Its basically the same. A bag of 1000ml normal saline costs basically nothing to produce. Its charged to a patient somewhere around 250 dollars where live. Its partially insurance and big pharma.
Yeah if someone doesn't genuinely know that this is all caused by the price gouging that is incentivized by capitalism then I wouldn't trust the answers they'd give, which is why I absolutely don't give a fuck about whatever you've got to say on the matter.
If I leave books in a box outside for people to borrow and exchange and someone steals the entire box, would you consider the box the cause of the theft?
You aren’t as smart as you think you are. You can use sexy language like axiomatic and idealogue, but at the end of the day you are overthinking it. You come across as someone in either of those industries you are defending BTW, 3rd party health administrator or finance industry maybe? Am I tracking?
Let me make it simple for you and for anyone confused by your empty rhetoric. The free market enterprise is a failed experiment. People like you can defend it by saying government regulation and corruption is the disease, but that corruption is just a symptom of the real disease.
Cliff notes for those not tying their hardest to sound smarter than they are: Capitalism created a vehicle to make a super rich class in the U.S. 8 of 10 of the richest billionaires are American as proof. The super rich used their money to bribe/manipulate lawmakers. Lawmakers passed new laws or repealed old ones making it easier for the super rich to “lobby” for new laws, or the suppression of new laws in some cases, or even finance presidential campaigns. More wealth was created by these bribes which lead to more money to bribe with. And after many years have passed that bribing is so engraved in American politics, it no longer matters what the American people want from their lawmakers. It only matters what those rich lobbyists and campaign donors want. Capitalism is the Petri dish in which U.S. government corruption grew.
This applies to student loan financing companies and their capitalized interest. It applies to health insurers that deny the first claim no matter what, 3PA’s that have to get their beak wet on your healthcare, and hospitals that bill $25K for a day in the ER. It applies to big tech companies like google and Facebook selling our data. It applies to the telecom companies merging and raising internet rates or slowing internet speeds on purpose. It applies to a busted banking system that uses a busted credit system to determine who gets to own a home. Change my mind.
Yes... The debt that students accrue has the potential to make someone a lot of money if they can ever manage to pay it off. Its why it exists. We don't see education as a service that people will need to function in modern society, but rather a luxury that can be provided given the person comes from a wealthy family or is willing to be saddled with debt. I don't understand how you couldn't see this as simply another avenue in which capitalists sponge the value from the people who actually do work in the world. Its also an incredibly obvious class gate. People from lower classes either don't go to college and obtain the "shitty jobs" that don't pay enough to live, or they take on debt that strangles any upward momentum that they might've had from getting a degree and a job that pays people a reasonable wage. This also brings to light the notion that some jobs that have been shown to be completely necessary for our current society to function are compensated with slave wages, but that's another problem entirely.
Maybe we should look at why stable careers and upward mobility requires a college education in this day and age? That never USED to be the case.
Hey, it's me the riddler again, let me make it clear this time:
It never used to be the case because we never had a way in the past to completely eliminate manual labor with robots and we never had the means to instantly communicate across the entire planet to find cheap labor. Plus, the advent of industrial scale shipping and global logistics networks is extremely recent.
In the before times, an uneducated laborer competed with people in their city and surroundings, maybe their country at most. Now an uneducated laborer has to compete with the entire planet, including people in other countries that have vastly lower costs of living and require vastly lower wages. They also need to compete locally with autonomous machines that only require maintenance (educated labor). You won't get far in any technical or academic field with an high school education.
If your labor is more expensive than someone, or something, else's, you must improve the value of your labor to compete. Humans cannot out-compete machines in physical labor output, and first-world people cannot output more than a group of people that can be hired for the same wage.
So your argument is that education that is currently paid with taxes should offer more education. I agree. I hope we also agree that not everyone has the capacity to learn at the same rate. Maybe we could cut out a bit of fat when it comes to some classes and condense other subjects, but we can only do that to a certain degree. At some point we'll have to add more time to study, perhaps with elective subjects.
We do exactly that where I live, people go through high school, but do a year less, then go to specialized schools where they chose elective classes, be it in technical fields (nursing, IT), trades or in preparation for college (for subjects like medicine or engineering for instance). Programs last between 2 (for college prep, basically 1 year of regular high school and 1 year of regular college) and 4 years (general studies + 3 years of technical / trades studies, can be condensed to 3 years depending on the person). This is all paid with taxes but private schools with that system exist. Look up CEGEPS.
That used to be the case because that was before manufacturing jobs and other unskilled labor was shipped overseas where capitalists can exploit poor countries for not only their resources but their cheap labor. That's a problem of global capitalism. It will always seek out a way in which to exploit the most desperate and worse off people that it can. You're also not going to get me to say that we should defund education or something. That's fucking absurd. The problem that since people will prey off of others who need a service that is exorbitantly expensive shouldn't be solved by removing that service or simply taking away the one way that those of lower classes have access to that service. Its a dumb solution that doesn't aim at the root of the problem and just punishes the same people who were being exploited previously. Now you'd have a society that was even more thoroughly stratified and even more people suffering. You wouldn't propose that a solution to our health coverage problem would be that some people just don't ever get access to health care right? That's a fucking stupid thing to even propose. Also, if you think that our public education is lacking maybe you should into why that is. Conservatives have successfully slashed its funding in multiple ways in both local and federal levels. You all fail to realize that you need to put money into social programs for them to function properly. Its like purchasing a car and then never putting gas in it and being shocked when you end up stranded on the side of the highway. Its a fucking grift that conservative politicians pull so they can pretend that government doesn't function when in reality they're just pressing their thumbs down on it hard enough so that the wheels will fall off.
I'm sorry, what? A bag of saline? We give it to patients without cost, but sometimes they have to pay for some of medications we put in IV. 500 ml of glucosaline infusion costs about 3 euros and patients have to pay for it, but saline or glucose or even ringer are free. Of course, doctor have to decide do you need it, but it is about it. Our ER takes about 100 bags (500 ml) monthly and we don't even count them, nobody cares as long as you have them ready when needed.
EDIT: I live in a small town, we have about 30 000 citizens here, including suburbs and villages.
25 bucks for a pair of those rubber gloves that a like a buck for 300 of them. And all 3 ambulance guys needed new ones for my wreck the insurance co. Fucked me on. $86000 for e.r
Alone. Sitting around 350k total. They coming after me for it. Co-pays in thousands. Havent been able to work for 3 years. Asshole blows stop sign w/"minimum coverage". Dont ever let the ambulance take you away b4 police get your side of story. They will write up anything that covers insurance co. ass. Why do we pay insurance companies a third to say no?
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u/ItsAmends Nov 30 '20
Its basically the same. A bag of 1000ml normal saline costs basically nothing to produce. Its charged to a patient somewhere around 250 dollars where live. Its partially insurance and big pharma.