Maybe a solution is to stop using insurance for things insurance shouldn't be involved with?
Do you use your car insurance to pay for a new air freshener? Do you use your home owner's insurance to get a new throw rug? Of course not.
Yet, we are using insurance to pay for things like birth control and penis pills. We don't use our car insurance to cover a tune-up or inspection, but we expect our health insurance to cover our check-ups.
Stop mandating that the insurance companies cover everything and pay for regular health care out of pocket.
Or, you know, go with single payer - which is what I'd suggest. But, expecting insurance to cover regular care just means it is one more avenue where an intermediary is profiting without adding real benefit. Insurance is for when things go wrong, not for regular care.
Really, though, I'd strongly suggest single payer.
It turns out that covering basic preventative care for "free" actually creates better outcomes. People feel obligated to go for the checkup when they've already paid for it, or more accurately are not discouraged from going because they can't afford it this month. Preventing disease is a lot cheaper than treating it in many cases, and creates a better quality of life for the patient. This is one reason countries with socialized medicine fare so much better on their health outcomes at lower cost.
The stats on 'bad outcomes' relate to 'life expectancy' etc. - but those are only indirectly related to healthcare.
If you have cancer - and could be anywhere in the world - it would be under an American health-insurer.
America has the #1 healtchare system in the world for those who are covered. For those who are not - it's terrible, obviously. And, it's crazy expensive as you pointed out.
But 'direct outcomes' are not bad - they're good.
Due to all the 'inner city violence' + Medics coming back from the war - American emergency rooms have become goddam miracle centres.
The number of people dying from gun wounds has dropped dramatically due to the amazing ability of the American healthcare system (perverse reasoning, but hey).
It's a crazy situation, but it's not irrational that 'cutting edge healthcare' is 2x expensive as 'socialized healthcare' that we receive here in Canada. 10% improvement (for those covered) at 2x the cost seems about right actually.
Take total US GDP in 1950 and divide by total compensation (wages plus benefits) for all private-sector workers. About 50% of GDP went to workers, and 50% went to owners of capital.
That 50% ratio stayed constant until about 1975.
The ratio has steadily deteriorated until today, where workers now keep 43% and capital keeps 57%. That 14% is a massive, tectonic shift and shows no signs of reversing.
Not necessarily, because the workers need a capital investment to either design(lab, testing equipment) or build(tools, factories) the robots. This means that at least some portion of the wealth they generate will go to the capital investor. In the case of research, there's a significant investment risk, so the potential rewards are seriously skewed towards the investor. In the case of production, depending on the sophistication of the work the investor could still be taking most of the generated wealth.
This is what communism talks about with "seizing the means of production" - without capital, the workers cannot exercise their design & production skills, and thus the wealth they generate is split between them and the capital investor.
Workers compete with themselves to design breakthrough machines or improve their work productivity in order to generate more wealth; capital investors naturally get exponential gains by continuing to reinvest in a growing economy.
In that sense, there should be a steady increase in the capital/worker ratio of GDP ever since the industrial revolution.
The Marxian response, although unpopular, is the rate of exploitation has increased. For Marx, technological development leads to more constant capital versus moving capital (i.e more machinery and tools of production) being employed which means that there is a drop in demand for labour-power; while the total value inputs and outputs are identical, only the composition of the value has changed. The falling demand for labour-power means that labour has less of a negotiating place at the table which can lead to real wages decreasing.
(Edit: Why are my comments receiving instant downvotes within less than a minute of posting? Who exactly is doing this, without explanation, and more importantly why?)
I don't think what you said is controversial, it's sound.
Marx's observations were mostly sound, and I think, not inconsistent with Adam Smith. It's his solutions that were crazy-balls.
Ultimately, all things being equal, tech that makes companies more efficient will drop employment and wages. 'All things' are never equal though :).
We should consider the fact that while modern countries are going anywhere fast - 100's of millions of people are coming out of abject poverty. That's often overlooked.
>100's of millions of people are coming out of abject poverty. That's often overlooked.
I very much agree. People on my side of the political spectrum often dismiss how much good capitalism has done to people, especially those in improvished countries, though it's important to note that even despite these improvements, Marx campaigned for Socialism - not beacuse the improvements were useless, but because there is more to a mode of production than lifting people out of poverty - we must also question the social, psychological and moral aspects of the way in which people live; while nobody disagrees that the standard of living has increased, whether the quality of life is the best that it can be, or that it should be, is a very hot topic and the Frankfurt School in particular hads taken it upon itself to examine this.
I made a comment[0] yesterday relating my problems with capitalism, and partly they are the reason I am a Socialist; perhaps we may find some agreement in the diagnoses of the problems but not the solutions, being as "crazy-ball" as you put them.
I know what you mean, but I wasn't even espousing an opinion here; I was offering the view of a particular school of economics which has found a recent resurgance in academia from names like Anwar Shaikh and Richard Wolff. I simply can't think what would mean that someone comes along, reads my comment, for whatever reason disagrees with the fact (not the view, as there is very little view in my comment) and then clicks the downvote button.
I'm sure I've read that dang has said that downvotes shouldn't be used to mark opinions you disagree with - yet here we are. I would really appreciate explanations, surely this is not above those people who have 500 karma - like I am, they are entrusted with extra powers over the content on the website; perhaps if they behave in such a way antithetical to the idea of Hacker News (that of sharing strangely interesting ideas and perspectives) perhaps they should not have that ability.
Would you please stop using HN for political/ideological battle? We ban accounts that use HN primarily this way, and yours looks perilously close to that threshold. It's not what this site is for, because it destroys what it is for—thoughtful discussion for the intellectually curious. If you want to smite ideological enemies, elsewhere would be a good idea.
2. Bullshit, even the reasons you provide are rooted in monetary incentive, e.g. how does one provide a better life for ones family? You give a nice example in Open Source at least, but tell me, do you think the self-motivated hackers can create enough value by themselves to support the vast majority of society leeching off UBI? At $1000 per month per American you're looking at well over $3,000,000,000,000 per year. Sure would suck to be one of those motivated individuals having your labor exploited like that.
Have you heard of the "fallacy fallacy"? The idea that calling out a fallacy merely invalidates the whole argument. Please explain how I have made the fallacy.
>to support the vast majority of society leeching off UBI
I'm not a proponent of UBI.
>At $1000 per month per American you're looking at well over $3,000,000,000,000 per year.
Although I'm not proposing that everyone be given $1000/mo (I'm arguing for Socialism, not charity!) the reason why you say it is so infeasible is firstly because (i) you regard $1000 as "basic income" (ii) you don't think this amount is already paid to the working class as a whole.
If the companies can collectively afford to pay people wages, then it would follow that an economy in which the companies have been replaced by a central organ would also be able to pay the same wages. $1000 is well below the median wage in the US (around $3100) which leads me to believe that Americans (by this I mean American workers) are are already collectively paid more than $3,000,000,000,000 per year. So why exactly is this number infeasible? It's already being paid, just by many entities instead of one.
> So why exactly is this number infeasible? It's already being paid, just by many entities instead of one.
The problem with your logic is that you would need an extra $3,000,000,000,000 ON TOP of the value currently paid out to the workforce (someone needs to create all that value), unless again you'd like to rob the workforce of their labor to redistribute those not providing labor?
>The problem with your logic is that you would need an extra $3,000,000,000,000 ON TOP of the value currently paid out to the workforce
Why? Those already making sufficient (i.e more) than the basic income wouldn't receive extra money. A proportional tax could be used to fund those who do not make the basic income to supplement them until the required amount is reached. For example if the basic income is $2000 and someone only makes $1500, then they would be given $500 each month, not $2000 as you seem to be implying. Those making $0 would be given $2000 each month. Massive taxes on unused land, extremely high "earners" and imports can help toward the goal of accumulating sufficient amounts. Laws regulating the rate of exploitation could also be introduced to lower the amount which each worker must be supplemented by if at all, capturing most but not all of the extra revenue made by the introduction of labour saving devices (also serving to reduce the rate of exploitation or stop its growth).
If workers get the same amount of money within the $0->$2000 bracket, what benefit do the employers get in paying them more? This introduces an easy corruption scheme where employers provide minor work benefits to employees who are willing to take a "pay hit" and supplement their income through UBI instead.
Why would these jobs even exist, anyway? The employees don't get a benefit from doing them(unless they enjoy the work, but then it's essentially a hobby, because your income does not depend on it). This should drive wages for jobs under the UBI limit up, e.g. why would a janitor agree to be paid $1000 if he can just do nothing and collect the same amount of money?
Since the work for these jobs needs to be done, businesses will need to provide some kind of monetary incentive for people to do them - e.g. you would have to pay people $3000 instead of $1000 to realistically entice them to work. The number might even be higher, because of diminishing returns in compensation(e.g. the first $1000 per month you get buys you food and housing, so you value it highly; once you cover the basic costs of living you start getting into luxuries, which people might value less).
What about previous jobs which netted $3000, but required qualifications on top of the ones you get for $1000? Why would people pursue these qualifications when they can now do the former $1k job for the same compensation? Would this not mean that you would need to increase wages for those people as well, in order to keep them working? This might have a lesser effect across career paths, but certainly within a single career path the upward pressure of the under-UBI jobs will force the over-UBI jobs to shift up as well - e.g. if you paid your "store worker" $1000 and your "store manager" $3000, the "store manager"'s salary now needs to go up, otherwise why would they take up the extra responsibility?
I'm not sure what the effect of this upward pressure on wages will be, but certainly some of it will be eaten up by rising prices - i.e. the supply of goods hasn't gone up but the demand would, with more available wealth in the population.
That's not how basic income is proposed. Basic income means everybody gets the same amount, regardless of what they are earning. At least that is the proposed solution and is the accepted definition. It is universal and unconditional. If you make a million dollars a year, you still get the same basic income check as the guy who is earning zero dollars per year. (Obviously, the guy making a million dollars per year would be heavily taxed.)
That means workers are producing more per hour for employers.
Yet wages are flat.
Who captured that extra productivity?
And what changed in the economy to allow them to capture incremental worker productivity instead of the workers themselves?