
Every family basically pays an $8k ‘poll tax’ under the U.S. health system - pseudolus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/07/every-american-family-basically-pays-an-poll-tax-under-us-health-system-top-economists-say/
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rayiner
I love the article's parenthetical explanation of its click-bait headline. In
the U.S., "poll tax" usually refers to voting taxes used to disenfranchise
black people. U.S. writers on tax issues thus generally refer to "head taxes"
or use the Constitution's term "capitation."

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hurricanetc
It can cost a million dollars to become a doctor in the US. Less if you go to
public schools and pinch pennies during your time at school but still half a
million or more.

Doctors earn high salaries because if they didn’t we wouldn’t be able to
convince kids to become doctors. We already have a severe shortage of
geriatric doctors because kids don’t want to enter the field and get paid
Medicare rates after accumulating a mountain of debt.

No easy solutions. We have built this problem up over many decades and it will
take many painful decades to unwind it all.

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londons_explore
Make becoming a doctor cheaper?

Teaching isn't _inherently_ expensive - you can do an online e-learning based
system with online tests for 90% of the course content. This whole idea of
having prestigious universities with limited class sizes to maintain
exclusivity isn't helping the nation.

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hurricanetc
That’s not an easy solution. Entire economies revolve around education costs.
Not to mention there are tens of thousands of doctors that already paid the
sky high costs. What do we do with them?

This problem is deeply entrenched into the American economy. Tentacles
everywhere. Nothing exists in isolation that can be easily and painlessly
fixed with the flick of a pen.

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SllX
You don’t do anything for them, you let time and the market sort things out
rather than trying to engineer any kind of solution.

Just decrease the cost of becoming and practicing as a doctor and you’ll
eventually get more doctors who will have to compete, and thus decrease their
own fees.

What are the relevant costs? How many of them are imposed by the government?

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jamisteven
pay wall.

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lioeters
Here you go: [https://outline.com/nHcEqX](https://outline.com/nHcEqX)

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panny
Seems the article has confused cause and effect. US health care costs haven't
caused poor health. Poor health has caused US health care costs.

40% of American adults are obese. Obesity causes heart disease, stroke,
diabetes, and cancer. Diseases raise a person's health care costs. Costs do
not make that person obese.

It's also not a head tax, because healthy people don't pay it. Obese people
need to accept personal responsibility for their condition and stop trying to
leech off the system.

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londons_explore
It's very rare to hear someone say "I won't eat this burrito - I won't be able
to afford the diabetes treatment in 50 years".

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anonuser123456
It's much worse than this.

Dr: "Stop eating burritos and soda or you will need insulin"

Average Joe: "Ok just give me insulin."

Type 2 is largely reversible by diet and exercise. But people would rather
just eat burritos and be sick.

