Retirement Blues: Deep Stupid #17 / Six Word Saturday

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Saturday, April 24, 2010

Deep Stupid #17 / Six Word Saturday - 4/24

Pay your medical bills with chickens.

The Stupid - it clucks!

Update: For deeper thinking, one can, as always, count on Krugman

5 comments:

Magical Mystical Teacher said...: La Stupida hasn't the brains of a chicken!; April 24, 2010 at 10:52 AM
Tylaine said...: Hi just browsing some blogs and found yous! (I was checkin out six word sat.) Looks like a fun blog. Glad I found you :)
So should I or should I not bring a chicken to the doctor's next time? :); April 24, 2010 at 11:28 AM
BadTux said...: Or as I've repeatedly pointed out, sick people consume over 16% of U.S. GDP, yet probably only produce 3-4% of U.S. GDP (when they're well, that is). Going to an all-cash medical economy would result in the end of medical innovation and a lot of dead people, since 3-4% of GDP isn't sufficient to fund anything more advanced than my mom's 1960 Merck manual, where probably 90% of the pages had this advice to doctors:"Send patient home with palliative care to die." Now most of those things that said "send patient home to die" in 1960, like kidney disease and liver disease, have actual treatments. But it cost a whole lot more than 4% of GDP to develop and deploy those treatments.

The only way to deal with medical costs is pooling, where everybody throws money into the bucket with the understanding that the typical year that money is going to go to other people but in the unlikely event that they get sick with, e.g., leukemia ($1M to cure it, only 10,000 cases per year), they'll be able to pull money out of the bucket to treat it. We call that *insurance*, and without it, modern health care simply does not exist, because 3-4% of GDP simply won't fund it. And what drives the tighty righties nuts about health insurance is what I've pointed out over on my own blog: There is no actual free market for health care once you have health insurance, because providers have the ultimate power of life and death over you, and you'll pay literally an infinite amount of your money if it'll save your life -- or, if insurance comes into the picture, an infinite amount of *other* people's money. Which clearly is incompatible with the whole idea of a "market" for health care.

- Badtux the Healthcare Economics Penguin; April 24, 2010 at 3:26 PM
Jazzbumpa said...: Mystic & Tylaine - thanks for the visit.

Tux -

I was just being snarky and having fun, and you go all serious and rational on me.

Even beyond your point, isn't the fundamental flaw in for-profit health care insurance the inherent conflict between coverage and profitability?

Here is real world proof.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100423/hl_nm/us_wellpoint_cancer

Of course, the real world means nothing to Repugnicants, Glibertarians, and Conservatives in general.

WASF,
JzB; April 24, 2010 at 3:36 PM
Kimmy said...: Gosh, I wish I saw this before cause we just had to pay a large medical bill the other day. Darn it!! lol

Happy SWS!; April 24, 2010 at 6:09 PM