Comments by "" (@jmitterii2) on "" video.

  1. +Chase Gallagher When I was a child, it blew my mind that hospitals, clinics, or any other medical service or product providers were ran like any ordinary business as well. I had always thought it was like most roads, utilities, fire departments, public K-12 education, etc. paid via taxes. But when I went into the doctor's office once as a kid, my dad was upset because I decided to opt out of getting a wart taken off, the entire reason why we went in the first place, that it was a waste of money to even go in. Fortunately, my body became immune to the wart virus and the warts vanished within just a few months after seeing the doctor. My dad and mom both yelled at me for wasting a $100 office visit. That was the first time I understood that going to the doctor or doing anything doctor-wise was for profit business and it was weird. This is in the mid 90's, I had played sim city and those games the hospitals were like schools, police, fire, etc. they were city ran and paid for by taxes since they inelastic essential services requiring huge economies of scale in order to be efficient providing a lower per person pricing.   Anyway, it has always baffled me that we have an old economic structure that reminds me of the days of snake oil salesman, and quack doctors you had to pay substantial sums of money usually for bogus ineffective treatment. I thought, wow we're idiotic country. Now that I'm older... I still think the same.
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  2. +Vinnie Chan They're not even using the market logic correctly, it's not "Free market" which really doesn't mean anything on economic terms. It's about competitive market principles. And like utilities, fire, police, etc. these things are natural monopolies as they require huge economies of scale, they're also essential services on top of the huge economies of scale that have essentially a perfectly inelastic demand curve which is yet another hit in the competitive market principles.  These violations of the competitive market principles basically mean, using a competitive market in such as sector will be less efficient than using some other method such as collectively paid, operated or highly regulated method. The free market meaning has escaped people into stupid land. What they'll go back to is a form of robber baron plutocracy, which unfortunately we've been heading for the past 30 years in the US. Indeed, many of the perpetually developing countries never really left a robber baron type plutocracy; hence why they're perpetually in a state of under-developed.
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  3. +Light of Judgment What I find interesting about at least Germany, is that they have price controls. It's one of their clever ways they can compete fairly well within the EU. Essentially, their relative earnings is smaller than many other countries in western Europe, but their domestic prices such as rent and some other staple goods like food are price controlled, to be lower, therefore their domestic purchasing power is actually stronger. Their relative actually pay outside of Germany is lower giving them the usually inauthentic comparative advantage of having lower waged workers, but domestically/internally that lower wage with the price controls is actually as high if not higher in purchasing power than the same countries. They're kind of cheating, but with this weird return to a neo mercantilism trade structure, it's actually pretty smart way to play the system for benefit for essentially their entire people; it is however at the expense to all the other sucker countries not realizing their game. Germans generally aren't idiots with numbers, this is the same country that actually came up with the very brilliant Kurze Arbeit or Short Work, instead of laying people off, the government would help business cover workers pay as if they were working full time. So if their normal work week was 37 hours, they all get cut so many hours say to 30 hours or 27 hours, the government paid the workers the difference, therefore the workers never took pay cuts nor went unemployed, this stopped the vicious deflationary cycle that generally happens during recession and allowed the economy to recover quickly after the great recession; demand didn't slump so far. And when things got better, the hours were restored, and the short work program ended. This was actually cheaper than paying unemployed people unemployment insurance money, as well as made the nipped the vicious cycle of lost jobs beget more lost jobs cycle making it faster to restore at least their domestic economy. They were out of recession incredibly quick. The US has skewed income levels as well, and we have more percentage of our population in poverty than most developed European countries, on a review we ranked 7th highest in child poverty out of 37 countries. That's not very good for a rich country. Essentially, we have a few people who make a tremendous amount of money, and the rest not so much. And even using the median rather than the average, we still get the distortion because the incomes between higher earners and lower earners is so extreme, you can't really even use the median to try to find a decent statistical median 50/50.
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  4. +john olmos We get estate claims at the water company, and someone had a final life expenses mostly medical for $2 million dollars, it was a claim against their estate (whatever money or assets they had left after death). It's a judgement for the money, and they have to send it to all the other creditors including the water company, it's why we see it. It's sad. $2 million in final medical expenses. Bet whoever it was, in at least that way, was glad they were dead. Whoever their beneficiary was going to be though probably ended up with squat, even large house around $250-$300K wouldn't pay off a bill like that.
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  5. pugfugly1989 Our medical system in the US is a complete and utter joke. My visit to Japan to just a family and urgent care clinic and to Germany, they have not just X-Ray equipment (maybe found at such small family doctor practice in the US). But Japan and Germany's family clinics have a small MRI machine, Ultra sound equipment, and some actually have CAT scan equipment. Some actually do away with the X-Ray commenting that's ancient technology LOL! We're stuck in the late 19th century.
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