The economy is made up of real people

[pmb]

It turns out that unemployment is not funemployment for most people. For every percent increase in unemployment, 47,000 people die [1]. This is very very bad. This means that the increase from the 2006 low of 4.6 percent[2] to the current rate of 8.1 percent [3] our economy has killed more than 150,000 people. And the most optimistic economists

Comments

[pmb]

Hrm. Except for how single-payer health care with mild copays actually seems to be the cheapest system going as a whole, I suppose you are right. But surely you must acknowledge that this is an instance where your libertarianism/ancapitude is advocating for what is actually a *less* efficient system for allocation of health care? All the evidence points that way... We seem to get less bang for our medical buck than any other nation in the world.

For what I pay for other peoples' medicare in taxes, I would also get single-payer health care for myself in every other OECD country except Turkey and Mexico, and Mexico was about to start it up until they collapsed into an almost-narco-state.

[snailprincess]

I actually don't think the evidence is so strong for single payer being the most efficient way to allocate health care. Also, even if it ends up being the most efficient system in the short term, I feel like there is a huge risk of drift off of efficiency once you start it. If you have no open market system to tell you how much things should cost you will likely drift off of efficiency over time, even if you started out efficiently. But you'll have no way to know.

Also, there's a risk of the social services you're talking about actually increasing structural unemployment. Europe with it's rigid labor markets tends to have an unemployment rate several percentage points higher than our own. By your calculation you might end up killing 100k extra people a year.

[pmb]

The evidence is universally in favor of single-payer health care. You can worry about drift and theory all you want, but we've been conducting a massive real-world experiment here with our system and Canada's system and the various European systems, and while we can argue about how *exactly* single payer should be implemented, it is impossible to argue that our system is better overall

[snailprincess]

Single payer systems have also nearly bankrupted countries. Englands is near collapse and I recall some of the netherland countries having to back off of their systems about a decade ago after it nearly caused their countries to collapse financially

[pmb]

We don't know what the ideal system would be. But we do know that single-payer has worked better than ours and is cheaper than ours in every single country that has tried it. Every single one

[snailprincess]

I actually just heard a talk from an experimental economist about the 'split the bill' thing you mentioned. The performed an experiment where people went to dinner and either were going to pay for what they bought or split the bill evenly. When they were going to split the bill evenly, the total bill was like 2 or 3 times more on average. And they found most people weren't even consciously intending to buy more.

[clipdude]

You’re already paying for uninsured people’s medical care. You do it when they get so sick that they have to go to the emergency room, where they cannot be denied care because of inability to pay.