5 ms·

3k month sounds about right for a chronic condition. Many many people pay at least this to stay alive. That said , Universal Health Care is needed for stuff li

3k month sounds about right for a chronic condition. Many many people pay at least this to stay alive. That said , Universal Health Care is needed for stuff like this to work. At 3k a month it makes the most sense to try and emigrate to a better country.

jacquesm 6y ago
That doesn't scale. If you push the cost of healthcare to other countries when it becomes too expensive instead of fixing the system in the country where you live then every other country with a better system's healthcare will collapse as well. Vote to improve the system where you live and make sure that your representatives realize that it could be them or their relatives in your situation. Quite a few countries have restrictions in this anyway, so whether it would even work in individual cases is another matter, for instance, here is Canada's provision: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/inadmissibility/reasons/medical-inadmissibility.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
- offtop5 6y ago
  You could also buy a 10$ bus ticket https://khn.org/news/americans-cross-border-into-mexico-to-buy-insulin-at-a-fraction-of-u-s-cost/ https://khn.org/news/americans-cross-border-into-mexico-to-b...
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Before long they'll be smuggling insulin rather than cocaine if it isn't already happening.
    - disabled 6y ago
      They already do. People buy insulin off Craigslist, in a way that is similar to a drug deal, because they cannot get it elsewhere. They sit in the car while their “insulin dealer” brings them the insulin from Mexico/Canada and they pay them in cash. See: https://youtu.be/VLwDvK0j4DQ https://youtu.be/VLwDvK0j4DQ
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        Words fail.
- malandrew 6y ago
  From all my research, I've come to the conclusion that while there are things that are broken about the US system, it's not as fundamentally broken as people make it out to be. Let's say there are two variables you can optimize for, X and Y, and that there are tradeoffs between optimizations such as optimizing for X often reduces Y and optimizing for Y often reduces X. The problem with the popular discussion today is that no one ever acknowledges what the US system does well. They only talk about what it does poorly. If you don't acknowledge what it does well, it's trivially easy to come up with solutions that address the things it does poorly, but often at the expense of creating a new replacement that now does poorly at the thing that the previous system did well. In the US, the system is remarkably effective at optimizing for financial incentives. The replacement system many people argue for will likely lay waste to optimizing for financial incentives. This doesn't come without a cost however. Eliminate the financial incentives and you will at minimum get less of two very important things: (1) investment by companies and capital markets in R&D, and (2) investment in a career in the field of drug R&D by individuals deciding what career to pursue. The loss of one or both would be devastating to the development of novel treatments in perpetuity. As a general heuristic, I've found it valuable to figure out what a system does well before I propose a solution to replace it. If I can't articulate what a system does well, it's typically a sign that I don't yet understand the system well enough and don't understand what that system's designers were optimizing for when it was first implemented. This heuristic is applicable to all pretty much all systems, not just health care.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    This comment is in very start contrast with the sibling thread regarding insulin. If a common drug like that is price gouged to the point that people will do street deals on unverified product then things are about as fundamentally broken as they are going to get, fancy discussions about optimizations and trade-offs can be discarded by simply looking at the available evidence.
markdown 6y ago
> At 3k a month it makes the most sense to try and emigrate to a better country. Countries won't let you in if you're going to cost taxpayers too much. For example, New Zealand won't let you emigrate there if you have serious psoriasis, since treatment can cost thousands of dollars/month.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  For biologics, sure, but steroid creams are the standard treatment and work quite well, and are much cheaper - maybe $100/year.
  - markdown 6y ago
    I used "serious psoriasis" when I should have used "severe psoriasis". If your psoriasis is treatable with steroids and methotrexate, it isn't all that severe. But psoriasis wasn't the point. Expensive treatment that's expected to be ongoing is.
grecy 6y ago
> 3k month sounds about right for a chronic condition My god, what a horrible way to look at life.

jacquesm 6y ago

That doesn't scale. If you push the cost of healthcare to other countries when it becomes too expensive instead of fixing the system in the country where you live then every other country with a better system's healthcare will collapse as well. Vote to improve the system where you live and make sure that your representatives realize that it could be them or their relatives in your situation. Quite a few countries have restrictions in this anyway, so whether it would even work in individual cases is another matter, for instance, here is Canada's provision: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/inadmissibility/reasons/medical-inadmissibility.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

offtop5 6y ago
You could also buy a 10$ bus ticket https://khn.org/news/americans-cross-border-into-mexico-to-buy-insulin-at-a-fraction-of-u-s-cost/ https://khn.org/news/americans-cross-border-into-mexico-to-b...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Before long they'll be smuggling insulin rather than cocaine if it isn't already happening.
  - disabled 6y ago
    They already do. People buy insulin off Craigslist, in a way that is similar to a drug deal, because they cannot get it elsewhere. They sit in the car while their “insulin dealer” brings them the insulin from Mexico/Canada and they pay them in cash. See: https://youtu.be/VLwDvK0j4DQ https://youtu.be/VLwDvK0j4DQ
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Words fail.
malandrew 6y ago
From all my research, I've come to the conclusion that while there are things that are broken about the US system, it's not as fundamentally broken as people make it out to be. Let's say there are two variables you can optimize for, X and Y, and that there are tradeoffs between optimizations such as optimizing for X often reduces Y and optimizing for Y often reduces X. The problem with the popular discussion today is that no one ever acknowledges what the US system does well. They only talk about what it does poorly. If you don't acknowledge what it does well, it's trivially easy to come up with solutions that address the things it does poorly, but often at the expense of creating a new replacement that now does poorly at the thing that the previous system did well. In the US, the system is remarkably effective at optimizing for financial incentives. The replacement system many people argue for will likely lay waste to optimizing for financial incentives. This doesn't come without a cost however. Eliminate the financial incentives and you will at minimum get less of two very important things: (1) investment by companies and capital markets in R&D, and (2) investment in a career in the field of drug R&D by individuals deciding what career to pursue. The loss of one or both would be devastating to the development of novel treatments in perpetuity. As a general heuristic, I've found it valuable to figure out what a system does well before I propose a solution to replace it. If I can't articulate what a system does well, it's typically a sign that I don't yet understand the system well enough and don't understand what that system's designers were optimizing for when it was first implemented. This heuristic is applicable to all pretty much all systems, not just health care.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  This comment is in very start contrast with the sibling thread regarding insulin. If a common drug like that is price gouged to the point that people will do street deals on unverified product then things are about as fundamentally broken as they are going to get, fancy discussions about optimizations and trade-offs can be discarded by simply looking at the available evidence.

markdown 6y ago

> At 3k a month it makes the most sense to try and emigrate to a better country. Countries won't let you in if you're going to cost taxpayers too much. For example, New Zealand won't let you emigrate there if you have serious psoriasis, since treatment can cost thousands of dollars/month.

freeone3000 6y ago
For biologics, sure, but steroid creams are the standard treatment and work quite well, and are much cheaper - maybe $100/year.
- markdown 6y ago
  I used "serious psoriasis" when I should have used "severe psoriasis". If your psoriasis is treatable with steroids and methotrexate, it isn't all that severe. But psoriasis wasn't the point. Expensive treatment that's expected to be ongoing is.

grecy 6y ago

> 3k month sounds about right for a chronic condition My god, what a horrible way to look at life.