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Friday Fun Thread for May 12, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This will probably get buried but it's outrageous that you can be bankrupted by medical debt if you get sick in the US! In Europe this doesn't happen.

EDIT: thanks for the gold kind stranger


I'm really exhausted by what seems to be this interminable stuck-at-superficial-memes discussion about health care in the US. I've lived in the US, spent a few years in the UK and experienced NHS, found it surprisingly shitty even though I was looking forward to rubbing Americans' faces in it, and then I ended up back in the US and actually on Medicaid (by near accident! a story for another time though) and found the quality significantly higher.

My new EA cause area for improving health care in the US is to arrange to have everyone live in Europe for a few years so they can get past using it as a cudgel for trying to advocate for their ideology that will fix everything.

I suspect it would backfire horribly and important lessons wouldn't be learned because the irony is too thick, but I dunno I'd really enjoy hearing "whaaaat? I need to wait 3 weeks for a blood draw because the one phlebotomist for my area is on vacation?"

To be clear I'm not saying the UK health care system is an order of magnitude worse (or better) than the US one, just that there are tradeoffs that can be hard to appreciate until you experience them.

(I had a different reply here but I deleted it because I was triggered by stuff that resembled something that you weren't actually saying. Sorry.)

But how much better is it? Perhaps less than those numbers would imply, on many metrics.

What metrics are there, out of curiosity? I've only really seen "outcomes" mentioned but in my surface view these are confounded by issues of affluence (e.g. more obesity, more driving everywhere). Also it seems like ass-covering and hostility-to-rationing drive up costs as well; a socialized medicine death panel could cheerfully say no that test is expensive and highly unlikely to find a problem so there's no rx for it end of story, but in the US an indicator that you could have a 0.01% chance of a horrific disease justifies the test so end of story.

In the UK you can usually get ‘that test’ done privately for less than the cost of the average annual deductible in the US if you really want it.

So, interestingly, my current wealth insurance plan is one where I pay out of pocket for stuff and then apply for reimbursement. This puts me in a position to shop around before I get tests to find the lowest price out of an attempt to stay under the per-incident deductible and also generalized fear that I might be stuck with the whole bill.

It's really eye-opening! The variance between rates quoted for a test is sometimes an order of magnitude and I can't get anyone to tell me why.

I've listened to podcasts with doctors and they will complain about such and such imaging machines being shit and others being great and that's why they refer to so and so place only.

So. I dunno my prejudice is that these cheap tests produce crappy grainy images that your doctor hates but they just roll with it. But I could also totally understand if it's also because proper supply and demand forces are completely distorted and you really do overpay by 10x for the same stuff