tptacek

14 ms·

331.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Just want to say that I went looking for cases other than New London and found nothing. You've got something interesting to share here, share it!
332.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Has this philosophical approach ever worked? It's a commonplace in the hard sciences and engineering fields (ie, refusing to work on weapons systems), but weapons systems are elite and well-compensated engineering projects that don&#x2
333.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Sorry, I'm talking about US overall outcomes, which is what I thought you were arguing with all this breast cancer stuff. I am not taking seriously your axiomatic argument that the uninsured are systematically not captured by the US ca
334.
by tptacek 2mo ago
No it isn't! The median wage for an electrician in the United States is about $65,000. It's nowhere near $200,000. The median general skilled wage is lower than that.
335.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Start with CONCORD-3. I'm not saying that the US is better than every other country. I explicitly said somewhere else on this thread that there's a common critique of our outcomes that we just do detection better, and that our l
336.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Just so that people reading this thread know that there is the medical expense version of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it lives inside Medicare (CMS), and it publishes data. Most things people are trying to derive axiomatically on th
337.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Start here: https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/advisory-commi... It's weird to hear someone in medicine say this, because it was a big deal at the time and it comes up in many health care
338.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Sure, I'd buy any hypotheses like this. We just have way more traffic fatalities; I don't have a strong take on the underlying cause.
339.
by tptacek 2mo ago
At the point where you're just dismissing the CMS NHE, you're well into the terrain of unfalsifiability.
340.
by tptacek 2mo ago
No, that's not why. Doctors also make drastically more than the median wage. Doctors make so much in the US because we have artificial scarcity of doctors.
341.
by tptacek 2mo ago
We have numbers for this, we don't need to derive them axiomatically. Practitioner compensation is the largest component of health provider spending. Liability coverage is the second largest component of admin spending, which is 25% of
342.
by tptacek 2mo ago
The AMA orchestrated the capping of residency slots through CMS/Medicare, which is the primary structural impediment to increased supply. Doctors in the US make integer multiples of what they do in Europe in part as a result of this. I
343.
by tptacek 2mo ago
They don't! It's a huge problem! It's probably the problem in US health care, which, despite my own belief that single-payer is bad policy, is in fact a total shitshow.
344.
by tptacek 2mo ago
This article repeatedly makes the point I made; I assume you cited it to back me up?
345.
by tptacek 2mo ago
No, the uninsured are included in both infant mortality and, even more obviously, death statistics.
346.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Oh, sure, it's bad! It's just a particular kind of bad.
347.
by tptacek 2mo ago
This statistic appears to have flown directly over your head. It is not an illustration of how awesome the United States is. The overprovision of MRIs in the US drives costs in a variety of ways; one of the most obvious is that routine imag
348.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I'm familiar with Wonderlic and would be very happy for sources on this, because the only sources I've ever seen have been that dumb New London case.
349.
by tptacek 2mo ago
That number might be true across all health spending, which includes hospital plant, home health care, all public health work (including animal control), and medical equipment. But if you zoom in on clinical and specialist practice, the p
350.
by tptacek 2mo ago
About 8.5% of revenue. This is not a poorly-studied number.
351.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Yeah, and they all generally get there by paying practitioners much less than the US does (by integer multiples). Single-payer, which this working paper equates with "universal coverage", is in fact not the norm among universal sy
352.
by tptacek 2mo ago
That claim is at odds with the working paper's methodology, which gets a good chunk of the $1T in savings it discussed by assuming very sharp cuts to practitioner compensation.
353.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Uninsured Americans are in fact universally included in death statistics and in cancer survival outcomes; we have top-tier cancer outcomes. Europe has several universal coverage systems without single payer. The original sin of the US syste
354.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Yes, this has come up several times on HN before. In a single municipality, with a population of 27,000, more than 25 years ago, one person was declined for a job on the basis of being overqualified. Meanwhile, virtually every major police
355.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Companies are not in fact legally barred from directly issuing IQ tests, and several major companies do. This is for the most part an Internet urban legend (it has a tiny and irrelevant kernel of truth, in Griggs).
356.
by tptacek 2mo ago
So the new comparison is Canada and Illinois. I can remember that! :) (Thanks for catching this! I had no idea.) This is super weird , isn't it? Some of it is obviously overprescription on the US side, but also: Canada could just get
357.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I don't think Venezuela was one of his comparands.
358.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I'm not making a maximalist argument; we might just be compatible here. But I'm not saying that life sciences will be accelerated solely because mathematics is advanced; I'm saying life sciences will be accelerated because th
359.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I don't think the idea is that a frontier model "cures cancer" so much as that it accelerates research that humans do, getting us to answers faster. That's a hard idea to dismiss after what's happening in mathematic
360.
by tptacek 2mo ago
This is like that thing about about $15,000 toilets at DoD. What's actually happening is a cost allocation function where an agreed-on list price for a whole project is getting distributed pro-rata over as many different line-items as

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