The whole premise of 'for-profit' healthcare stinks to high heaven. Regardless of hospitals calling themselves 'non-profit', they behave like profit seeking enterprises. This is the ultimate corporate double speak.
The bottom line is that - people do not get to choose their illness. So a capitalist model in Adam Smith's sense where people get to 'choose' their 'insurance' based on price and benefit is an illusion. It would be like having identical futures contracts on a commodity from different brokers with the only difference being the commission structure. The underlying product is the same and in fact regulated by law.
Legally, are non profits allowed to do mergers and acquisitions ?The hospitals are becoming monolithic monopolies.
There's a third option though: the state is the customer, not the individual. Then private healthcare can work. Insurance companies sort of try to emulate that, but it doesn't really work.
Yea. I expect it to be better because we have this in Sweden and it's vastly better than the US' system :P But there are many other things that are different of course, so hard to know which is which.
I am an American born to greek parents. For ‘normal’ conversation, I have adapted two ways of interacting - the greek one is direct and has instant access to emotional reactions. The American one obfuscates emotions, as if daily interactions were a game of poker. When i let my ‘greek’ out here in the US , it initially adds life to any interaction but over time the other participants distance themselves from connection. It is as if Greeks (many Europeans?) run at a higher temperature (also using temperature as it applies to LLMs). In greece, Intent and meaning are more often conveyed by emotion and its intensity, often only loosely connected to the meaning of the words used.in daily conversation , Americans rely entirely on meaning of content subtracting almost all emotion unless threatening behavior or violence is involved. Emotion expression is used as a ‘tell’ or bait in the US. Interestingly this distinction has dissolved over the past two decades as greece has ‘westernized’ and youth in particular are indistinguishable by any metric.
Any field with abstraction becomes susceptible to ai disruption. In fact, ai susceptibility is proportional to the amount of abstraction. In this sense, the more abstraction then the more ai will displace people (my observation). This turns the millenia old model upside down. Traditionally more abstraction required more schooling and experience and was rewarded with more financial rewards. Until robots and world models become safe, affordable and ubiquitous, the financial apex of careers will be those that are abstraction resistant (technicians, emts, trades, etc) and those protected by requlation and the requlators(politicians, ceos)
I think security is the issue-ai is good at circumventing this. For example , ai can read paywalled articles you cannot. Do you really want ai to have ‘free range’.?
Maybe we can get israel to pay some of our billion dollars a day military costs. Adelson gave stump 750 million for campaign. There must be a lot of wallets in the us that will open for israel. Maybe a synagogue tax?
