U.S. Deficit For 2022 Falls To 1/2 2021 Level, Only $1.4T Now...

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, November 2, 2022 at 10:58:44 PM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs wrote:

On Tuesday, November 1, 2022 at 1:14:35 AM UTC-4, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Tuesday, November 1, 2022 at 1:32:07 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Sunday, October 23, 2022 at 7:06:52 PM UTC-7, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Monday, October 24, 2022 at 8:49:14 AM UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 23 Oct 2022 15:11:38 -0400, bitrex <us...@example.net> wrote:
On 10/23/2022 12:02 PM, Fred Bloggs wrote:
snip
Groundwork Collaborative have documented call after call in which CEOs
brag about gouging consumers and blaming it on inflation:

https://otherwords.org/its-not-just-inflation-its-price-gouging/
It\'s responsible behavior for any seller to charge all they can get.
Collusion to set pricing is illegal.

And the problem with the US is that the GOP is precisely a device to let the rich collude in setting high prices for the products they sell.

American health care costs half as much again per head as it does anywhere else because the health insurance business is run in a way that lets it cream off extravagant profits.

If you had a rusty VW up on blocks in the back yard, and someone offered you $60 for it, and someone else offered you $9000, which would you sell to?

Not really a relevant point. The $60 offer would come from somebody who would set it as scrap metal, and the $9,000 offer would come from somebody who would restore it and sell it as an antique. One hopes that it wouldn\'t be authentic antique - as Ralph Nader pointed out, the original Beetle was easy to roll.

Hey, your response, as usual, is NOT relevant. The example was about the behavior of sellers, not buyers. Producers, however, have a more complex optimization problem: how to set prices to generate the maximum profit. Contrary to libtard\'s belief, this DOES NOT mean charging the maximum price. Charging a lower price increases sales and increases profits - to a point. Below this price point you can\'t increase sales enough to offset lower, or no, profits.

Tell us how this works for American health care. The product clearly isn\'t worth one and half times the price that you\'d pay in other advanced industrial countries - American don\'t live longer than people in countries with less expensive health care - Canada gets 80 years for males and 84 years for females. The US has to make do with 75 years for males and 80 years for females.

American health care is superior to every other system out there with the exception of maybe Germany.

So how come American medical outcomes are decidedly third world?

> American doctors, and especially the specialists, are usually appalled at the lack of diagnostics and treatment they see in patients transferred from national health systems.

Other countries restrict the medical services industries to selling services that are actually useful, as opposed to charging for any test they can think of.

>Canada is a bureaucratic joke, and I suspect the same applies to all the present and former Commonwealth countries.

They haven\'t got the bloated bureaucracy the American health insurance industry gets their customers to pay for.

> Professionals well educated in public health administration in UK do not have kind words for their NHS- damaged and broken seem to be a common refrain.

The conservative party does seem to want to make it Spartan enough to get people to be willing to pay for BUPA. It\'s certainly a whole lot more cost-effective than the German system, which is still much more cost-effective than the US system.

Both deliver better life expectancies than the US system does.

It is interesting that french-fry producer Ore-Ida could not sell Tater Tots, which are made from the scrap parts of the potato, because the price was TOO low and consumers regarded them as junk. Sales popped after the price was raised and consumers perceived a value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tater_tots#cite_note-Ore-Ida_Fun_Zone_-_Fun_Facts-0).

Not all that interesting. Economic behavior is irrational, and markets have to be regulated (to some extent) to stop irrational antics creating chaos and disaster.

The American health-care system is clearly a poorly regulated disaster, and the people who make loads of money out of it\'s defects cry \"socialism\" when anybody tries to clean it up.

America leads in sheer volume of contributions to medical science, and quite a lot, as in most, of that is spurred by profit motive. Altruism and socialized organization of any kind just don\'t work.

Quantity may well be high. Quality is less impressive. In medicine, motivation by social outcomes does work. It\'s not strictly motivated by altruism - stopping the employee classes getting thinned out by disease before they hit retirement age makes good economic sense, and the US system doesn\'t do that all that well.

The US does develop a lot of expensive drugs that are too expensive to make economic sense, but can be profitably be sold to millionaires who fancy living a bit longer.

What the world really needs is a vaccine against malaria, but the people who need it haven\'t got enough money to be an interesting market.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7227679/

\"RTS,S vaccine was created in 1987 as part of a collaboration between GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) that began in 1984. At the time, both groups were attempting to develop a vaccine based on proof-of-concept studies that radiation-attenuated sporozoites protected against malaria infection.\"

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is a UK company - not American.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney