[cornellwright]

This is completely right. I don't think people realize how much tying healthcare to full time employment hurts people and slow innovation.

It makes people stick in bad situations and disadvantages small businesses both financially and in wasted time.

[tankerslay]

Health care has leeched a huge amount of wage growth from the economy, in businesses large and small.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-28/health-ca...

[ainiriand]

It is an interesting way of seeing it. The way I look at it is that by not having universal healthcare, like the rest of the civilized world, is costing you a lot of money to sustain.

Take for example Lantus insulin. My gf needs about a box a month and in the US is at least $289.46. Here in Ireland without insurance you pay 40€ and we pay only 5 euro when properly insured. Actually you can apply for chronic disease card and it is free to you, those 5 euro cover all. Checking strips, insulin meter, needles, all covered. So it is not healthcare what is expensive, it is making money out of you.

[candiodari]

Well, in trade for health care ... yes. In the same way cars and TVs have "caused" a huge amount of debt.

[lovich]

Cars and TVs go down in price for the same feature set as technological improvements and nor efficient business models are created. Healthcare has gotten more expensive every year for the same features(ex, a physical, or treatment for the flu). That is where healthcare is leeching money out of the economy.

They haven't provided any improvements in service or products, they've just learned how to wring more money out of everyone

[candiodari]

First, cars haven't gone down much in price. Advanced in quality, sure. Gone down in price ? Hardly, at least in my experience. About 8-14 months net pay. TVs have gone up massively, mostly because flatscreens make ridiculous TVs possible. A CRT screen just can't be big. 50" is ridiculously large for a CRT, and anything under 40" is just unusable, so there just wasn't much difference between the cheapest and the most expensive screen in the 90s. Then, when plasma screens came, the prices for the top end went utterly ridiculous. But in the 90s you just couldn't spend a month's pay on a (single) TV. Now, 32000$ screens are in every electronics store (who do they sell these to I often wonder).

But the thing is, eliminating labor from healthcare seems to just be impossible to do in a responsible manner. So their prices go up with specialist labor prices. And yes, those have not exactly gone down. As for actual prices for basic things, I do get the impression they've gone down. Not by a lot, but 20-30% over a decade or two ? Certainly.

[tankerslay]

>TVs have gone up massively, mostly because flatscreens make ridiculous TVs possible.

Your assertions about price movements sound rather curious as they appear nearly the opposite of what is obtained by people whose job it is to measure these things. https://fee.org/media/17509/prices2-1.png

https://fee.org/articles/why-large-screen-tvs-are-affordable...

[candiodari]

Looking at that article, they are comparing same-for-same tv sizes, and essentially saying that the 40" TVs are really cheap now.

I'm saying the biggest TVs (the ones that everybody seems to buy, like 100" and up) are far more expensive than the biggest TVs used to be 20 years back.

Also that article argues for competitive private healthcare. We've tried that. We know where that leads. Trust me, you don't want that.

It also comes with such insightful statements as this one: "Consider each product or service shown. College is heavily subsidized, regulated, and exclusionary, and the costs are soaring."

Yes this whole student loan thing we keep hearing about ... nothing to do with anything, right ?

[tankerslay]

A very limited number of features have improved (e.g. if you have HepC). At the same time there has been massive price inflation for things that are marketed as "improvements" without convincing evidence of actually being better (e.g. nexium vs prilosec, many medical devices).