NY Soda ProhibitionFollow

If you refer to London 2012 - worthwhile, it had a feelgood factor for the country and has given us a little legacy. It also regenerated an entire area of London.

What will be the legacy of NY Soda Prohibition?

You've said this a million times, and been wrong a million times.

Unless, of course you can prove it.

Which you can't.

Huh? Talk to anyone who was an adult in the 50s and 60s. Ask them about health care costs and about health insurance costs. Basically, everyone could afford basic health care. You paid as you went and it was relatively inexpensive. Insurance covered major medical costs (hospitalizations and operations and whatnot). It was also relatively inexpensive because it only covered rare and expensive things. It's like you're asking me to prove that people managed to live prior to television, when quite obviously they did.

Honestly though, that's because of government funded stuff as well (medicare specifically). It's funny, but medicare will continue to pay for a nearly infinite series of life extending treatments. You know what it wont cover (or not sufficiently)? Hospice. Oh. It'll pay for the nurse care and medicines, but not for the room and other related care (which is by far the larger cost). So you are literally better off spending hundreds of thousands of government dollars on procedure after procedure and long expensive hospital stays than saying "F-it" and just taking some pain meds while you wait to die.

If people were limited in terms of total costs rather than type of treatments covered, they'd make very different choices.



You likely wont have much choice. Not unless you actually commit suicide or something. Cause you don't get to spend your money the way you want, but the government takes your money and then tells you how it can be spent. So there's your freedom issue right there.

No. You'll have the government doing it instead. The difference is that the for profit organizations do what they need to do to earn a profit. So if people pay them money for insurance, they kinda have to deliver on what they promised, or they don't make money. Once the government has your money, it can change the terms and conditions of what you get however it wants, and you really don't have much say in it.

The problem with government run health care is the same basic problem of pension type systems. They are not investment driven, but rely utterly on current funding to pay for current costs. So you pay for 50+ years of your working life for those people who were receiving care while you were working. But when you need the care, that's being paid for by the current crop of taxpayers. Taxpayers who may find it in their best interest to cut the care you receive in order to reduce the costs coming out of their pockets. And when you're in that condition, you'll be in the minority and more or less at the whim of the younger majority.

You have zero recourse in that situation. You get whatever care the government says you get. With a privately funded system, you pay into your own health care, either via some kind of account, or insurance (or both). Since you've got a contract with the insurance provider, they're required to provide you the coverage agreed upon in the contract. And if they fail to uphold that contract, you can turn to the government and courts to force them to. Also, you get to decide what care and treatment you want based on what you can afford and what you want to spend money on. If you've invested your own money into your own account, and you choose not to spend it, you can hand it to your children and grandchildren instead. You can't do that with money you paid into medicare, so you have no reason to even think in terms of cost. I'll point out that you do *not* have a contract with the government. It can change the terms anytime it wants to and you're just out all the money you've paid into the system all your life. Also you have no real power to choose what is provided and what isn't, and there's no cost savings to you if you chose a less expensive alternative. And there's nowhere to go if the government makes that decision, cause you know, it's the government. So it's basically worse all the way around.


My issue is that actual health costs *will* rise over time absent competitive forces keeping them low. This is not a guess or speculation, it's a market fact. It can't not increase relatively speaking over time. At some point, those costs will rise to the point of unsustainability. At that point, the cost per "unit" of heath care wont or cant go down, so what must give is the quantity or quality of care. Which means that you wont get what you will feel you've paid for. It's not a matter of "if", but a matter of "when". And I suppose who happens to be in the generation that gets screwed by this.



Edited, Mar 20th 2013 8:14pm by gbaji

Well, at least Oregon gives me the freedom to do that if I so choose.


Edited, Mar 20th 2013 8:30pm by someproteinguy

Your system wildly skews people away from receiving preventative, or early intervention care, except for the tiny minority of wealthy Americans. THAT is probably why your overall healthcare GDP costs twice as much as any other OECD nation, for the same or worse results.

No, it's mostly end of life care. There have been hundreds of studies, we don't need to guess.

I heard instead of Taps, they play Yakkity Sax at funerals.

Ironically, I was in Oregon last weekend, visiting my dad, who's in Hospice. 3 years or so of cancer treatments wasn't a problem financially because that's all nearly 100% paid for. Medicare pays for pain medications and someone to administer them, but not for any of the other costs related to caring for someone who can't get out of bed by himself. Know what else doesn't pay for Hospice care? VA benefits. Well, they do, but the application process is typically longer than the time you've got left, and they don't reimburse.

Course, my dad's an ornery cuss, and 90 days (is that just like a stock estimate?) will probably end out being more like a year. But then the benefits will still only pay about 1/3rd of the cost per month, so that's not necessarily a good thing.


Oh. Just wanted to say: Portland is a dump. Salem is beautiful though.

Thanks. No, I reconciled with him years ago. He was always a tough parent, and that's difficult to deal with as a child, but you actually kinda appreciate it as you get older. What responsibility I do possess, and my work ethic, I largely got from him. Poor housekeeping and eternally being 15 minutes late I got from my mom (but I'm working on that. Really!).

It's an interesting experience because he's relating stories about himself and his life that he never told us before. Like the time his ship (LSD Comstock) hit a buoy while he was in the rear steering compartment. The buoy got caught in the propeller and broke some things, causing said compartment to start flooding. The other two guys in there disappeared, but he was told to stay at his post. Which he did until told he could leave, at which point the water was up to his neck. Apparently, the commander and captain were relieved for that incident. He also got to witness the one and only nuclear depth charge test. And I found an old newspaper clipping from his (apparently tiny and news short) hometown about him being on one of the ships involved in some big amphibious landing exercise which would be filmed for footage in the exciting up and coming film "South Pacific".

The only time he got emotional was when talking about a friend of his from the war (not sure how they met, but they were into power boats here in town later on), named Frank something, who'd been at Chosin and later became Sergent Major of the Marine Corps (at least according to him, but he could have gotten that wrong). Lots of information and we're trying to get as much as we can. That side of my family is not as well known as my mom's side, mostly because they all live in Missouri or thereabouts, so any information is good.

gjabi is stuck in a leave it to beaver episode.

Health care in the 50's and 60 and especially back in the day of 'house calls' is irrelevant. This is a different time. Life expectancy had increased since the 40's (it's plateauing now). Diseases and medical technologies have changed considerably. Also, house calls are a very inefficient way to distribute health care. Considering the advances in transportation, they were on the way out - with our without government intervention.

Regardless of all that, health care in the 50's and 60's was nothing to brag about for most.

My dad broke his arm as a boy in the 40's. They were a farm family and couldn't afford much in the way of health care nor even quick transport to a hospital. He eventually got the arm set, but it had already started healing improperly. It's been a bit weird all his life. His little sister died of the flu. Both my parents ended up with false teeth in their twenties because of no access to dental care.

So yeah, you used to be able to trade a goat for a self-taught doc to pull an aching tooth, but this is a very very different time gbaji.

But that's about advancements in medicine, which has very little to do with how we pay for it. We managed to have significant advances in medical treatment over the first half of the 20th century, all prior to the passage of medicare (early 60s), much less the HMO act (mid 70s). There's no reason to assume that the health "care" would suffer if we used a direct pay method (and some argument that it might improve faster). What would change would be how much it would cost.



Which is exactly what would happen today if you didn't take someone to a doctor to get their arm set. The difference is that the cost to get a broken arm set today is much higher relatively speaking than it was in the 40s. So we're worse off in that regard.