[ajuc]

Because homelessness. Because medical bankrupcy and opioid crisis. Caused by THE SAME industry. Nobody's responsible. Because USA is designed by and for small groups of people owning the companies providing for ridiculous money at insane conditions what everywhere else is cheap or free and well regulated.

[wilg]

As I posted elsewhere in this thread, not a good diagnosis of homelessness. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

[ajuc]

Houses per capita: https://imgur.com/oS9d2kf from https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HM1-1-Housing-stock-and-cons...

Homeless per 10k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...

Notice that USA has more houses per capita than countries with homeless populations that are significantly smaller.

People can move between American states easily. If there's a state where living as a homeless person is easier - people without homes will move there. Which will cause the problem to grow there and decrease in the origin state. If you really wanted to only compare American states - at least split the states by "homeless produced" vs "homeless exported". Otherwise it's just propaganda. Also - why would you only compare American states? Seems very manipulative. Like you wanted to ignore the possible causes of the problem that are shared by all American states.

[cwalv]

I had a friend in college who lived in a trailer; he had a mortgage that was something like $17/month. The majority of the expense was renting the spot.

The truth is there already is cheap shelter available .. just not near downtown LA.

[wilg]

Not sure what you're talking about, but I think if you honestly look into the situation you'll find the right answer.

[pyuser583]

Which industry are you talking about?

The pharmaceutical industry is international. Many of the big players are headquartered in UK, Canada, etc.

Hospitals are mostly non-profit, and mostly purely domestic.

[mym1990]

Is the non-profit status of hospitals supposed to mean that they are not driven by the allure of ripping their patients off?

[pyuser583]

It’s complicated. Hospitals aren’t necessarily making big bucks.

They have insane expenses. There are lots investments that are recouped in the doctors office: paying for medical school, buying downtown real estate, decades of medical research, etc.

Nobody says “we have $50 million to invest, let’s build a hospital.” Although investors occasionally buy them.

I don’t think US hospitals are for profit in the sense they have shareholder demanding a return on investment.

Doctors who have the ability to make lots of cash usually break out on their own asap.

So there’s probably some profit seeking, but not a lot.

I know plenty of folks who work for non-profit hospitals, and it’s a total mess. But it it’s usually organization chaos, and not profit seeking.

But I’ve heard stories of venture capital firms buying and shutting down hospitals, but never building them.

[verall]

The pharma-hospital-insurance complex. The same non-profit hospitals in which at least one person you're seen by will be out of your insurance network because it makes more money for the hospital. The same pharma companies which evergreen and lobby for drugs to be ruled unsafe once patent rights run out. The same AMA that limits the number of doctors and ensures they are paid more than any other country while patients wait months for availability. The same insurance companies which intentionally hide their deals with hospitals to obscure the true cost of Healthcare services.

It's not a shadowy cabal deciding to make medicine worse to profit more, the sociopathy is efficiently diffused between everyone involved, many of whom work their asses off in incredibly stressful environments for a tiny share of these profits, powerless to change anything about the system.

But for purposes of discussion, it's one industry and it's fucking broken. It is impossible to fix anything by changing only one piece of this.

[pyuser583]

You’re taking about really different things.

In general:

* Insurers try very hard to keep costs down.

* Unions try very hard to keep labor costs up.

* Drug makers try very hard to keep drug costs up.

* Hospitals just try to survive.

* Medical provider try to keep a decent work life balance while paying off their student loans.

[theGnuMe]

Doctors and other medical professionals working for the govt or qualified non-profits can get some or all of their loans forgiven or paid for. Not to mention there are specific programs to reduce it in general since they are in high demand. Some states are so desperate for doctors they will put you through medical school for free if you agree to work in state for a few years after.

https://www.aafp.org/students-residents/medical-students/beg...

[ajuc]

I could accept these as true if the effect was comparable to any other place in the world. It's not. So either Americans are uniquely bad at trying really hard, or the system is set up with different goals in mind.

[verall]

I'm talking about one thing, it's why healthcare in America sucks, and it has many reasons. Your point, which is that each of the major players in this game really are just trying to do their jobs the best, is the problem. There aren't easy solutions but we at least need to admit we have a problem.

[echelon]

I wonder what the cost of building cheap housing for the homeless would be. To house the entire homeless population. The negative externality of having them on the streets is probably far costlier for everyone, and it's downright embarrassing that we can't do more to help.

As I understand it, these folks want privacy, storage, pets, quick commutes to loved ones, and/or drugs/alcohol.

I think it'd be easy to offer privacy and storage. Let them have locks on their doors (that staff can open). Put cameras in the hallways. I think these things could be done affordably, especially if housing was built on cheap land.

Dogs might be possible and might help some of them recover. There would need to be a system to keep violet animals and maltreatment down, and sanitation would be important. Apart from that, animals help calm the mind. That's probably cheap to do too.

You'd need to feed and clothe everyone, but it needn't be expensive.

Transportation is expensive and should be offered in a limited basis. Non-profits probably already have this cornered, and you could do it at scale even cheaper.

The substance abuse problem I haven't the slightest idea on. You ideally want to get them to stop abusing, and most taxpayers would gag at the thought of providing homeless with the drugs of their choice as an incentive to get off the streets. Not sure how you compel the addicted to leave. Forcing them to leave would be illegal in most municipalities, and it feels a little wrong unless we have quantifiable data that it helps their outcomes.

And then there's the fact that each individual will fall into a range of mental health states. Some may be permanently disabled and in need of institutional housing (which I don't think we do anymore?)

It's a tough problem. Every nation has to deal with this, but some are clearly doing better.

I'm not well educated on this topic, so maybe I have the incorrect assumptions.

[shrimp_emoji]

It's also a violation of Article 25 ¶1 of the UN's declaration of human rights:

```

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

```

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

[JKCalhoun]

So unbridled Capitalism?

[SpaghettiCthulu]

More accurately, corporatism.

[goodluckchuck]

Exactly, most of the country’s most corrupt conglomerates could never survive capitalism, but thrive on government sponsored monopolies and taxpayer funded subsidies.

[Retric]

Capitalism doesn’t inherently mean companies get to alter the laws to favor themselves or government should decide winners and losers with bailouts. That’s a function of the political system involved.

This is something else. In some ways it’s closest too feudalism where the rule of law is subservient to various powerful entities and limited competition exists parallel to various monopolies. Though obviously it’s very different from the historical examples of feudal societies.

[mindslight]

It kind of does? I go back and forth on this - I do hate the trope of blaming everything on "capitalism", because doing so seems like a recipe for something much worse.

But the best good faith definition of capitalism that I can come up with is that it's a framework focusing on capital first and foremost. Contrast with focusing on free markets first and foremost. A lot of people hand wave away the distinction between those two and treat them as synonyms, but they can be strikingly different and even directly opposed.

For example, imaginary property. A focus on capital leads one to conclude that creating new types of capital out of whole cloth is a good thing. Whereas a focus on free markets sees imaginary property as a market intervention (whether justifiable or not).

Similarly, capitalism would seem to include regulatory capture and other purchased legislation as a form of business capital.

[Retric]

> Similarly, capitalism would seem to include regulatory capture and other purchased legislation as a form of business capital.

That seems to equate our current system as the only thing that qualifies as capitalism. Slavery or the abolition of slavery both seem happy to coexist in our definition of capitalist societies. We are happy to talk about ownership of the means of production without including the ownership of workers. The same presumably applies to the existence or non existence of individual elements like intellectual property etc.

Ie. The idea of patents of limited duration alongside copyright of seemingly endless duration both seem to qualify as capitalism.

[mindslight]

Capitalism is not uniform condition of a society, and private capital exists in societies that we wouldn't describe as capitalist. My point is that embracing "capitalism" creates a tendency to approach problems in terms of private capital, similar to how programming in an object oriented language causes a tendency to decompose problems into objects.

> The same presumably applies to the existence or non existence of intellectual property

If the two are orthogonal, why is it common for arguments against imaginary property to be characterized as anti-capitalist?

And is there not a general tendency for "capitalists" to push dividing up things that would otherwise be public commons or the purview of government, to parcel out for private ownership? eg water rights, radio frequencies, power grid, the Coase theorem in general. There have been varying amounts of success with privatizing each of these things, but the point I am making is that putting primacy on the private ownership aspect is a bit like putting the cart before the horse with regards to the overall quality of the outcome.

[Retric]

Calling things anti-capitalist is useful propaganda independent of it actually being anti-capitalist.

> private capital exists in societies that we wouldn’t describe as capitalist

Capitalism at its core is an outgrowth of respect for private property which creates incentives for further investment. A Neolithic hunter is going to invest time into better tools if he’s not worried about those tools being taken from them. As such, an inner city ghetto isn’t capitalist if people expect their stuff to be stolen regularly.

That’s the essential ground truth of capitalism, the minutiae isn’t nearly as important as the incentives. Civil asset forfeiture is directly anti capitalist in ways that changing specific IP laws isn’t.

[JKCalhoun]

Well, I did qualify it with "unbridled".

[Inityx]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

[krapp]

That's oligarchy, which is still capitalism.

[Retric]

Oligarchy doesn’t have anything to do with capitalism. The Roman Senate for example was really an aristocracy rather than what we would consider business leaders as power often flowed from parent to child within powerful families. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Senate

[ajuc]

Capitalism is ok, as long as it's regulated by democracy.

Oligarchy is the problem.