Losing my religion
I ' m going to interrupt the series on medical costs for today and talk about religion. I ' m sure it won ' t come as a surprise to anyone that I am very pleased by the graph below.I took it from this Daily Kos diary about the actual meaning of " Christian " identity to Trump cultists, which is not really the main point of this post although it ' s relevant.The majority of poll respondents still say they identify as Christian, but it ' s a sharply declining majority. Furthermore, many people who say they identify as Christian do not attend church regularly. Church is for weddings and funerals and maybe Christmas and Easter...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 15, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: What's this doing in the Bible?
Psalm 45 is apparently written to celebrate a royal wedding. It starts with a panegyric to the king, then introduces the bride and exhorts her to renounce her family and country of origin. RSV translates the word " Shoshannim " as Lilies, which would apparently refer to a melody, but some think it actually refers to a musical instrument. In any event, nobody has any idea what this has to do with the sons of Korah, although it seems to me the most likely explanation is that they are a guild of musicians, or perhaps even a specific band -- the New Christie Minstrels of the day. Notably, there is no theological content, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 14, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Why is health care so expensive in the U.S.?
It seems inquiring minds want to know, and rightly so. In fact, we spend about twice as much on medical goods and services as the average wealthy country (defined for most purposes as members of the OECD), and something like three times as much as Japan, but we also have the lowest life expectancy of all those countries, and Japan, that spends the least on so-called health care, has the highest.WTF is going on here? We can usefully decompose the issue into four parts, or maybe 4 1/2, but in the end it all comes down to one main problem. The four and a half parts are 1) prices for medical goods and services are higher in th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 12, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Who are these guys?
Fortunately we now have a few relatively short psalms. A " maschil " probably means an instructive or didactic psalm, according to some authorities, but that would not seem to describe Psalm 42. It could instead be a musical form. The " sons of Korah " are a rather surprising attribution, however. (In the KJV it appears to be addressed to them, in the RSV they seem to be credited as authors. It isn ' t clear.) As you likely will not recall, in Numbers 16 Korah organizes a rebellion against the hegemony of the Levites. Yahweh responds by causing the earth to open and bury Korah and two of his lieutenants alive, and th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Busting a myth
A common right wing trope is that illegal drugs are coming across the southern border, carried by illegal immigrants. You may even have seen the political ad featuring people climbing a wall wearing backpacks, implying that they were what are called " drug mules. " The whole thing was, of course, faked. I have written here before that this is not true, that is not how illicit drugs come into the country, butnow there is a very rigorous study proving it. Unfortunately, unless you have institutional access, you can only read the abstract, which is not very informative. (NBER used to be open access, this is apparently a new p...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 9, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: WTF?
Psalm 40 is an otherwise anodyne song of thanksgiving, but it makes the startling assertion in Verse 6 that God does not require animal sacrifices or burnt offerings. Since this was purportedly written by David (it wasn ' t, but still) that would demolish the main premise of the Book of Samuel, the Torah, and the rationale for the Temple and the Levite priesthood. No doubt there are apologists who try to explain this. Psalm 41 is more of the paranoia and whining we say in Psalm 38. It seems likely it was written by the same person in the same circumstances.40 I waited patiently for theLord;he inclined to me and h...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 7, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two, continued: The Death Spiral
It ' s been a few days since the last post in this series, so I ' ll remind you that last time, we posed the question, " What would happen if insurers were simply required to cover people for pre-existing conditions? " Problem solved, right? No. Problem made worse. Imagine what would happen. All of a
sudden a whole lot of people with serious chronic diseases, who couldn ’t get
health insurance before, will buy it now. They’re expensive to cover, so the
premiums will go up for everybody. At that point some number of people who
don’t need it quite as badly will drop their coverage, leaving only sicker
people in th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 5, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Misery
In psalms 38 and 39, the singer -- purportedly David -- is suffering from some very unpleasant disease. Of course, back then they believed that diseases were punishments by God, and so the psalmist believes. Although the attribution of these psalms to David is fictitious, it would not be surprising if he had some sort of sexually transmitted disease, assuming he actually existed and 1/10th of the stories about him are true. Anyway . . . The reference in the introduction to psalm 39, "To the choirmaster: to Jeduthun " is to 1 Chronicles 16, in which David establishes the tradition of musical performance bef...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 3, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Regarding the previous post on oligarchy . . .
I published a comment on it but I want to address it here. Obviously manufacturers moved their operations overseas in search of cheap labor and lax or non-existent environmental and safety regulations so they could make their products more cheaply, and yes, that made many products cheaper for consumers. WalMart is particularly known for squeezing manufacturers to lower prices and hence encouraging this dynamic. Americans as consumers benefited, Americans as workers lost out. As it turns out, the net result was losses for people with less education, as those manufacturing jobs -- often unionized -- that enabled blue collar ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 1, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm continued: What's this pre-existing conditions deal?
Since I interrupted this series, I will remind you that previously, we discussed the problem of adverse selection -- that people who are unhealthy are more likely to buy health insurance in a hypothetical Free Market. â„¢ But sellers of health insurance must find ways of predicting
and limiting their losses. The problem of adverse selection would not exist if
we had a universal system, as all other wealthy countries and some
not-so-wealthy do. Everybody would pay into the system, preferably according to
their mea ns. That way people who are healthy today subsidize the costs for
people who are not. If that strikes you as un...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 1, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The Just World Fallacy
The " just world fallacy " or illusion is a cognitive bias that assumes the consequences of actions are morally determined -- that people ultimately get what they deserve based on the rightness of their actions. Psalms 36 and 37 are among many that express this fallacy as fact. Indeed, the just world fallacy is central to most religions -- God rewards the righteous and faithful, and punishes the wicked and impious. Of course this is not true. Note verse 11 of Psalm 37, which the RSV translates as " The meek shall possess the land. " KJV translates this as " The meek shall inherit the earth, " and I suspect that ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 31, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Digression -- an important economic fact
I commend to your attentionJeffrey A. Winters in The American Interest, with the essential truth about our present historical moment, that gets obscured in the deliberate distractions thrown up by politicians and journalists who would rather make us think and talk about something else. Pull quote:Despite polls consistently showing that large majorities favor
increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, policy has been moving for
decades in the opposite direction. Reduced taxes on the ultra-rich and
the corporations and banks they dominate have shifted fiscal burdens
downward even as they have strained the government â...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two, continued: " Insurance "
Health insurance – again I’m using
the term because everybody else does, not because I think it’s accurate – can
work in many ways. One of the most important broad dimensions is how the
benefit gets delivered. ·Indemnity
plans are the most like fire insurance. They pay money when the beneficiary
incurs medical expenses. (The money could be paid to the beneficiary, or
directly to the provider. That doesn ’t much matter.)·Service
benefit plans have negotiated arrangements with providers to pay them a
certain amount for a given service, when it is provided.·Service
delivery plans actually provide the s...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 28, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: I am your retribution
Psalm 35 is one of many in which the petitioner calls on God to harm or destroy his enemies.SAB has provided a helpful list:Ask the angel of the Lord to persecute them by making their paths dark and slippery.
Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the LORD
persecute them. ... Let destruction come upon him at unawares.Psalm 35:6-8
Ask God to kill them and send them quickly to hell.Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell.Psalm 55:15
Ask him to break their teeth (in their mouths) and then cut them in pieces.Break their teeth, O God...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 27, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm Chapter Two, continued: Medical externalities
I ' ve had a request to say more about inflation. That ' s a bit off topic for the time being, but I ' ll get to it.Medicine is also unlike most other goods and services in the
extent to which it has important positive externalities – that is, benefits for
people outside of the transaction, who are not the providers or consumers. (Of
course it has negative externalities as well, including carbon emissions and
notably, a huge quantity of plastic waste.) A straightforward positive
externality is infectious disease control. Prev enting or curing infectious diseases
prevents them from being transmitted to others. This ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 26, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
