Month: February 2013

The True Cost of Health Care

09:36

Dr. Belk begins explaining how intellectual property law is ultimately extortion and murder. $70,000 a year for leukemia pills in one case.

The fact that families of dead leukemia patients aren’t executing big pharma CEOs faster than they can be replaced is proof that there will never be a revolt in this country. We will literally let our family and friends die before doing anything other than sign petitions and choose Coke over Pepsi come election time.

This is also why chemistry calculation software doesn’t exist for sale, let alone for free. The last time I looked the most I could find was a company that had software but charged you per use. You had to email them you question, pay them and then await a software generated answer.

Seems like all it would take to fix that is a coder with a chemistry degree, but coders are the digital version of big pharma pyramid climbers, they want to be steve jobs when they grow up, so naturally they aren’t going to share something so valuable/difficult. Must better to hop on the gravy train at one of the usual stops. (Education, Medical, Industrial.)

Please prove me wrong and link me to an open source chemistry application designed to do for chemistry what Wolfram Alpha does for math. But even they don’t put their code on a device or offline software.

IPL==Extortion

18:34

This is why my credit score was destroyed because I can’t drive or use the phone, nor do I have insurance, (because it’s a little hard to find a job when you can’t drive or use the phone) which means when my gal bladder decided to start torturing me one night and I went to the ER, and didn’t get so much as an aspirin or diagnostics in excess of checking my blood pressure, I was billed ~800$ which naturally I could not pay, nor could I negotiate because there was a massive line at my closest hospital so dad drove me to the next one which was not biking/walking distance.

All that is academic though because I didn’t know any of what Dr Belk explains. So I assumed that they were billing me what the services cost. I didn’t realize I’d have to haggle. I didn’t realize the answer to the question “what do I owe ya?” when put to a hospital is “well, whatta ya got?”

26:51

A classic example of where all the profits from enhanced technology actually goes under a capitalist system with no meaningful redistribution.

(My island example on this essay goes into that http://underlore.com/bait-and-switch/)

This is one of those places where coders and technologists hop on the gravy train. Yes the machine will run the test in seconds, but purchase of, and care and feeding for, that machine is over priced to a gargantuan degree because of hardware and software patents.

27:47

This is why it won’t ever get any better unless we force it on them. As he said EKG is ancient in the modern medical context. “It takes more far more technology to photocopy an EKG then it does to run the original.”

28:28

“In every case, they’re billing on average about ten times what they expect to get paid and if you want to pay for it yourself… That’s your fine. You get _fined  ten times as much as this service is worth because you decided not to use your insurance to pay for it.”_ ~Dr. Belk

“This means that insurance companies control every dollar that goes into and comes out of heathcare. And by controlling every dollar that goes into and out of health care. They have 100% control of the message. They can tell us whatever they want about health care costs and who are we to argue?“_ ~Dr. Belk

29:12

MRI vs Airplane Ticket. #epic #NailedIt

And he says that an MRI machine doesn’t cost as much as an airplane and he’s right, but even if it did the question would be why. Thanks to the coders and technologists that own the patents on the software and hardware said machines they get to ask the end user (hospitals or medical diagnostic companies) “Well how much you got?”

If you public-domained all the hardware and software patents/copyrights that cost would drop substantially.

This entire culture is designed to do one thing by the people that own it. To Enslave You. And they will say and do whatever it takes to make that happen, and to keep you from fighting them on it, or to keep you from striking.

36:17

Malpractice insurance cost: ~$3,000 a year. The price of which has been dropping nationally in the last decade.

37:10

Just watch this section. A family of 4 with no medical problems and free doctor visits pays 18,000$ a year in health insurance. That’s 3x his other insurances (houses/cars/business/malpractice/etc) combined.

More importantly, he sums up the disparity between dropping actual costs and rising insurance costs.

41:44

“All of this technology they’re talking about? That’s lowered the costs, not raised them.” ~Dr. Belk

Exactly. And that’s happened system wide. We are not going broke, we are being robed!!!

42:22

What is meant by “cost” in the medical context.

43:56

What we can do. #1 Shine some light on the prices.

45:00

“The problem is most people think they already know this.” ~Dr. Belk

Amen brother. Boy Do They Ever. http://underlore.com/Food%20for%20Rage.html

_”The only thing in this country that is more broken than healthcare is our political system. And unfortunately going to our politicians to fix healthcare is a little bit like going to Zimbabwe to fix the financial crisis in Greece. But we can try.”_~Dr. Belk

It’s all the same, do we or do we not tolerate being pillaged?

http://underlore.com/if-not-now-when/

Apparently we love it.

“But that’s always the big thing about laws. We always assume that if we pass a law then everything will be great, but you have to spend the money to enforce a law for it to work.” ~Dr. Belk

Or be willing to enforce it at all…

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213

_”This is why I am doing this: You cannot solve a problem ever until you fully understand it.”~Dr. Belk

“I have a lot of libertarians following me on this they love this message because you know libertarians love this thought of paying for it yourself. and so they’d all throw rocks at me if I said single payer would improve things the fact is it probably would but it’s never gonna happen in this country.” ~Dr. Belk

Not this libertarian. Some of us aren’t islanders. (http://underlore.com/islanders/)

“Our leaders don’t lead, they don’t even follow, they are dragged by their hair if you’re gonna get them to do anything. To call them our leaders is a complete misconception.” ~Dr Belk

And hands down the best quote of this whole thing:

“They only have the power that we give them, and it is up to us to take it away.” ~Dr Belk

Bait and Switch

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ~Richard Buckminster Fuller

I grow weary of the implicit assumption that it’s perfectly ok to demand that all humanity be forced to trade labor for survival. I thought the whole point of consciousness and technology was to transcend nature’s ant-like hamster wheel.

The ultimate point of machines isn’t to simply change the character of our servitude, but to eliminate it. We didn’t invent the plow simply to trade the hunt for the chore, the chore for the wage. There is more possible here than a market full of slaves competing for the most desirable whip.

The only things which should ever be enslaved are those things which are incapable of experience, and make no mistake giving in to the notion of universal conscription, even if conditional, is enslavement.

There is already a shortage of useful actions as a result of technology. Whole fields have already been more or less replaced.

Everything is getting easier, and the culture has yet to face the simple fact that eventually there won’t be enough needed tasks to go around. We have 3 basic choices. Mass culling/population control, mass unemployment/deception/delusion/regression, or mass profit sharing.Yes there will always be some things that need doing. The answer here (as usual) is more freedom and more compassion.

The exact opposite of the islander (http://underlore.com/islanders/) position.

Busy work, or refusing to face the fact that jobs as we think of them are finite, are not the solution. If we’re just going to make up jobs to create wage then why not skip the middle man and give everyone wage and let creativity and ambition fill the gaps?

Because our culture is ruled by the terminally greedy/stupid/delusional/sadistic/psychopathic that’s why.

“Would it feel right to have others doing all the work for you for nothing in return? I know I wouldn’t.”

There are a lot of subjectives/assumptions in that question.

Without asking a few of my own questions to nail it down I’ll just answer this way:

No, so long as all the “others” are being paid ethically for doing “all the work.”

Now making a different set of assumptions my answer would be: Well if I felt bad then I would go find a use for myself. But isn’t it better to give me the real choice than it is to try and force me?

This is also more efficient by the way, because it “takes money off the table” which as Dan Pink tells us improves my productivity, especially in creative areas, which are growing in importance almost by the minute.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

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Imagine you’re on an island. On this island the population is 100. To support them 100 tasks per day must be completed. That’s 100% employment.

Now, imagine someone on this island (the professor?) builds a device that does 25 of those tasks. Is it right to starve the 25 newly unemployed people so that the professor can grow rich off the proceeds of his device? That’s capitalism, and how it responds to surplus labor and innovation.

IMO though he yes does obviously deserve recognition and reward for inventing the device, he does not deserve that reward at the expense of anyone else. He deserves it only as a larger cut of the net cultural profits without any externalizing of cost.

The assumption is made that additional tasks for the obviated workers can be found. I’m saying there aren’t always additional tasks, and I’m also saying that even if there are, people shouldn’t be forced to find or invent them on pain of deprivation/austerity so long as a minimum level of support is possible.

Not as charity, but as a human right to a slice of the pie your ancestors earned via the building of the culture, a slice which is your human birthright. If inheritance is legitimate, so too is a universal basic income.

For the record: Forced employment for all eternity is slavery, and I’d rather die than be a slave. If force is attempted not only will I die, I’ll hurt the system and anyone acting as its agent on my way out.

With regard to me the system has two choices, pay me my birthright sufficient to live in peace and health, or kill me. Currently my parents are choosing to pay on the culture’s behalf. Not counting the food card, the cost of which is divided (unevenly in the wrong direction) amongst the population.

Further, had my system been in place, or something like it, I’d have been able to save up all this time and start my own business. Poverty is self fulfilling. So is wealth. The islanders in people like me create a self fulfilling prophecy. They say I’m lazy and don’t deserve pay because I don’t have “a job” but their denial of initial resources is exactly why I can’t create what they would call value with my life.

Basically capitalism as it stands incomplete as it is, is the cliche ignorant islander telling the starving Somali farmer to get a job because they refuse to even offer a loan citing the farmer’s unemployment as a bad credit risk, never mind the fact that a loan in itself is already exploitative.

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Addition: The concept of minimum wage is already an effort to redistribute wealth conditionally based on contribution. If you eliminated minimum wage, wage slavery would become not just a problem but the standard condition of life for 99% of Americans.

One Possible Solution