The Glade 4.0

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-family-mak

Ran across this little article that explains how a person with kids working one week a month at minimum wage and receiving govt benefits has more disposable income than a person with kids working full-time for $60,000 a year.

Interesting, yes?
Accurate? Who knows.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

It's somewhat skewed, but it's still pretty telling.

1. They arbitrarily increase the cost of childcare for no apparent reason.

2. The Earned Income Tax Credit for a $14,500 earner is technically $5,036, however they can't get that much credit because they don't pay that much in taxes in the first place.

3. The $60,000 earner calculation doesn't take into account health care that this person probably gets from their employer, since employers with a group plan are required by law to offer that plan to every employee.

What I find far more damning is the health care cost by itself. It costs $16,500 a year to provide health insurance to a family of four. That's absolutely insane and nobody would stand for that if they weren't hiding the cost by making the employer or government pay it behind your back.

That is a pretty insane healthcare cost.

I pay around $2k per year in premiums, and my wife around $2500, plus an additional 300-600 between the two of us each year for doctors visits, medicine, etc.

And honestly, I just like the insurance plan because of the security- I could up the deductible and *probably* see an overall decrease in my yearly expenses.

::edit:: I should clarify, that's the total cost... I have no employer/other contributions.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

We have one of the nicest plans out there and we pay roughly $4500/year. That's what WE pay, not the cost. No idea what my wife's organization ponies up.

Would it be fair to estimate that an employer picks up about 80% of the total cost of the plan? I'd like to see what happens when we plug somewhat verifiable numbers into this issue.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Your employers don't break out what they pay vs. You? Remind me Monday it is on all of my paychecks.

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There are first-world countries that insure their entire population for less per-capita than the US spends on Medicare. $16,500/family for health insurance is completely broken regardless of who is paying for it.

Which ones?

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

According to this site, total spending on Medicare and Medicaid was $2,890 per person in 2009. South Korea, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, Greece, Japan, Portugal, and Finland all spend less than this per capita on all health spending combined. South Korea spends less than we do on Medicare alone. That's all health spending combined, the amount they spend on insurance is necessarily less. Probably not much less due to the existence of universal health care, but it is less.

All of these countries insure 100% of their population? Can you cite a source?

And even if its true, aren't they all bankrupt too?

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, there. Yes, every citizen in all of these countries gets health insurance from the government. Of course, you could also argue that every person in the US is also "insured" as the hospital can't turn you away if you're dying. Italy's government insurance for example doesn't pay for some prescription drugs, but they still have universal health care.

However, in every single one of those countries the government is responsible for 75% or more of all health care spending.

Your earned income tax credit can exceed total taxes paid, Xequecal ... and if it does, you get that money back.

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After adjusting for GDP and some other factors the US seems to be around 1,800 a person higher in the healthcare arena. I think we can find a lot of that as passthrough costs due to regulations, malpractice premiums, demand for treatments and procedures, administrative costs etc.

The implication that it's just profit taking by insurance companies and doctors is just preying on peoples ignorance.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

I would suggest it's profit taking by pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, not insurers or doctors. Insurance companies have a profit margin of about 3%, those companies sit around 20%.

I'm asking where you are getting your information.

99% of this is caused by government price fixing.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Total healthcare spending per country: here (download the excel file)
Profit margin for healthcare and insurance companies: here

Then wouldn't it have been good business sense for pharmaceutical companies to raise prices in the EU to lessen that 1800 dollar gap I mentioned? It would have disarmed the price debate and kept a stable market that now has the uncertainty of more government regulation looming.

Why do EU countries get a price break? Why don't we make them pay "their fair share" since the US fostered the enviorment which made these treatments possible? Why don't we just buy our pharmaceuticals outside the US since its apparently cheaper?

Because the same entity that is claiming it needs to fix this is the one that broke it.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Pharmaceutical companies can't raise their prices in the EU because the governments there don't let them. They have to negotiate with basically a single payer that will refuse to pay more. Anyway, how would we make them pay "their fair share"? Our copyright and patent laws do not apply there, and once a medication is produced it's trivially copiable.

As for buying it from outside the US, a lot of people were doing that, especially from Canada, before the feds cracked down on it.

A) See my thread about China. If people aren't honoring our copyrights and patents, we need to stop exporting to them. In fact, we ought to criminalize the export of IP-based products to them, so that it's illegal for them to send people over to buy our products, and bring them back to copy our patented products.

B) Once you've applied pressure to persuade people to honor our patent and copyright laws, now negotiating with the single payer is simple. If they don't want to pay "their fair share," they don't get sold the product. You know, the same way it works for non-single payers without the force of government and the threat of piracy (as it were).

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Exactly the points I wanted you to see. Like gasoline in the US the prices are screwed around with. No wonder we pay more since we are the only market that these companies will make much of a profit in.

Now lets regulate it more instead of having the EU pick up more of the tab. My conclusion- less gets researched and companies do more with easy sellers like

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

How can this possibly work? A medication is only slightly less trivially copiable than software. It's not a matter of exporting or not, they only need one bottle of pills and reverse engineering it to make themselves is easy. There's no way we can feasibly prevent them from getting their hands on any of the medication. It'll get prescribed to thousands if not millions of people, some of which will probably travel over there. China might bow to a threat of an embargo and dishonoring of all the debt they hold but the EU has a bigger economy than we do, such an embargo would hurt us just as much as them.

*Shrug* There's got to be ways, then. If the EU is such a big innovator and economy, then perhaps we just stop honoring their patents and copyrights until they start honoring ours? What's good for the goose...

Or there's simply the notion of big tariffs. I'm sure there aren't any German car companies, for instance, that would balk at the notion of having a 25% tariff imposed on imports to the US. They couldn't possibly exert any influence.

That is true about the medications, I didn't consider US citizens travelling abroad.

However you look at it, though, all those countries that negotiate single payer at the threat of just letting somebody domestic infringe the US patents if they don't comply are sticking "other people" with the research bills.

If we simply join the ranks of those countries, then "other people" go away, and now nobody's paying for research, meaning no research gets done.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That's foolishness. What company seeking to do business in the EU wouldn't seek patent protections there? They might not honor our patent laws, but they honor their own.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

You don't get the patent protections unless you play ball with the government.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill