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Economics & Investing / Re: Retiring Boomers Making Inflation, Labor Shortage Worse
« on: January 19, 2023, 02:36:34 PM »Is it grift?
Absolutely it is a grift.
Look at healthcare spending relative to GDP across time for the US and then look at it versus any other country and it is obvious there is more than just a bit of mixed shifting around of costs.
Even the least expensive patients in the private sector get to enjoy things like differential pricing based on insurance status, gotcha dropped coverage for pre-existing conditions (illegal, but they do it anyhow), illegal to import medicines from Canada (out of alleged safety concerns) even though the company which manufactures the pills offshored the production to China or India, double billing, billing for services not rendered, hidden prices until after the fact.
There are also CON laws where you have to get your direct competitors to sign a paper stating your services are needed before you can open a new service provider, then on the flip side there are hospital groups doing regional roll ups, the whole "out of service" insurance exemptions & so on.
Of course older people break down and consume way more healthcare products & services than younger people do, but like just the fraud in the healthcare system is a tithing over the entire economy.
Think of how much hype something like ChatGPT is getting & how much online databases and technology have lowered the cost of organizing data sets over time. Obamacare was being touted as a "jobs" program
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/07/what-is-the-effect-of-obamacare-economy-000164/
where people were getting McJobs shuffling paperwork back and forth between insurers and care providers.
When Republicans pushed to repeal the ACA the New York Times warned it could detrail that McJobs job engine
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/business/health-act-repeal-would-strike-economys-engine.html
And all we really need to do is look at the stock price of United Healthcare (UNH) since Obamacare passed and ask if we should expect government regulated financial intermediaries to grow market cap at a faster rate than the global FANG monopolies have. Their share price was ~ $21 a share when Obama took office & is now ~ $480, for a 23x growth in 14 years. They aren't a small company either, with a market cap of $448 billion - about 25% larger than Meta.
My disgust for the above gift stems in part from having my wife dropped from insurance coverage twice. Once before Obamacare and once during it. If we didn't move after she was illegally dropped by the insurer we would have been fined for being uninsured.