[vkou]

Good thing the moral hazard of getting unnecessary healthcare that your doctor ordered for you is controlled for.

Perhaps someone should also control the moral hazard of the people owning and running this racket getting unnecessary amounts of money, or an unnecessary seat at the table.

[fnordpiglet]

The moral hazard is making a product with nearly totally inelastic demand a multi layered adversarial free market with structural price opacity. Thanks Reagan!

[thomasdziedzic]

Reagan hasn't been president for close to 40 years and died more than 20 years ago. At what point do we accept responsibility for this instead of blaming dead presidents?

[nz]

You might be surprised just how durable the effects of 40-year-old decisions are. You can actually see changes to the very degree completion-rates, when partitioned by field of study. Particularly, education and physics fields (as classified by NCES), have absolutely cratered from the mid 70s to the mid 80s, while business fields became dominant. And if you need data, I actually published an entire (and entirely too long) essay, analyzing the NCES data from 1970 to 2011 (a sequel post for 2011 to present is planned), yesterday[0][1]. Healthcare tends to boom and bust[2] in cycles, and those cycles are _inversely_ correlated with engineering, informatics (the most elegant term for what we call "computer and information sciences"), and business.

[0]: https://galacticbeyond.com/two-percent-programmer/

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260620162923/https://galacticb...

[2]: In both the economic sense, and in the completion-rate sense, because those two things are correlated. And they have been correlated since the 1980s, because a lot of the healthcare industry became de-regulated and more profitable as a result, since at least 1978 (when hospitals were de-forbidden from making profits).

[aetch]

Had me in the first half there

[IncreasePosts]

Everyone is in on the grift in the industry. Obama wanted to go single payer but realized 10% of america would be out of a job if we streamlined the bureaucracy

[dghlsakjg]

Obama proposed and pushed for single payer and it was voted down in the senate. Specifically, if you want to blame someone, it was Joe Lieberman who would have been the deciding vote, and he killed it.

Joe Lieberman realized that he was from a state with massive moneymaking insurance operations. Had nothing to do with Obama streamlining bureaucracy.

[mullingitover]

> Specifically, if you want to blame someone, it was Joe Lieberman who would have been the deciding vote, and he killed it.

I too believed that Joe Lieberman sucked, and sure, he did. However: there's a pattern of parties creating convenient designated villains within the party (usually someone not up for re-election) who can take the blame for doing the thing the party insiders planned to do all along. It's been especially noticeable in the current Congress.

When the designated villain sticks it to us next time, notice how there are zero consequences for them.

[dghlsakjg]

Maybe it’s a massive insider conspiracy to have the party ruin its own landmark legislation of the era and all of the coconspirators have kept their mouth shut on a major scandal for more than a decade.

Maybe it was the 1.1 million dollars in donations from the healthcare industry to Joe Lieberman.

We may never know.

[vkou]

Nah, the problem was that the blue dog democrat congresscritters (holding usually red districts) would have been out of a job.

So instead of single payer, everyone got the ACA, and then the blue dog dems lost their jobs anyways.