In an efficient market this would be less of an issue. But we don’t have that, so you don’t know. I expect it probably happens. I asked an assistant at a sleep clinic how many people leave without a prescription for a CPAP. “Oh, almost nobody.” :dubious:
“The Continent” has multiple systems, including several which in no way resemble that one.
This is IMHO, not GD nor GQ. While I strive to be accurate and credible, I don’t feel any onus to get into a “You can’t cite that 100% to my acceptance then it doesn’t count” debate.
As I said, if you want to believe that threats and pressure of unionization didn’t affect Walmart’s decision, I’m fine with that. I think you’re very wrong but I’m fine with you being very wrong if the alternative is a tedious “that doesn’t count!” volley.
Efficient markets rely on both parties having the same information; information asymmetries create a market for lemons, with “lemon” as in “bad car nobody wants, but the dealer can fill the transmission with sawdust and sell you anyway” because you don’t know about the sawdust or the 30k mile “eccentricity” that model develops or…
Regulations mitigate this, by forcing the real lemons off the market and by making side effect information available. Unless you’re buying supplements or alternative medicine, which is wholly unregulated and therefore full of lemons. My point is, though, the doctor is an MD for a reason and you’re not, for the converse of the same reason. There’s always an element of trust in getting expert assistance, which you cannot do away with simply by doing your own research (because you might stumble upon a Null or a Weil or a Wakefield and end up with a head full of bullshit), so there can never be an efficient market for healthcare.
Holy mother of biased samples.
It may never be an efficient market but I wouldn’t attribute most of that to any undue complexity; it’s just medicine. But instead to features like hidden pricing, inability to shop for emergency care (because it’s an emergency), normal incentives not being in place due to how health insurance works (or doesn’t) here, etc.
This was during the lucrative apnea boom some years back. It sounds like insurers have caught on and put a harness on it. Insurers Are Grumpy Over Booming Sleep Apnea Business : Shots - Health News : NPR
Wages for the working class remained stagnant during the 80s and didn’t climb until the mid-90s – starting a few years after we started increasing minimum wage, in fact. You are not only (bizarrely) cherry-picking a date range that includes the greatest economic collapse in the last 60-some years and saying “How come increased minimum wage didn’t grow this more”, but also including including all levels of pay including the huge upgrowth in salaries for the high upper class.
Demonstrate to me that he will do these things. You are extrapolating a ridiculous level of information from an essentially meaningless data point.
The author of the article is making a stupid assumption; the problem is that the opposite assumption is equally stupid.
Perhaps that just shows that if you educate people then they’re going to move to Australia. 
What a silly argument.
“They are complaining because they don’t have bread”
“Let them eat cake!”
Of course someone who can afford an expensive doctor by paying cash has no sympathy, if not outright contempt for people who aren’t as affluent. However, most people are sensible enough to not say so directly.
“Life is unfair” says every dickhead business major whose parents sent them to college, read Atlas Shrugged and fancies themselves as Hank Rearden based on their desire to snap necks and cash checks.
Really the question is “if you are broke and get sick or injured, what is the minimum level of medical care you should expect in the wealthiest country on Earth?”
I think the idea is that if we removed the minimum wage, heart surgeons would have to work for $2 an hour.
Regards,
Shodan
The other question is, “How much pure wastage, how much deadweight loss, can we remove from the system by making medical care easier to access?”
What isn’t understood is that the people who are opposed to UHC are the ones making the moral statement without regard for economics. They’re the ones advocating an economically illiterate position based on what they think is morally superior.
The date range I picked was the largest increase in the minimum wage in US history.
Since all salaries are based on minimum wage why does it matter if the salaries are for working class or upper class?
EPI uses tricks like not counting all compensation, ignoring demographic changes, etc. to push their stagnation message. The myth doesn’t pass the sniff test; just look at life today vs 1980 or even earlier. To steal from Scott Winship, “To honestly believe that below the top 10 percent of earners there has been essentially no improvement in 45 years is to declare an extreme disconnection from the real world and a commitment to a negative interpretation of the American economy that is beyond parody.” And when we look at what people are actually taking home, CBO (PDF) showed (Table 1) an increase of real median household income of 35% between 1979 and 2007.
Re: demographic changes, EPI ignores low-paid new additions (young people, immigrants, the previously unemployed) and high-paid subtractions (retiring boomers) to the workforce, such that the apparent wage can decrease even if, on average, everyone with a job is doing better than before. E.g. http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/el2016-07.pdf