This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

You need to actually look at the data here. Much of US healthcare is non-profit, at least on the provider side, and the for-profit provider institutions don't make that much money. People naturally then assume it's the insurance companies that are making out like bandits, except they're all publicly-traded so we can see exactly what their profit margins are and they don't remotely explain the high cost of healthcare. At worst, the for-profit model adds 5%, and there's no real reason to expect it to add even that. In most industries, for-profit is more efficient than non-profit, because it turns out that the competitive drive for profits drives costs down.

Again, look at actual numbers. What you'll find is that this explains basically nothing. Yeah, they have high salaries; take those and spread them across the patient base and you're talking about maybe 0.001% of healthcare costs -- and then only if you assume that these high salaries represent a pure loss, that an administrator getting paid a tiny fraction of that would the job just as well. If you assume that at least part of those high salaries are payment for services rendered, then the CEO salary overhead is even smaller.

Again, the pharmaceuticals are publicly-traded and they break out what they spend on advertising. Is is a lot in absolute terms? Yes. Is it a lot relative to the total amount of money we're talking about? No.

I'll stop here, but the same applies to everything else you mention. Yes, there is some waste due to the for-profit model, but it actually isn't that big. Our drug costs are high because we fund most of the research, because we can afford to. If we found a way to stop doing that, a lot of drug research would stop. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is something you have to decide. Personally, I think we get a lot of value for that money.

It feels like you should be able to point to just one thing and say "That's why healthcare is expensive in the US!" but you can't, really. The root cause is actually a lot of different things, and most of them have their roots in regulation (and, specifically, the way in which we regulate), rather than in a for-profit model.

If you want to make US healthcare both very cheap and very good, but only for those who can afford it, you should do the hard-eyed libertarian thing and go full-on for-profit, including removing the legal requirements that doctors treat people who can't pay, and eliminating Medicaid and Medicare and all of the complexity and cost they add. Also, make competition nationwide -- make provider and insurer licensing federal so states can't impose different requirements, and set up nationwide medical and nursing licensure processes that eliminate the ability of the AMA to artificially restrict supply. Quality would go up and competition would drive cost down for probably 70% of Americans. The other 30%, however, would be screwed, hard. Well, maybe 20%, or 15%, because prices would come down, making healthcare more affordable for everyone but free for no one.

But because we as a society will not leave the poor completely without care (not even free ER visits), the libertarian pure-market approach won't work. So, instead, we should go the other way and offer a national single payer option. This would not make healthcare cheaper by itself, but it would enable regulatory pressure to begin chipping away at all of the many sources of high prices. It wouldn't ultimately make healthcare as efficient, cheap or good as a pure market-based approach, and likely wouldn't make it as cheap as what other countries pay, but it's the best we're likely to actually achieve.

Look, this isn't complicated.

1. If you're going to claim you know what people should do to be healthy, you should have both formal education and experience in the space.

2. If you're going to be an administrator over a health organization, formal education and experience in healthcare are a very good idea, but what you really need is to know how to be a good administrator.

RFK Jr. wants and claims to be able to do #1, but lacks the knowledge, skills or experience to do so.

If RFK Jr. wanted and claimed to be able to do #2, that would be fine. He's maybe a little out of his depth in such a large and important organization, but if he could bury his ego and work hard at it, he could probably do it reasonably well. But the overriding requirement to do it well is to listen to his subordinates, who are experts in the field, while he's a lawyer with no medical or scientific training. But obviously he won't do that, because he thinks he does know better than the experts, i.e. he is trying do do #1, which he isn't qualified to do.

True, though note that Google does have all the data needed to brute force that password, so make sure it has plenty of entropy. I recommend "correct horse battery staple".

Yeah, but then you have to drive an ICE, which sucks. Slow, noisy and smelly.

True, but if the EVs have decent range (say, 300 miles), a reasonable commute (say, 40 miles) and there's a fast charger in the area, it's easy enough to make sure you never get into a situation where an overnight power outage will keep you from getting to work. Just hit the fast charger whenever you're out and about and your remaining range has dropped below 100 miles, just long enough to get it back above 100 miles, which will only take 2-3 minutes This won't happen often for most people, less often than they have to visit a gas station now.

If there's a multi-day outage this becomes more problematic, but we're well outside of what's common now.

L1 charging even works fine for a lot of people, especially if there's an L3 fast charger in the area for occasional use. If your car is home 12 hours per day, on average, you can put in 50 miles of range per day with an ordinary 120V 15A outlet. That's 350 miles per week, which exceeds the 280 miles per week the average American drives. A sequence of heavier-than-average driving days could leave your battery low, which is why it's helpful to have access to a fast charger, though it won't normally be needed.

If you can also plug in at work (e.g. if you WFH)... L1 becomes all you actually need.

This was less true a few years ago when EV batteries were smaller. I got an L2 charger because I was driving a Nissan Leaf with only ~80 miles of range, which means it had little to no buffer to handle extra errands or whatever. If I wanted to go out to dinner after work I needed significant range added in the 2-3 hours between getting home and going out, but if your car has 300+ miles of range, that's not an issue.

That just means you need to change your business model to one where the longer people stay, the more they spend. In the case of services around EV chargers, the sweet spot is about 30 minutes. You want to structure your offerings so that it takes a half hour to consume most of your amenities. Have a few extra options for people who might stay longer, but 30 minutes is the target.

So, what do you offer people who are traveling (other than fuel)? Bathrooms, obviously, but that only takes five minutes and you can't charge any money for it (not in the US, anyway; people expect bathrooms to be free for paying customers). If you're selling them gasoline, there's not much time left after the bathroom break, so you offer them snacks and sodas. If you're selling them electricity, you still have them for 25 minutes, which is just about right for a fast food meal plus some snacks for the road.

Your advantage with EV chargers is that your customer base is more "captive". With gasoline cars, they'll often stop for gas, then head to a restaurant a few miles down the road, maybe in the next town. But with EVs, they eat within walking distance of the chargers. They'll often do some shopping, too, if you can find the right goods.

One option to exploit this is to build amenities around your chargers, the "travel plaza" model. Another is to find a location with good travel amenities and put your chargers there, getting local businesses to pay you for the customers you bring them.

The comments here demonstrate a lot of AI Effect, to the point that most of it is clearly wishful thinking plus lack of experience with current-generation LLMs.

This whole debate is a little weird to me, because unassisted suicide is very easy, and cheap. Out of an abundance of caution I'll refrain from describing common cheap, painless, easy methods, but the information is very easy to obtain online. So it seems to me that the issue really only arises if the patient is already severely debilitated by their illness, such that they lack either physical capacity to carry it out. Those situations occur, of course, but they're far less common that the scope of the debate would seem to imply.

Thus, I think the first step any regulation should apply is to ask the question "Is the patient physically capable of unassisted suicide"? If the answer is yes, then no one may assist, except to provide information. This alone should filter out nearly all of the "greedy relatives" cases. If there's a case of an individual who says they want to die, and is physically capable of doing it but just can't bring themselves to... IMO that's a case of someone who hasn't really decided they want to.

Happy to: It has NO VALUE.

The problem here is that your definition of "value" is invalid. Your claim is equivalent to saying that shares of Apple stock have value because we have built systems to ensure that ownership of them is unique and non-duplicable, and that the supply is finite. But that is not what makes shares of Apple stock valuable. What makes them valuable is that they represent partial ownership of a company that produces and sells hundreds of millions of useful devices every year, among other things, and generates hundreds of billions in profits.

Shares of stock, dollars and bitcoins are all non-duplicable, finite-quantity tokens, but the shares of stock and dollars are tokens that represent something in the real world, while bitcoins represent nothing beyond proof that some electricity and some hardware was diverted to create them and transact them, rather than put to a productive purpose.

Yes, it's true that the guarantees of the non-duplicability and finite quantity are stronger for the coins than the others, which could theoretically make bookkeeping easier and reduce the need for auditing of transactions, but it turns out that the cryptoasset guarantees are hugely more expensive than the old way of bookkeeping and auditing, and the non-reversibility of crypto transactions is a fatal flaw for serious real-world use (though it's a boon for scams). If cryptoassets were easier and cheaper to exchange than traditional methods, and if there were a good way to address the reversibility gap, it would make sense for countries and companies to switch to using crypto-tokens rather than audited database entries. Maybe someday someone will invent a crypto-token design that achieves that, and then we'll trade shares of Apple stock by exchanging tokens on a blockchain (or similar). But even if we do that, it will still be the case that it's the ownership of a productive enterprise that provides value, not the token, no matter how elegant the cryptography.

Note that I'm not saying this because I don't understand the cryptography behind cryptoassets. I'm a mathematician and a professional cryptographic security engineer; this stuff is literally my day job, and has been for most of my 35-year career. I deeply understand the (actually quite simple, though cleverly assembled) cryptography and precisely what it does and doesn't do. It strongly ensures that there is a limited supply and that coins cannot be double-spent, and it does this in a decentralized way. That's it. The limited supply and non-duplicability are properties required of any asset, but aren't what give an asset value.

Most people fundamentally don't believe in markets. Look at how they react when prices rise due to a supply bottleneck or similar. They shout "Greed, we're being gouged!", even when there's plenty of competition to keep prices down and rising prices is actually the optimal solution to suppress demand in the short term and encourage increases in supply in the long term. Conservatives are worse than liberals these days, since conservatism/liberalism has evolved to be divided in large part by education level, and market mechanics are really non-obvious and counterintuitive unless you've had at least some level of formal (even if auto-didactic) education in basic economics.

I think markets are, to a first approximation, the ideal solution for every problem that involves optimization of large-group human behavior. Only when markets clearly don't or can't work should you even start to think about non-market alternatives, such as direct regulation, or even subsidies.

But shockingly few people agree. Carbon pricing immediately makes them want to know who's getting the money and why they should get it, even though that question is irrelevant to the primary goal.

I have great confidence in market-based solutions to rapidly move us toward optimal solutions to the climate problem. I have near-zero confidence that it's what we'll do. Heavy-handed, imprecise and mildly counter-productive regulation is the strategy we'll take, if anything.

More like 80% for me. I use Rust.

(In Rust, an expression without a semi-colon at the end of a block -- including at the end of a function -- is the return value for that block. This is used heavily in idiomatic Rust, which means there are lots of lines that do not end with semi-colons. The more you use short, single-purpose functions and the more you program in a functional style, the fewer semi-colons you use.)

I'm also a fan of market solutions. Most people aren't, though, and they're especially challenging with an international problem, so I don't think carbon taxes or warming fees is how we'll do it.

I think you present a false dichotomy. Several of the proposed geoengineering schemes are relatively inexpensive, though of course a lot of investment will be needed to demonstrate their practicality and effectiveness. I expect that geoengineering will be much cheaper than getting to net zero.

However, that doesn't mean we don't also need to get to net zero, because the geoengineering proposals only address warming, not the other effects of high atmospheric CO2. Ocean acidification and whatever is downstream of that is probably the biggest one, but there are others.

Geoengineering should be viewed as a short-term mitigation strategy, not a long-term solution. I think we'll need that mitigation, though. Assuming AI doesn't kill us all and render the whole question moot :-).

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.