Weirdly, Unicorn Store was the first thing that came to mind. Which is funny when you consider that it was essentially a sort of weird meta-prequel to Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson's turns in Captain Marvel.
This reads like the poison pill (mis)characterization of the original version of ACA that killed it. Most of the ideas are good, but you've snuck in a few obvious non-starters.
It's clear that there needs to be some degree of nationalization, though. Middlemen are literally killing us (and now, in a shift that might actually induce a change, getting killed).
I'd wager that America is culturally closer to the UK and Italy than Germany (ironically enough), particularly with regard to our attitudes towards social welfare. A decade after ACA's full implementation, I'm thinking that we maybe can't be trusted with Germany's model. It's all-or-nothing, as far as the greater system goes; sprinkle some private coverage on top for the wealthy, if you must.
Before revolutionizing the system, why not start with capping insurer profits and pay it back to policyholders? That will put a limiter on the greed machine
As I understand it, the ACA caps profits by requiring that insurance companies spend 80% of their revenue on "medical care and quality improvement". Therefore, the only ways for insurance companies to make more money is if they get a lot more customers OR if the price of medical care skyrockets.
I suspect the reason why UHC has decided to deny so many claims is that this will allow them to marginally lower he price of their premiums relative to their competitors. This'll get them more money via method 1. The whole industry is working around the clock on method #2.
That's broadly correct. One of the most under-appreciated wins of the ACA was capping non-care premium costs (read: admin, et al).
From working on automation inside the system at insurers at the time, I can definitively say this spurred health insurers to streamline and lower operational cost overheads.
With regards to the denials, I think you're right too. People like to point at insurers and blame them, but it's easy to forget they're just the middleman.
There's "cost of care" on the other side of them. At the end of the day, premiums need to balance with costs... (somewhat, in aggregate)
There are probably some edge cases where there are opportunities to profit, mostly to do with privately-administered but publicly-funded areas of health insurance (read: FEP and Medicare Advantage), but generally it's trying to get premiums lower for competitive reasons.
This is why I groan when people talk about, say, how the government needs to "incentivize" increased building volume in order to solve the housing crisis. If you accept the argument that there's a shortage of physical units (and not just a shortage of affordable units that haven't been converted to rentals, or just simply kept off the market)... the real estate market is never going to kneecap itself. No matter how much money we give them. The government needs to start building houses. Directly. Whatever loss is incurred will pale in comparison to the costs (social and otherwise) of another few decades of paying private corporations not to solve the problem.
We REALLY should have learned our lesson after what happened with the broadband rollout in the early 2000s.
I always believed a good president would declare a national emergency. Deploy the military, national guard, ect and begin a massive housing campaign. Imagine what can be built in 5 years time.
I suspect that something has changed in the way square footage is calculated. Perhaps there are more finished basements or something. I was very involved in several moves my family undertook when I was younger. I feel like I got a good sense for home sizes. Many of the ones listed for 3000 sq ft. today look more like the 2000 sq ft. houses from yesteryear.
I also think about Louis Rossmann's quest to find a NYC storefront for his repair business a few years ago. He brought a laser measure with him, to document how the actual space squared with advertisements. I don't know that he ever found a place that wasn't lying. Yes, New York and, yes, commercial, but I wouldn't be surprised to see similar tactics in place for residential, across the country.
And the jobs? The amenities that make areas highly desirable require workers who can actually commute to them.
It's a game of chicken. The people who live in these areas and expect to be served without complaint either acquiesce to density and lower property values, or risk (occasionally fiery) demonstrations against the unfair and unworkable situation. Their goal is to keep the game running, so that everyone else doesn't decide on one or the other end state. Essentially, "Highly desirable areas that are too expensive for low/middle-income workers," is a transition state.
>Is it more likely the trend continues and young people will simply become priced out, or is a correction more likely?
As a layman, take this with a huge grain of salt: it depends. By established rules, a major correction should be imminent. In fact, it should have happened one of several times already.
Examples of catalysts include a bond liquidity crisis in late 2019, the flash crash at the start of the COVID pandemic, the Gamestop debacle in early 2021, the collapse of the Chinese real estate market later in 2021, and the US bank collapses of early 2023. There are also others, though several venture into conspiracy theory territory.
In every example I mentioned, unprecedented action was undertaken to prevent a catastrophic event that might have lead to financial contagion across global markets. There will be probably be more. It remains to be seen whether authorities will continue undertaking steps to shore things up when the bubble threatens to pop. (Trump's return to office is an interesting wrinkle; grab another grain of salt, but it's my opinion that the Gamestop thing only got as bad as it did because the regulatory regime under his tenure was asleep at the wheel.)
It should be noted that a correction doesn't necessarily lead to affordability if purchasing power simply continues falling or remains stagnant, as a result of a weaker job market. There are people who believe that sellers will simply refuse to drop residential real estates prices, as they have with commercial properties. Consolidation of ownership under large entities - as we've already seen to some extent - would allow owners to simply squat on properties, perhaps renting then out. Who knows what happens to the algorithmic rent fixing lawsuits, that might have brought those costs back to Earth a bit, after this year's electoral red wave.
A correction won't occur because there is a housing shortage of between 3-8M units, depending on who you ask. There is not enough labor to build more units at any reasonable rate, so it'll be a slow burn as the system reaches equilibrium over time (new housing comes into the market when owners must sell, demand destruction due to pricing). Due to demographics, a lot more housing could be satisfied by smaller units accounting for reduced forward looking family formation, but the challenge remains in sourcing labor to build these units.
With regards to the labor market, due to structural demographics and labor shortages, it is highly unlikely in my opinion that the job market weakens to the point where housing experiences a crisis from a rapid, sustained increase in homeowners who cannot afford their mortgage payments.
Never say never, but yes, agreed. And that shortage depending on how it’s calculated may be more pronounced if we look at where people plan to live in the future. Central Ohio where I live is on track to gain in population while the state as a whole loses population. A house in a rural county doesn’t necessarily count/help, even if it’s included in official “here are many houses we have” statistics.
Home builders, especially with a risk-free 4% return today, do not have any incentive to build “cheap” or “affordable” housing, and as material prices continue to increase because there are 330 million people in America who also want those resources, new builds will have to continue to increase in price and perhaps decrease in quality, depending on how much oil goes into the construction of the house. Home builders, absent clear evidence of industry collusion will simply increase their profitability and will not build ‘starter homes” or “affordable housing”.
We can address the issue in a few ways, for example removing artificially limiting zoning practices, generally speaking, or perhaps the elected government can just pay for cheaper housing, or we can craft good legislation.
But on its own I don’t see a good catalyst right now that will cause home prices to “correct”* without a treatment worse than the disease (economic depression or global war or something else that is otherwise catastrophic).
* The term “correction” is popular but misused. The current price of an asset is always correct. When an asset decreases in price, that decrease is no more correct than a corresponding increase in price.
Great points, great comment. An additional measure to solve for this would be by making remote work a protected labor right (assuming it does not overly burden the employer and such), so workers can move where the housing is, or the housing is cheap. But we'd rather let old, status seeking folks at the top of the corporate ladder "show workers who is in charge" and maintain control while workers get extracted from for higher than necessary rent or mortgage payments near an office (where housing is in demand but very slow for additional supply to come online, if it ever does at all).
> A correction won't occur because there is a housing shortage of between 3-8M units, depending on who you ask.
I'm not from the US, and unfamiliar with the statistics, but in NZ the general narrative has been similar - i.e. "the property price boom was due to a shortage caused by an increase in population and a lack of new stock".
For NZ, this doesn't hold up when looking at actual statistics.
- Prices rose x4 between 1995 and 2021 (inflation adjusted).
- The total number of households to total number of dwellings remained relatively unchanged over the same period.
- The average household size remained steady (i.e. it's not just a case of each dwelling housing more people).
Given the above (and some other evidence), my assumption is that the property boom was not driven by increased demand for homes, but by steadily declining interest rates causing an increase in demand for investments. If this is true, and we are at the end of the era of ever decreasing interest rates, then I believe a correction is entirely possible (it is well underway in NZ - 30% down in 3 years in my city).
I would be interested to know what makes the US situation so different (my feeling is that the situation in most anglo countries is similar - if not so extreme as NZ with regard to price rises and population increases).
US institutional ownership is too low nationwide to be material compared to new housing build rate when considering overall supply shortage. Of note, there is institutional concentration in certain local markets, which diminishes purchase supply in those localities (and potentially contributing to price level firmness in those localities).
When I said "steadily declining interest rates causing an increase in demand for investments", I wasn't referring to institutional investment only (for residential properties this is almost entirely insignificant in NZ). I was referring to the motivations of all purchasers.
Nobody was paying the average of NZD1M for just a home - they were making an investment with future capital gains in mind (as well as getting a home). Now that credit is no longer cheap those capital gains are less than assured - even negative. So a correction is occurring. The correction has not been caused by a drop in demand for homes/places to live.
This is a misconception that gets perpetuated because of a conflation of a shortage of physical housing units (which does not exist) and a shortage of affordable units (which does)[1]. This shortage is highly local, as your Fannie Mae sources discuss; it is best characterized as a mismatch between local resources and opportunities. This suggests that it's not merely a matter of market failure, but additionally (if not principally) one of municipal mismanagement.
The solution is already known, as it has been executed successfully in many places, including Singapore, the UK[2], and the Soviet Union: the government builds units directly and either sells or rents them according to affordability rather than cost. This will destroy housing as an investment, which would certainly have knock-on effects, but in terms of solving the problem at hand - "Are there enough places for people to live?" - it's adequate. Chalk up any resulting difficulties as a redistribution of the externalities of letting the problem fester for so long.
>With regards to the labor market, due to structural demographics and labor shortages, it is highly unlikely in my opinion that the job market weakens to the point where housing experiences a crisis from a rapid, sustained increase in homeowners who cannot afford their mortgage payments.
Please see GP for examples of situations where just that exact scenario happened (China, relevant because of the potential for financial contagion) or almost happened (the rest). It's unwise to bet the labor market on the ability of officials to pull novel remedies out of thin air every time a systemic threat appears.
Domain specificity of "weak link"-hood, as well as the compounding of innocuous, sub-symptomatic "weak links":
Carpenter Tom is a hard-worker, great husband, and community leader. And he voted for an autocrat, against his explicit interests (benefits from ACA, benefits from undocumented immigrant labor, benefits from special-ed resources for his kids) because he dislikes keeping abreast of current events (poor reading speed) and made his decision based on a misunderstanding predicated by, essentially, a game of telephone across his personal network that warped facts about the candidates.
He's a "weak link" on the subject that counts - the matter of the vote - but otherwise an upstanding member of the community. You're going to disenfranchise him?
I sympathize with the rest of your comment. I do think it's a bit naive to think that these programs help even of a fraction of the poor kids they should be reaching. They seem to mostly be a way to section off semi-affluent kids in "lesser" schools (e.g., parents who can't move for work or family reasons).
No, I'm just going to wish that he was more educated and informed, and that the school system 40 years ago taught him critical thinking. American school needs to get better at teaching middling students too, too many USAians I talk to are incapable of reasoning about and discussing policy. With all that being said, the way he is the "weak link" is that by voting, he is most capable of negatively affecting the most people.
Maybe? Disenfranchise him, and see how all of the good he does for his community is consumed by the energy he puts into not being the second-class citizen that you've designated him as. We're bound to the success of our weakest links because they affect our lives beyond the arenas where they're weak. In our subject's case, he's ass at voting, but society gets more out of him than just that one ill-conceived moment.
In Seattle, there's actually a test you can take to get you into the "HCC" program which is the gifted program in Seattle Public Schools. Seattle, however, has been trying (successfully) for years to dismantle it. So even if you pass the test, there's not very many places that you can go to get these services.
Was this a test that a child could be voluntarily signed up for by their parents? In my district in a different state, the students were first selected based on standardized testing to then take the IQ test like exam to get into the program.
I'm not so certain that a test like that is proof of anything other than that someone has the resources to study for that test. Seattle's system seems to have been a magnet program (where such tests are maybe appropriate) masquerading as a gifted program. One has to wonder how many gifted students went underserved so that such a magnet program could be maintained. Sunsetting it for a neighborhood program seems fairer and more effective.
In any case, it's good that you've observed your daughter's failure to achieve without an extrinsic impetus. It's probably a good time to sit down with her and determine what excites her intellectually so that she can be empowered to pursue that subject independently. I can tell you first-hand that relying on a school or school system - even one that routinely sends graduates (minority and white, working and middle class) to highly-selective colleges and universities - to shepherd students into stable and lucrative careers is currently a fool's gambit. Academic achievement is often necessary but not sufficient (and also more expensive and time-consuming than incorporating a measure of autodidacticism.)
Most tests like this are IQ tests, and studying has little impact on IQ test scores, except perhaps showing where you over think things or take too much time. It might get you from 12% to 35%, but won’t get you from 12% to 70%.
Most IQ tests are rife with cultural biases, and can, in fact, be studied for. There's also no indication of what constitutes "passing" for Seattle's test, and how that compares to "passing" in other jurisdictions.
IMO any student that is 1-2 years ahead can be considered gifted for the purposes of parents who are thinking about how to optimize public or private education for their kids.
Based on how a lot of education systems work in the US (recognizing only discrete progress in a student), if your child is 1-2 years ahead then that's worth recognizing and start nurturing. That's about when public schools also recognize the giftedness of a student.
You don't need brilliant children to achieve this kind of advantage, just a careful eye and consistent nurturing.
The OP strongly tries to claim (before contradicting herself in the concluding pargraph) that gifted is a major psychological difference, not merely being smart and a fast learner.
This comment section is going to be a sh*tshow, but I think I agree with the author's central contention that the issue is one of lax definition, and a failure to prevent dilution of that definition by pushy parents. The racism aspect is a chicken-or-egg situation; whether such programs started as a way to allow engaged, mostly white parents to track and separate their kids from students of color, or merely became that, is probably a matter that varies by location, but the tensions that such a state conjures are clearly a major component of the initiative's undoing.
It once again comes down to us not being able to have nice things until that racial hysteria is resolved - minority parents assured that their children aren't being mistreated because of conscious and unconscious perceptions on the part of the school, white and affluent Asian parents assured that their children aren't going to receive a subpar education just because their child's class is double-digits percentage black/brown - and, perhaps more broadly, there is a decoupling of elite educational attainment and basic economic stability. Suffice it to say that anyone telling you that the only problem is that schools are Harrison Bergeroning their little prodigies either aren't acknowledging the whole story or are hoping that you don't know it yourself.
As soon as we undo 3 centuries of systemic oppression and get the races roughly on par with each other, we'll have an easier time managing G&T programs.
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