bhupy

23 ms·

151.
by bhupy 5y ago
> It's a bigger issue in the US since policymaking is strongly influenced by those with money. This is a popular talking point, but one that has thus far been soundly refuted by empirical results. https://twitter.com&#x2F
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by bhupy 5y ago
> we have to decide on one of two mutually exclusive goals > Your link discusses the Scandinavian countries. Those have a GINI (income score) about half that of the US. Of course they have broad-based taxes. I want to address everythi
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by bhupy 5y ago
Are there any videos of Lightning in action in the real world (I.e. not abstract explainers)? Genuine question, I don’t know enough about it and would love to learn.
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by bhupy 5y ago
It certainly is, but then the next debate is whether the existence of rich people precludes a society from being functional and peaceful. I appreciate that you may believe that the mere presence of rich people destabilizes society, and ther
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by bhupy 5y ago
All you really did was declare that your goal is to both make the poor richer as well as the rich poorer. And I respect your right to have that opinion, but just want to point out that there are loads of thriving societies that are built ar
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by bhupy 5y ago
> Having a strong middle class is a deep factor for the stability of a country. Again, in the grand debate about whether we ought to make the poor richer or the rich poorer, both sides would agree that "having a strong middle class
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by bhupy 5y ago
> The fundamental end goal of taxation is to reduce inequalities in a society to keep it functional and peaceful. This is not at all clear. To many others, the fundamental end goal of taxation is to fund the government. The trillion doll
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by bhupy 5y ago
> generally, you cannot go back to traditional Medicare You're always able to go back to traditional Medicare, you just have to wait until the next open enrollment. In fact, after the first trial run with MedAdv, you can switch back
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by bhupy 5y ago
> Medicaid asks a LOT of questions, the food bank does not. Not sure what you're talking about. Medicaid is extraordinarily generous. The only questions that are asked are in determining whether one qualifies to enroll in Medicaid,
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by bhupy 5y ago
> The profit motive is what causes those regulations in the first place! It has always been like that, especially in the states. Actually, that's not true. The regulations were created as a result of a series of well-intentioned but
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by bhupy 5y ago
Yes, agreed. A big part of why that's the case is that the individual market is one huge adverse sample, in its current form. Because most healthy people in the US are employed, they tend to receive their health insurance through emplo
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by bhupy 5y ago
No disagreements re: crisis / war. That's typically when states of emergency are conventionally recommended.
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by bhupy 5y ago
> Many food banks will give people who want food, food. Few questions, sometimes no questions asked. > It is rare to have similar access to health care. No it’s not, you just described Medicaid. The Venn diagram of people that rely on
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by bhupy 5y ago
> Feeding people isn’t a priority! Feeding people is 100% the priority, which is why the vast majority of people in the first world have access to food primarily produced by a predominately private food industry. The US is in the top 5 i
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by bhupy 5y ago
Yes, Medicare traditionally never covered long term care. This was true for both Original Medicare, as well as for Medicare Advantage. Only Medicaid covered long term care, but as you may know that’s only for those with low income. However,
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by bhupy 5y ago
> With food, for example, people have lots of options, and while the need for food is absolute, wants for food can be ignored and or vary widely. Wants for food absolutely cannot be ignored. Without food, you starve and die. Along with h
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by bhupy 5y ago
> You have not met that burden. Not even close. What? I absolutely have. I’m not sure what you’re on about. Switzerland is as close as it gets to a profit-driven purely private healthcare system. Indeed, the US was modeled off of it. The
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by bhupy 5y ago
> So, part of your job is to analyze health benefits plans (health insurance plans) that Americans get. You also work daily with actuaries in the life sector, who assign dollar values to people's lives. Yes, exactly like health insu
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by bhupy 5y ago
> Either the goal is fixing sick people, delivering care, or it is not. That's an odd dichotomy. You could apply this to literally any good or service. With food, either your goal is nourishing hungry people, or it is not; and yet t
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by bhupy 5y ago
> did not find myself sold on the idea we are improving at all. I don't think we're improving either; as long as we have an employer mandate and privileged tax treatment for group health insurance plans, I don't see this c
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by bhupy 5y ago
> Really? That is news to me, as a dual US|EU (Croatian) citizen, who is culturally American--but currently living in Croatia. Yes, and just like that health policy analyst, I can attest to it. I've read more than enough plan docume
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by bhupy 5y ago
Full disclosure: I work in healthcare pricing, so I have some first hand insight into all of this > Fact is Americans have high personal cost and risk exposure relative to nearly all of the rest of the world. This is only true for some
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by bhupy 5y ago
It's a stat that requires a lot of contextualization. To your point, you're absolutely correct that the number of bankruptcies is important, because over the last couple decades, 1) bankruptcies in general have been falling, 2
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by bhupy 5y ago
There’s also something to be said about not only being “just as bad”, but being righteously self-unaware about it.
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by bhupy 5y ago
Totally agree that the devil is in the implementation details which can make or break the idea as a whole. One potential way to mitigate these risks is to have the fund be set up with a strict breakdown, say, 20% of the dividends can go int
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by bhupy 5y ago
Where have we done that? Keep in mind that we're talking about sovereign wealth funds funding a universal dividend; the closest we have to that is Alaska's fund, which provides an equal dividend to everyone regardless of income.
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by bhupy 5y ago
An idea that I really like is to do what countries like Singapore and the Scandinavian countries do: create a public sovereign wealth fund, and then do what States like Alaska do: divert the dividends from the fund directly to the people. A
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by bhupy 5y ago
The episode "White Bear" comes to mind.
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by bhupy 5y ago
Well, in practice, it's not either-or, the vast majority of users get to have both 10+ companies "bloat", as well as 10 album's worth of music. The base model of an Apple iPhone comes with 64GB, which is probably more th
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by bhupy 5y ago
Not wanting to eliminate the corporate tax as an independent intervention is entirely different from imposing a global minimum corporate tax, which immediately precludes sovereign states from even attempting to do what you (correctly) poi

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