Crémieux says that it’s time to grade the short manifesto written by the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson:
Firstly, the U.S. does not spend all that anomalously much on healthcare. It is just vastly wealthier than its peer countries.
Others have explored this in greater depth, but the gist of it is that Americans are richer than everyone else and healthcare is a superior good, etc. etc., so they simply consume a lot more healthcare—and I mean “more” very literally, because Americans do not just suffer from higher prices. For example, you can predict America’s high health spending from the amount of surgeries it does.
With that out of the way, secondly, America’s poor life expectancy has little to do with its healthcare system, and what amount it does have to with the healthcare system likely favors America. Compared to other rich countries, Americans do live shorter lifespans, but about 90% of the gap for men and two-thirds of the gap for women is explained by a handful of well-known observables.
America lags behind its peer countries largely due to obesity and its comorbidities, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and needless risk-taking. But notice: it generally leads in screenable and treatable cancers.
[…]
The 2024 John’s Hopkins Life Expectancy Report reiterated these facts. It reported that 57% of the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and the U.K. was down to cardiovascular disease, another 32% was down to drug overdoses, 20% was down to firearm-related homicides and suicides, and 17% was due to motor vehicle accidents. But, as the above treatable/screenable cancer note suggested, the report also concluded that, if anything, America is ahead when it comes to mortality from conditions the healthcare system can actually affect—namely, COVID and cancer.
Here’s a different perspective: https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-insurance-denial-ulcerative-colitis
That aside, Crémieux is the ultimate “well ackshually” poster. He’s a truth-seeker, but he has an autistic fixation on trivia, which he posts in Freakonomics-tier snippets. His fixation on trivia always, always distorts his overall view of things.
See, maybe if you consider insurance in isolation, it’s not the ultimate evil. The problem with the health insurance industry is that it is effectively a maximally hostile middleman. It’s hostile to service providers, and it’s hostile to service users. (The most charitable thing you can say about it is that it creates enormous amounts of paperwork, thereby creating jobs and boosting GDP, making Americans seem wealthier.) It’s not difficult to see how it has become so widely hated.
To make matters still worse, the insurance industry sets up hugely perverse incentives for pharma and medical providers. Instead of charging patients in a transparent way — which ultimately caps prices at what patients can afford — they gouge insurance in a shadowy and perverse way, which inevitably raises prices for all.
As an aside, there’s something rich about an Israeli (Crémieux) lecturing Americans on how health insurance ackshually isn’t so bad. The Israeli medical system, which has deep ties with their military, has benefitted from substantial American largesse. It’s also a system of universal coverage, and the insurance component, such as it is, is run by competing organizations which are prohibited from taking profit or denying care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Israel
Has Crémieux done anything with his life to indicate that his opinions are worthwhile? Did he get elected to office? Did he track down intensional jewel thieves? Did he invent a better light bulb? Or is he another guy who got good grades in high school and then failed to live up to his parents’ expectations? I don’t trust the police who claim to have captured Luigi. If Luigi actually wrote the manifesto then maybe Crémieux has some ground for argument. That does not mean Crémieux’s argument is worthwhile. I will research his social status before I write a rebuttal, but whether or not Luigi pulled that trigger, Crémieux does not deserve to sit on a high horse.
Dr. Christopher Badcock wrote:
thought-policing — and indeed all dogmatic intolerance of differing points of view — amounts to an autistic-like denial of what the agent regards as others’ false beliefs. Indeed, leading authorities on Asperger’s syndrome comment that some high-functioning autistics go into so-called “God mode” and become “an omnipotent person who never makes a mistake, cannot be wrong and whose intelligence must be worshipped” (see T. Attwood, The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome). Clearly though, this cuts both ways, and people who routinely are in ‘God mode’ where others’ speech and beliefs are concerned could be seen as acting like autistics, with thought-policing as an institutionalised deficit in appreciation of false belief.
Crémieux felt his ears burning when Badcock wrote that.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/12/12/how-science-is-showing-that-free-speech-is-built-into-the-brain/
Guys, Crémieux is an Ashkenazi Jewess.
Cremieux is extremely smart and honest. Trust his (her? don’t know don’t care) statements.
That said.
US Healthcare costs are maybe 75% D patronage shakedowns.
1) D Obama’s shakedown raised the cost maybe 25%.
2) Like every big business in the US, healthcare providers are required by law to take a large percentage of D patronage hires. D Patronage hires are D party members first, maybe do the day job as well if they want. It is their duty to the D party to report whoever is least loyal to the D party line.
3) DEI D party shakedowns make this worse by putting D patronage hires in charge. If they happen to like doing their day job as well, great, but D party loyalty comes first.
4) Mischievous suits in D party courts further shake down US healthcare.
5) D party importing tens of millions of D ringers plus mischievous suits in D party courts require hospitals to provide care to illegal immigrants who will not and cannot pay. A huge population of diseased illegals would spread disease to citizens anyway, so this would be a burden on US healthcare anyway.
6) Trauma cases increase from D party shakedowns on policing.
7) Much more.
As always, unless you report US stats by race, you can’t understand what’s going on, especially when it comes to violence, drugs, and sexually transmitted disease.
“Cremieux is extremely smart and honest. Trust his (her? don’t know don’t care) statements.”
My understanding is that he’s an Israeli male.
Anyway: High-INT/ultra-low-WIS build. You can trust his analysis, but never trust his conclusions or his judgement, and you always ought to question the notion that he’s analyzing the right thing. (As here, where he’s not — where he’s self-evidently hyperfocusing on a cogwheel in a larger machine and drawing conclusions that are completely removed from important context.)
“America is ahead when it comes to mortality from conditions the healthcare system can actually affect—namely, COVID and cancer.”
If he had put that at the beginning of the article, I could have skipped reading the rest of it.
An allegedly anti-corporate writer claims that assassins damage the cause of the common man because they encourage the ruling class to repress the masses even harder:
https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/luigi-mangione-should-be-tortured
Being that we’re already at world-historically unprecedented and unimaginable levels of repression, and that such repression continues to escalate at a pace ever more rapid and shocking, it is rather difficult to imagine that calling into question the looters’ formerly unquestioned physical safety will suddenly cause much more repression to be implemented.
Ponder that sensitive young men like Luigi Mangione wouldn’t have felt the need to avail themselves of the justice system if the violence system hadn’t made hospital chains and pharmaceutical conglomerates functionally above the lawl.
Oh, well! You can’t mix the creamer out of the coffee.
And the doctors should have their heads shorn like those Frenchwomen who fucked the German soldiers, and be sent to farm potatoes in Idaho at bayonet point. It’s better than they deserve, but we can afford to be lenient.