Any source for this? Most of the research I've seen with regards to lead and IQ is correlational and could be confounded by intelligence being correlated with income which is associated with living in places with less lead exposure.
Basically the IQ gap between the lead exposed and non exposed has stayed the same even though the amount of lead in the bloodstream has dropped by orders of magnitude. So either the first part of lead exposure is 100x more damaging then the 100th part of lead exposure (which animal models do not bear out) or a lot of the lead exposure IQ research is confounded.
I believe when in life you are exposed makes a difference too. Children are at a higher risk for being harmed by lead for a number of reasons including having less blood than an adult, and being more likely to eat paint chips off the ground than (most) adults. I'd imagine that lead replacing calcium in the brain during critical developmental periods also matters a lot.
> It raises the bar for low effort hackers and improves security.
There are meaningful ways you can improve the security of your app. There are ways to make sure your app passes CASA. I found very little if any overlap between those two when going through the process.
When we filled ours out for a CRM they wanted a video of the CRM. So we showed them a video (from dev with fake data). We appealed the process explaining that Mickey Mouse is a not a real person. They rejected that appeal. So after going back and forth for a week or two we uploaded a video with basically everything but the navmenu blurred out and they finally approved it.
Food waste isn't a problem. If the US threw out 20% less food all the same countries would struggle with food security and hunger. If the US consumed less food, less would be grown. It wouldn't change the price of rice or wheat in India.
Almost all the food imported from the US to India for instance is consumed by the middle class such as tree nuts (almonds) and are not staple foods consumed by those struggling to eat. There isn't that much rice or wheat that's imported. In addition India has lots of tariffs to drive up the price of imported food from the US to protect local farmers. None of the cause of food insecurity is Susie throwing out a mayonnaise container that might be perfectly fine but past the best by date.
I think you might have some misconceptions. The difference in take home pay for devs is quite large between the US and Europe and you can still get insurance with pre-existing conditions in the US with an out of pocket maximum much smaller than the difference in pay.
Measuring burdensomeness of regulation by number of laws is an incredibly poor measure. Though I'd still be surprised if many countries healthcare laws were as complex as our own.
For example
All doctors require 1 year of schooling
2 year
5 years
10 years
20 years.
Each is 1 law but has each also has very different level of burdensomeness.
I think the causality runs the other direction. Europe has an efficient system so they can easily afford to give everyone health care. We have a very expensive system so we don't.
Medicare costs do not look like the rest of the world. Medicare has slightly lower costs than private insurance but that's mostly bargaining power not any increases in efficiency. They free ride a little off money made off private insurance.
Everyone knows the US healthcare system sucks. But the United states medical system is not uniquely under regulated compared to the rest of the world. It's uniquely poorly regulated.
> It would be more efficient to pay for it using taxes, both income and sales taxes, rather than letting some groups—the poor and the elderly—off the hook arbitrarily.
I don't think this is true. Some countries with public healthcare are far more efficient than our system.
But there are countries that have systems similar to ours that are far more efficient as well.
We just have a really shitty system, and who pays for it isn't going to change that. It's a hard technocratic problem that doesn't have any easy answers. (Besides increasing the number of residency slots, removing the bachelor degree requirements and allowing foreign physicians to practice which are basically freebies.)
> But there are countries that have systems similar to ours that are far more efficient as well
Typically, those countries have BOTH a public system and a private sector. This means the private sector actually has to be really competitive, because they're competing with "free" (or close to it). This isn't the case in the US, there's no competition.
Netherlands has a mostly public system with heavily subsidized mandatory non-profit insurance under government oversight: Health insurers receive compensation for high risk individuals from the government,[5] and government subsidies pay about 75% of insurance costs.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands
Israel also has a public healthcare system in practice. Mandatory participation in 1 of 4 non profit insurance programs looks like private insurance but … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_IsraelFor the health tax, wage-earners and the self-employed must pay 3.1% of their monthly salary up to 60% of the average prevailing market wage (appx. NIS 6,300 in 2020), and 5% of anything earned above it.[25] Employers are legally obligated to deduct insurance contributions from their employees' salaries, while the self-employed must arrange payment on their own. Pensioners have contributions deducted from their pensions, as do those receiving unemployment benefits. Those who are not working but have income must pay 5% of their income in health tax, while those who are not working and have no income must pay NIS 104 a month.
Yes health care is very different in every country in the world. There are a 1000 ways to do it well but the US is unique in having insane healthcare costs. Having non profit insurance companies isn't the difference, having mandatory health insurance isn't the difference. It's not that easy to fix.
Each of things individually is lowering healthcare costs. Medical billing is a significant multiplier for US healthcare costs, and going to a highly regulated nonprofit only system would help.
There’s other factors like our obesity rate, but we’re basically intentionally shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to healthcare costs because cost savings is lost profits for someone else.
The unifying factor of ~all other developed-world systems is price controls, de facto (e.g. government monopsony or [near-]monopoly) or de jure (outright pricing sheets)
Medicare for everyone seems like an "easy" fix but we have too many red state neanderthals in the US who oppose policies that clearly benefit them claiming "personal responsibility" though they oddly still think schools, police, fire departments, etc. are just fine...
Medicare for everyone fixes the under and uninsured problem. It doesn't fix the cost problem, only moves it from paying private insurance companies to the government. It's true Medicare pays less per procedure but that is not because those procedures are more efficient it's because relies on pricing power. Many hospitals would go out of business or have to layoff a significant amount of their staff if they were exclusively paid Medicare rates.
NL may be better than what's in the US but it's quickly deteriorating after the 2006 reforms. We've got dozens of competing health insurance companies big and small, but their base coverage package is the same because that's legally required. So the main thing they differentiate is with nonsense; minor differences between competitors, but mainly marketing, bullshit apps, etc. That is, a nontrivial portion of health insurance payments is spent on marketing.
Then there's the other big problem. Base insurance, which btw goes up to €150 / month next year (per adult), only covers cheap generics whose purchase prices are negotiated by the government (or something like that). The consequence now is that the manufacturers are not willing to pay the import fees for their generics, because the profit margins are too slim. Thousands of types of medications are now no longer available, difficult to get, or will only be available again in X months. This is stuff like basic painkillers, adhd, diabetes, etc.
You would expect healthcare cost to scale pretty linearly with population size, I think? Number of doctors, hospitals, drug prescriptions etc. are entirely population-driven.
Medications also don't cost more or less based on population size. Although in a single-player market monopoly, I suspect a larger country should have greater cost negotiation power, so this should actually benefit a larger country like the U.S.
A greater factor than population size may be demographics. Countries with older and less healthy citizens would have a larger cost burden.
A poorly designed government structure could also disadvantage a large country like the U.S. This has been observed in the U.K., where successive Conservative governments have centralized the healthcare system over the last two decades, reducing efficiency and increasing cost. Not sure about Switzerland, which is also a federation of states (cantons).
It’s kind of like Obamacare without a huge number of compromises
> non-profit private insurance
Only base/minimum coverage, the same companies still offer extended/supplemental plans with no such limitations.
Also is the for profit part really that important? Profit margins are capped and even if all insurance companies became non profit and costs went down went down by another 5-10% or so at most, would that fundamentally change anything? The extreme inefficiency seems like a mich bigger issue.
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