Maybe, but all sorts of things could have long term effects. Even without plastic, the environment is full of toxic or non-digestible things, like dust, or pollen. Many organisms don't want to be eaten and shed particles that evolve to be non-digestible.
If you worry too much about what MAY be dangerous, you couldn't leave the bed anymore. Remaining in bed is definitely dangerous. Not drinking water is also definitely dangerous.
While that is the common story, I am not entirely convinced. It is presumably true that there are more controls for tap water. But those controls still only test a limited number of substances.
One story that goes around a lot is for example the claim that tap water contains a lot of hormones from all the contraceptive pills women take and then flush out of their body into the water system. That seems to not be controlled for. Not sure how serious the issue really is.
More controls also doesn't change the quality of water. It only detects bad water of some variants. If you had an excellent "mineral water" and an OK tap water, more controls wouldn't make the tap water any better.
Not saying you shouldn't drink the tap water. I drink it most of the time.
If that's the case, the same would be true for most bottled water. The majority of mainstream brands are made from water from the same distribution system, just filtered some more and with added minerals.
Can you explain to a Non-American what forces this system of employer insurance onto the US? Why don't independent insurance companies emerge that offer other models of insurance?
There's both historical and insurance-business (underwriting) reasons.
The history: wage-price controls implemented during WWII as labour was taken up by the military and companies had to find some basis other than pay on which to differentiate. Benefits, including health care, were excluded from wage consideration.
Insurance itself is the business of assessing, managing, and sharing (or "pooling") risk. In the case of health care, the typical costs that a given population will face are predictable based on age, gender, and various exposures. Given a sufficiently large number of people, a group or policy cost can be assessed. Along with other groups, this results in pooled risk.
I'm not an actuary, but "large pool" risk is fairly low, I suspect it's on the order of 30 or so people. Smaller pools can be formed (or more likely: aggregated to form larger ones), down to a small number of members, as few as a handful or so.
The idea being that in any given pool, what's called "adverse selection" (people specifically looking for insurance due to high risks) are less likely -- you're dealing with the average population.
In individual markets, all of this becomes much less predictable, and/or the transaction and administrative costs of individual insurance simply add up.
Since a large share of the population works, or lives in a household with someone who does, allocating healthcare group insurance through employment has more-or-less stuck in the US.
The fact that it provides yet more leverage and control by employers over employees is another factor, of course.
Source: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I studied this at uni. Plus more recent experiences / exploration.
I don't think the size of the pool is that relevant. The pool from the perspective of insurance company is all insured people, so it doesn't matter whether it's a company of 5 or 5 individuals joining, it's still a huge pool.
Adverse selection is the big reason. An individual signing up for insurance can be used as a signal that means "individual is sick" or "individual is likely to need insurance soon". If a company policy covers all employees (or all employees above a certain level), the signal is "person works" which is orthogonal to "person will need insurance" (in fact, it's probably slightly anti-correlated, a.k.a. "person is fit enough to work").
I think people who are already sick should be covered by a kind of charity (or social services). It doesn't make sense to ask insurance companies to insure people who are already sick.
An alternative is to have random-lot assignments, at least so long as you care to preserve a private, for-profit, insurance sector. That is, members of a given population is assigned, at random, to a set of insurance providers, who have minimum performance and obligation standards.
Otherwise, the socialised version already exists, in most industrialised countries, in some form or another. Within the US, Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and children, and in many states, "high risk pools" which are state managed.
More generally, a problem is that the bulk of health benefits do _not_ accrue from direct or acute medical treatment, but from public health and preventive measures, _especially_ well-mother, well-baby, early childhood, municipal sanitation and environmental measures, and general (workplace and elsewhere) safety provisions. Insurance companies of and by themselves don't address much of this.
Great comment. I’ll agree and add that the pool of people working full-time itself serves as a beneficial selection process for the insurance pool. It includes (expensive) births but excludes a lot of expensive debilitating conditions so long as that condition precludes someone working full-time.
One major factor in the US is that, from the perspective of an employee, employer plans have a massive tax advantage compared to anything the employee could buy outside their employer.
If your employer pays your insurance premiums, this doesn't count as taxable income for you. So you effectively have a choice that looks like:
- Your employer directly pays $200/mo for your insurance, or
- Your employer pays you $200/mo as cash, the government takes $40 (adjust as appropriate for tax bracket) out as income taxes, and you have $160/mo left over to pay for health insurance.
I can't really speak to the political forces that keep this subsidy in place, though.
So if you insure yourself privately, you can not deduct it from taxes? That would be an issue then, but seems easy to fix. Why isn't that part of the health care discussion?
So the choice from earlier is actually more correctly stated as:
- Your employer directly pays $220/mo for your insurance, or
- Your employer pays you $200/mo as cash and pays $20/mo directly to the government in payroll taxes, totaling $220/mo. Then the government takes $40 (adjust as appropriate for tax bracket) out of your paycheck as income taxes, and you have $160/mo left over to pay for health insurance.
The payroll tax issue would apply even if you could fully deduct the $200/mo from your personal taxable income.
> seems easy to fix. Why isn't that part of the health care discussion?
If employers can deduct more for health insurance than private people, it seems unfair and rigged.
Payroll taxes are another matter to me, that's mostly window dressing. Either employer pays the tax to the government, or pays it to employees and they pay it to the government. The outcome is the same.
I think payroll taxes exist mostly to hide the amount of taxes they pay from the population.
Big business likes the level of control. Employees are limited in their job mobility, especially to small companies. It restricts competition, it also suppressed wages.
Big business in the U.S. gets what it wants, and if they didn’t want employer provided healthcare it would be gone, but it’s not gone so it means they like it.
If there was universal healthcare in the U.S. there would be an explosion of small business. Most small business can’t afford to provide healthcare, and if you have an existing health condition there is no guarantee that the plan from your new employer, if they have a plan, will include your doctor, or that they agree with the old doctor’s treatment plan.
If insurance costs $500/mo, either your company can pay the premium for you directly, with no taxable event for you; or, they can give you $500 more as a part of your salary, but the government will take $150 of that (or whatever, depending on your tax bracket), and then you have $350 to cover a $500 expense.
Individuals can deduct medical/insurance payments on their taxes every year, but: 1) the rules are complicated with some payment minimums that mean a lot of people couldn't take the deduction at all, and 2) you have to come up with the extra $150 every month for 12 months before you get that money back (since the US tax system is pay-as-you-go with per-paycheck withholding), which is a real burden for many Americans.
Alternatively, your company can give you $715 per month, the government will take $215 of that in taxes, and then you have $500 left over to pay your $500 insurance bill, but: 1) your company would very much rather pay $500 instead of give you $715, and 2) that $715 is actually not a hard number, but will vary depending on each employee's personal tax situation, which can change throughout the year, and your company likely doesn't care to deal with that (this is less of a big deal, since it could be outsourced to a piece of software written by a payroll company).
Why do Americans put up with this? Many of them (most?) just don't understand how this all works, and so don't even know they're getting screwed. Many have no concept of systems in other countries that handle this better, in part because they don't travel and don't have friends or family abroad, but more because of concerted misinformation campaigns around any kind of changes to our health care system that would threaten the incumbents.
I guess big business doesn't "prevent" alternative insurance companies; there are plenty of available options for insurance that individuals can purchase on their own. But it generally costs more (because you're not an HR benefits person negotiating on behalf of your 500-, 1000-, 50000-person company), and you end up with the bad tax consequences described above.
If you're an enterprising individual who wants to set up an alternative insurance company that charges very low premiums for great plans, you run into the problem of having no negotiating power with health care providers, who are used to charging high prices because the traditional insurers will pay them.
You can adjust your withholding amounts by filing form W-4 with payroll, so that in-year cashflow issue is largely a red herring. (It’s solvable now and would become standardized/automated if the overall system changed.)
Other (more concerning) items you itemize are the real blockers.
In practice, most people do not actually understand how the boxes on W-4 translate into withholding amounts. There'd be a lot of trial and error involved if done manually.
Regardless, there's a reason why I marked that issue as "not a big deal" -- because it isn't -- the other issues I mention are the meat of it.
The issue you appear to have marked as not a big deal is calculating the gross-up that would be required to keep employees whole not the per-paycheck withholding cash flow issue, which you labeled a “real burden” for some (unless I’m misreading your post). I agree both are manageable and would be automated if things switched models.
Another factor that hasn't been mentioned yet is adverse selection.
Individual health insurance plans do exist, but few healthy people buy them, so the pool is sicker than average, so the insurance costs more, so even fewer healthy people buy the plans, and so on.
Employer group plans cost less in part because the pool is generally healthy.
"The auction cleared at £45/MWh (1). This means that the bids referenced in the Bloomberg story have succeeded. Bloomberg have significantly updated their story to reflect the results. In today’s good news story, we can change “may” to “will” in the headline to match the updated story :)
(1) https://twitter.com/mliebreich/status/1175080738116571136?s=...
"
Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany it sounds like there is just a perpetual lag, where offshore wind is built and then it takes awhile to get it hooked in. It's been going on since at least 2014, and since that time like 5GW of offshore wind looks to have been hooked up, so I'm not sure there's a problem beyond "things take a while to build".
The Taliban were a tiny splinter group before the US financed and trained them. They have always been fanatics. Funny how they were not called terrorists while the US thought they could use them for their own ends.
So do you care about the civilians, or not? It seems possible US engagement saves more civilians than it kills. At least that is presumably the general idea.
Unlikely. There were massacres during the Taliban rule outside of war, but it was at much lower scale than in the current war, and US only helps taliban grow by its intervention, it seems, if you look at the numbers of fighters.
It's not like killing a person with certain beliefs stops the beliefs from spreading.
The idea was that "possible US engagement saves more civilians than it kills", and I was reacting to that, as it is very doubtful.
I didn't say it would be ok to live under Taliban. But there are other weird islamic countries, where I wouldn't want to live either. Do you propose US making war there, too?
The US is in afghan for one reason only, opioids. It's no coincidence that US opioid addiction rates skyrocketed in the years following the Afghan invasion. The big pharma companies benefit from the US controlling the worlds major poppy fields, and in turn they pushed their product unto the masses.
I'm sorry but your explanation makes no sense.
Oil is wherever it is located, so you have to go there if you want to take it or protect it. But you can grow poppies in most places. It makes no sense for the US to spend something like a trillion dollars and thousands of lives for something they could grow in California or Texas.
Move to a city where you don't need a car, would be a start. That's likely to cost money, although I am not sure if it would cost more than the running costs of a car.
We are not used to be free. Economic restraints force us to do things we don't want to do instead of watching Netflix. So most don't understand what "just watching Netflix" means. If you set out to "just watch Netflix" as your main activity, you would very very quickly get fed up and depressed, and thus stop watching Netflix.
Those fortunate ones with enough wealth to have the option to just watch Netflix for a year and don't do much else, don't do that and are happy with it. And neither would the less fortunate once after an initial learning phase. Humans must learn to be free, but they can. We want to take part, show our contribution, feel proud. As soon as we have found a pleasant way to contribute, we do.
Yes, conditionless basic income would change work ethics. People who fill up supermarkets displays or serve food to unfriendly customers at unhealthy hours would maybe just stop going to work. I would be happy for them, and I hope it would happen today.
There is a lot of work that is needlessly tiring, badly paid, and in which you are badly treated, but people just stay in the status quo because they see no way out. Once there is a way out, the jobs will have to change, and that rapidly. That would be progress for society I still hope to see in my lifetime.
But... if you look at the most free animals in nature: cats, after domesticating humans and getting guaranteed safety, shelter and food. They have independently decided to sleep and murder their lives away. Their contributions to the art world via social media (a task they’ve mostly trained their humans to do) is probably the nost significant and vacuous the world has every seen. Their obsession with small mammal terminating is probably better for the biosphere.
I have taken over a year off of work multiple times in my life and while I didn't do much that was productive with my time off, I was definitely unhappy with time wasting and lounging around all day. My motivation to eventually start working again would have assuredly been directed elsewhere if not for the pending need for income again eventually
That is a pretty pesimistic presumption that AFAIK has no empirical evidence to back it up. Even without holding the threats of homelessness and starvation over people's heads, humans are highly status driven, competitive creatures. There is a lot of evidence that people will do massive amounts of work that has little to no material benefit, just for a bit of social status (or even for self satisfaction.) Otherwise, volunteerism, open source software and Indy Games couldn't be as successful as they are.
I don't doubt there are some people who would stay home and watch Netflix. I just suspect there are more people that are ground down by the daily grind and abandon their dreams.
Even if there are more unmotivated people than demotivated people, unmotivated people are low value anyway. People that lack self-motivation are never gonna be the most productive members of society so designing a system to extract work from them at the cost of wasting the time of more motivated individuals seems... backwards.
Besides for most people to be able to watch Netflix, some people will need to make Netflix. If there aren't enough people to make Netflix, something else will be made but at the end of the day there is no way nobody will do anything - if nothing else, people will be bored and actively want to do something.
You seem to be under the assumption that the masses will find inspiration and motivation to do things you don't find disagreeable.
I'm emphatically for people having the resources to pursue whatever the heck the want (even if that's sitting around drinking beer) but I think that most of the UBI crowd is out of touch with how the people who will most benefit from UBI will use their newfound freedom. Covering poor people's housing and food expenses isn't going to magically make them want to spend their time acting upper middle class. You give people freedom and they will act how they want, not necessarily how you want. I'd still call that a win but many will not.
> Covering poor people's housing and food expenses isn't going to magically make them want to spend their time acting upper middle class.
You seem to be under the assumption that the majority of "poor people" behave the way they are portrayed in "reality" TV shows or whatever you're consuming that makes you think this way.
In fact most are no different from the "upper middle class", except for the amount of money they can freely spend. Do you honestly believe they're somehow wired differently just because they're poor?
>You seem to be under the assumption that the majority of "poor people" behave the way they are portrayed in "reality" TV shows or whatever you're consuming that makes you think this way.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about my life experience and who I don't associate with.
>In fact most are no different from the "upper middle class", except for the amount of money they can freely spend. Do you honestly believe they're somehow wired differently just because they're poor?
Yes, people are very much the same on some level but it's pure lunacy to pretend that one's life experience does not have any effect on shaping a person's standards and preferences. If you give a poor person a good paycheck they will probably pick a few areas to indulge but they will not magically upscale their entire lives. Their standards and tastes will take quite some time (if ever) to adapt to the lack of economic scarcity. (Obviously I'm speaking in generalizations here and my statements are subject individual variance.)
You can leave the trailer park but the trailer park will never leave you.
>Watch less TV, interact more with actual people.
Since we're sinking to this level you should get out of your gated community and internet echo chambers.
When I take a few days of holiday I literally don't do anything but waste time. When I have longer breaks between work I start doing productive things after a period of decompressing. My normal job just sucks up all my productivity in a way that it becomes hard to even take out the trash.
Does it matter? Even if only 1% of people used the time to do something constructive/beneficial to society and the environment that would still amount to over 70 million people worldwide. That could definitely move the needle away from the capitalist dystopia we have created.
We are not living in a capitalist dystopia. If you have an interesting thing you want to do but can't afford to do, head over to Kickstarter or Patreon and collect funding.
To reply properly would warrant an essay about n order effects but long story short the fact that crowd funding exists in it's current state is a reflection of how broken our economic model is.
If you worry too much about what MAY be dangerous, you couldn't leave the bed anymore. Remaining in bed is definitely dangerous. Not drinking water is also definitely dangerous.