shape of systems which empirically do those things better than the US, which there are plenty of examples of in other advanced economies, would make sense.
My evidence is that I've lived in countries with market-based healthcare (Thailand, Mexico) and countries with socialized healthcare (Canada, UK), and the market-based healthcare is always infinitely better. My wife had to wait months to see a psychiatrist in Canada, before we moved away. WTF? In Thailand it's like $50 and you get in right away.
> empirically do those things better than the US
Why are you bringing up the US? It's not market-based healthcare.
Both the source article and every comment in this thread except for one on the middle explicitly references the US; I didn’t bring it up, it was the established subject of the discussion.
I can't comprehend how someone can believe in a flat Earth or that vaccines cause autism but I'm knowledgeable enough about those issues to emphatically state that such people are stupid or willfully ignorant.
With regard to government run healthcare not being socially optimal. The United States spends far more money per capita on healthcare than any universal health care system in the world. There are lots of examples which show that universal healthcare systems can be much more optimal than the American system.
The factors that cause America to spend a lot of money on healthcare don't go away when you switch to a single payer. If anything, they get worse.
Reform needs to happen elsewhere; for example, we need to stop using taxpayer money for extremely cost-ineffective treatment of very old people (which is where most of our money goes).
The factors might not go away. It depends on how the reform is done. To say that they won't go away is incorrect. You don't know this. As with all reforms, they can be done well or poorly.
Sure, in a magical world where we suddenly switch to a perfect utopian medical system, the problems will go away. But none of the concrete proposals in this thread will make the problems go away.
It's hard to claim that this can only happen in a magical world when there are numerous examples of universal healthcare that provide better outcomes with lower costs.
> It is clearly more economically efficient to treat malignant cancers earlier.
This is not necessarily the case, because additional screening has costs - both direct costs of running the screening, but also hidden costs like costs associated with false positives (which represent the vast majority of cancer diagnoses). For example, we realized recently that for many years we had been too aggressively encouraging women to get breast cancer screenings, and it ended up not being socially optimal due to the high cost and false positive rate.
> The decision to start screening mammography in women prior to age 50 years should be an individual one. Women who place a higher value on the potential benefit than the potential harms may choose to begin biennial screening between the ages of 40 and 49 years.
> . For women who are at average risk for breast cancer, most of the benefit of mammography results from biennial screening during ages 50 to 74 years. Of all of the age groups, women aged 60 to 69 years are most likely to avoid breast cancer death through mammography screening. While screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years may reduce the risk for breast cancer death, the number of deaths averted is smaller than that in older women and the number of false-positive results and unnecessary biopsies is larger. The balance of benefits and harms is likely to improve as women move from their early to late 40s.
> . In addition to false-positive results and unnecessary biopsies, all women undergoing regular screening mammography are at risk for the diagnosis and treatment of noninvasive and invasive breast cancer that would otherwise not have become a threat to their health, or even apparent, during their lifetime (known as "overdiagnosis"). Beginning mammography screening at a younger age and screening more frequently may increase the risk for overdiagnosis and subsequent overtreatment.
> . Women with a parent, sibling, or child with breast cancer are at higher risk for breast cancer and thus may benefit more than average-risk women from beginning screening in their 40s.
> Go to the Clinical Considerations section for information on implementation of the C recommendation.
Here's a page that details the false negative rates for this type of screening:
> Data based on results from a single screening round for women regularly receiving digital mammography indicated that false-positive results were common in all age groups (Table 1). The rate was highest among women aged 40 to 49 years (121.2 per 1000 women [95% CI, 105.6 to 138.7]) and decreased across age groups (P < 0.001). Rates of false-negative mammography results tended to increase with age, ranging from 1.0 to 1.5 per 1000 women, but did not statistically significantly differ across age groups.
> For women with initially positive mammography results, rates of recommendations for additional imaging were highest among those aged 40 to 49 years (124.9 per 1000 women [CI, 109.3 to 142.3]) and decreased with increasing age (P < 0.001). Rates of recommendations for biopsy did not statistically significantly differ across age groups and ranged from 15.6 to 17.5 per 1000 women.
> Rates of invasive breast cancer were lowest among women aged 40 to 49 years (2.2 per 1000 women [CI, 1.8 to 2.6]) and increased across age groups (P < 0.001). Rates of ductal carcinoma in situ also were lowest among women aged 40 to 49 years (1.6 per 1000 women [CI, 1.3 to 1.9]) and increased with age (P = 0.055). Women aged 70 to 79 years had the highest rates of invasive cancer (7.2 per 1000 women [CI, 6.4 to 8.1]) and ductal carcinoma in situ (2.3 per 1000 women [CI, 1.7 to 3.0]). Consequently, the yield of screening was more favorable for older women. For every case of invasive breast cancer detected by mammography screening in women aged 40 to 49 years, 464 women had mammography, 58 were recommended for additional imaging, and 10 were recommended for biopsy. In contrast, for women aged 70 to 79 years, for every case of invasive breast cancer detected by screening, 139 women had mammography, 11 were recommended for additional imaging, and 3 were recommended for biopsy.
> Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of a cancer that wouldn’t have gone on to cause harm in a person’s lifetime, in other words, if the person hadn’t been tested (whether that’s screening or some other type of test), the person might never have known they had cancer, and would not have died from the disease.
This website is full of overconfident midwits - nothing new. I appreciate that you're still willing to put in the effort to show them the evidence. Unfortunately, I'm at the point where I don't think it's worth it; it's not like they developed their current opinion by looking at any evidence, so they're not going to change it on account of evidence.
Gwern is great. One of a small number of people I support on patreon. Really high quality authorship on a huge range of topics, from drugs to cartoons to AI research.
