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[Rusty Shackleford]

snip

Can you really say it's politically impossible to tax things for being unhealthy in the US when every state and the federal government have special high taxes on alcohol and tobacco? I understand that you might personally oppose these taxes, but Americans in general seem pretty tolerant of them.

Okay maybe not impossible but it would be pretty unpopular. Not just with individuals cause their sugary drinks and snacky cakes would cost more but special interests like Coca Cola and farmers would oppose say, a tax on HFCS. It wouldn't really stop with a fat tax either. It would hurt corporate bottomlines would be seen as excessive nannying by individuals.

 They've always taxed alcohol and tobacco since religious types supported it traditionally. Also alcohol is still pretty cheap. Most people have come to terms with that but I doubt many Americans would stand for a plethora of other heavy sin taxes on other consumer goods. Probably almost as much as they'd hate paying for other people's unhealthy lifestyles.

[scriver]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is an entirely awful way of presenting information and I hate it. It hate it.

There are big problems with it (neither axis is zero-rooted, one has to assume what the unlabelled cost figure represents, there is no actual 'standard' conversion rate from one scale to the other save what one chooses and change the scales/offsets and the gradients can all be made positive/all negative, and without every country represented we can't be sure that the US is not just the "worst of the absolute best" like Norway would appear if one excluded the US and rescaled accordingly...  does that cover it all, or did I miss something? ) but it demonstrates useful things like the fact that the apparently pilloried "wasteful" NHS, in the UK, may or may not be imperfect (there are problems, and arguments rage over whether it is due to too little oversight or too much) but it clearly does better in cost-benefit ratio (if raw LE is considered a benefit) than yonder colonials at the lower latitudes...

Oh, I was mostly getting at that it doesn't have the usual L shape that I expect from graphs and that made me have to look closer to figure out what it said...

[Starver]

You could get a scatterpoint graph, then, from the same data, and see who sits above the best-fit line, but it might be difficult to label or colour-key all the countries where they cluster (.au and .ca on the same LE line and very near each other in the cost direction, .se and .fr even closer!), so I think labelled strips (has the appearance of scissor-cut coloured card, laid out physically then imaged!) indicates 'trends' well enough for the respective data, even if a bit deviously.

(It certainly looks like a "downward trend" for the US, if one assumes time horizontally and a single scale upwards, and I suspect that it was not an unhappy (mis)association to have conveyed to the vasual viewer, for those who formed the diagram, even if only a side-effect of presenting notarised and fully-referenced data intended for more knowledgable scrutiny by those who would not be so easily mislead.)

[Rusty Shackleford]

Just keep attacking that windmill - such cases get thrown out of court almost immediately, when they aren't fabricated entirely. They exist only so that the gullible will try to give away a potent line of defense. Then there will be nobody to speak for those crippled, wounded, or dead because the doctor insisted that they were obviously faking chest pains to get Vicodin, or that they collapsed because they were paranoid after smoking half a joint two hours earlier.

Of course there are legitimate cases. I support 'loser pays' tort reform such as it is in Europe. If the victim is right than its free. anyways.

Otherwise everyone paying for healthcare is also paying for litigation insurance, which is astronomical anymore.

I suppose your solution is to make the government aka the taxpayer pay for this, right? Or more accurately taxpayers 20 years in the future that have to pay the assumed debt taken on by the government to finance this kind of shitshow?

You compare national debt with gross domestic product to determine if there is a problem, not tax revenue.

You are correct about this, as a portion of GNP the federal government has fairly sane amount of debt compared to say, western European governments.

Also the primary mechanism the federal government uses to assume debt is through issuing bonds. So if they want to borrow money, the increase the bond interest rate to attract more bondholders. Why its kinda funny when people say 'oh China owns us! We owe them so much money! When in reality they just own T-Bonds they can't do anything with besides sell them to somebody else or hold then until the maturation date

Anyways, I derailed myself. I don't even remember of I had a point to make besides that single payer healthcare would only be feasible through a substantial rework of the entire system. Also ideologically most people don't consider it to be the federal governments responsibility to provide healthcare but that concept is pretty eroded by now. It would otherwise be an astronomically expensive to say, simply buy health insurance policies for everyone tommorrow.

[McTraveller]

Oh, I was mostly getting at that it doesn't have the usual L shape that I expect from graphs and that made me have to look closer to figure out what it said...

That graphic was, in fact, absurdly terrible.

I have seen a "correct" version of it - where the x axis is spending per capita and the y axis is life expectancy. It shows the same information in a much more appropriate scatter plot, and more clearly shows how the US cost per unit life expectancy is very different than other countries.

EDIT: dang, sniped by @Starver

[Starver]

That graphic was, in fact, absurdly terrible.

There are worse ways of doing it.  e.g. array the countries along the X axis (optionally sorted by any criteria you might care for) maintain left and right "valuations" and either mix bar and line (each (colour-?)keyed to a different side-scale) or double up lines or side-by-side bars, similarly differentiated.

Or bar(/line) graph upwards from the X for one figure (benefit? i.e. LE?) partnered by bar(/line) downward for the other figure (cost?). Necessarily not zero-rooted, in either direction)p.

Or superimposed radar-plots (filled centre, other line swipes in and out of the filing).

Or pie-chart them, segment angles to (proportion of total of) one figure, segment radii/area proportionately relating to the other.

TIMTOWTDI, and they've definitely avoided some of the actually terrible methods.

[Zangi]

Healthcare is a booming captive market.  What financial interest is there in allowing the government to screw with that?

[McTraveller]

We should commission a tax-funded study to determine if it was, in fact, the worst way to present that information. 

More seriously - it's a very tough thing to try and actually rank healthcare. It's kind of the issues with any policy. Consider the "a rising tide raises all boats" that is often quoted for one economic policy or another.  There is a marked difference between "raises each boat" and "raises the average of all boats".  It's almost certain that every single policy raises the average of all boats, but never ever raises each boat. And that's the crux of the issue - the boats that must be lowered so that other boats can be raised don't like it. If you could actually raise each boat then there probably would be far less wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Consider the following hypothetical: you have a moon base that has a population sufficient to support one doctor. A second doctor arrives.  That second doctor is going to probably come in at lower prices so he can have some business. The entire colony is now better off, because the total spent on doctors is now lower. BUT the first doctor is guaranteed to be worse off - fewer customers at a lower cost. EVEN IF the prices didn't drop - the first doctor will be worse off because the customers are going to be split between two providers. Even with price parity, the overall colony will be better off because wait times, etc. will be shorter with two doctors than one.  QED, raising "all boats" does not "raise all boats".  Now I fully admit that in some cases this may not be true, but it is almost always true that raising the aggregate condition requires the (at least short term) sacrifice of some individuals. (This also applies to climate change mitigation tactics, incidentally.)

[wierd]

Indeed. Raising the average can mean giving a single person immortality, and perfect healthcare. Since the average is all persons in the pool, divided by the number of persons, such an occurrence would skew the value absurdly. I would not consider that a valid way to view the situation.

Raising the MEAN, or even MEDIAN healthcare on the other hand--- that might be useful as a metric.

[smjjames]

Isn't median the same thing as average? But yes, choosing average as a metric can still mean extremely lopsided results.

[McTraveller]

Isn't median the same thing as average? But yes, choosing average as a metric can still mean extremely lopsided results.

Arithmetic Mean is the same as average. Median is "the value which half the population lies below, and half the population lies above".

The mean (average) of [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,11] is 2.  The median is 1.

[scriver]

We should commission a tax-funded study to determine if it was, in fact, the worst way to present that information. 

More seriously - it's a very tough thing to try and actually rank healthcare. It's kind of the issues with any policy. Consider the "a rising tide raises all boats" that is often quoted for one economic policy or another.  There is a marked difference between "raises each boat" and "raises the average of all boats".  It's almost certain that every single policy raises the average of all boats, but never ever raises each boat. And that's the crux of the issue - the boats that must be lowered so that other boats can be raised don't like it. If you could actually raise each boat then there probably would be far less wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Consider the following hypothetical: you have a moon base that has a population sufficient to support one doctor. A second doctor arrives.  That second doctor is going to probably come in at lower prices so he can have some business. The entire colony is now better off, because the total spent on doctors is now lower. BUT the first doctor is guaranteed to be worse off - fewer customers at a lower cost. EVEN IF the prices didn't drop - the first doctor will be worse off because the customers are going to be split between two providers. Even with price parity, the overall colony will be better off because wait times, etc. will be shorter with two doctors than one.  QED, raising "all boats" does not "raise all boats".  Now I fully admit that in some cases this may not be true, but it is almost always true that raising the aggregate condition requires the (at least short term) sacrifice of some individuals. (This also applies to climate change mitigation tactics, incidentally.)

On the other hand, the doctor can now see a doctor when he too gets ill

[Playergamer]

God, thanks for that analogy. Now I'm imagining two doctors trying to cover themselves in fake blood and snot to make the other one look bad.

[Starver]

I have more than the average number of eyes that people have. So, probably, does almost everybody else here. Hopefully all.

Simplified explanation.

• Mean (average of values): Add 'em up, divide by them back out equally.
• Median (midpoint value): Line 'em all up in order, take the middle one. Or the value exactly between the middle-straddling two.
• Mode (likeliest value, or even non-value): Which is the most common number (or colour, or whatever) in the set.

There are others (and interesting tricks with those, like the Root Mean Square) but, unless you have something relevent in mind, you don't usually want to worry too much about Winsor Means at one end and Midranging at the other.  (Or, rather, at both ends and at the middle..  )

On the other hand, the doctor can now see a doctor when he too gets ill

"On a moonbase, the single doctor treats all people who don't treat themselves"...  No wonder we need another doctor!

Oh, wait, with two doctors, the doctors are Ok, but now everyone else is being professionally treated twice, if at all...  Might be a problem.

[ChairmanPoo]

"Doctor, heal thyself"