43 points

I heard about a study that women who own horses live longer. The comment below was "if you can afford a horse you can probably afford health insurance. It isn’t the horse "

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2 points

Essentially yes but it’s not the underlying cause, as it wouldn’t also be true in places with free at the point of use healthcare.

The group “women who own horses” will, on average, be wealthier of course. However, it will contain an abnormally large group of people who can afford not to work.

Wealth is the biggest indicator of life expectancy. Adjusting for healthcare costs, the change happens when people earn enough passively to not work or significantly reduce their hours to a very small number.

Imo, the answer is “we’re all forced to work ourselves into early graves, unless you can afford to live off of other people working themselves into an early grave for you.”

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1 point
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By aspiring to own a horse or live by the water or whatever, you can accidentally afford healthcare too!

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96 points

What’s more depressing than American healthcare?

Canadian conservatives replacing theirs with the American system without a fight.

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52 points
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When I last visited Canada a group of old men were talking at the Canadian Tire about how long it takes to see a doctor. Were saying they need to start making people pay like they do in the States.

Don’t fall for that propaganda. We have both long waits and pay a ton of money in the US. It can be both. I’ve had bills up to $118,000 and it can take me a year to see a specialist. I can’t find a primary care doctor and it takes several months to get in with a temporary nurse practitioner instead.

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5 points

How did you have 118000 to pay?

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4 points

Most likely the insurance covered a huge chunk of that.

It’s a long story, but the TL;DR; of American healthcare is:

Healthcare providers over-inflate their costs and over-charge by orders of magnitude to insurance agencies. Why? It’s because insurance agencies have whole teams and teams and teams and teams and teams (80% of insurance companies cost is administrative groups that just do this) of people that negotiate/argue that down to a reasonable amount. This means they pay a fraction of that initial bill, but they don’t show that in the printout, instead they negotiate only “their part” of the bill, and send the rest they didn’t negotiate down to the enrollee to cover up to their yearly maximum.

This is why you see bills for $100K+ and your amount owed is roughly $2-3K with insurance “paying” the rest.

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3 points

I didn’t. I put some on credit card that was required up front in hospital and the rest went into debt collection while I fought the insurance company for 2 years. Eventually I ended up paying about $12,000 I think.

But the credit cards interest was more and I have been in severe debt the past decade since. All my money goes towards debt payments and bills.

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41 points

It’s pathetic. We are willing choosing to let it go, despite being such a huge advantage of being Canadian

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9 points

Wait are you guys going down the shitter too? Illegally migrating to canada has always been my backup plan

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21 points

Oh yeah, we are. Pierre says privatization is cool, and like morons, the majority of Canada believes that this rendition of trickle down economics won’t line the pockets of the rich

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10 points

the entire conservative agenda is to dismantle universal healthcare from the inside to prove that “it doesn’t work, we should privatize it”

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5 points

Someone didn’t hear about the convoys

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4 points
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I hear this a lot but where is it happening? Definitely not in the discussion in NS.

Dont get me wrong, fuck the PCs but I havent seen any real evidence of replacing our public medical system.

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11 points
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It’s not “our” it’s per province. Alberta in my case.

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7 points
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It’s the provinces with an outrageously wealthy upper class. BC, Calgary Alberta, and Ontario are chock full of rich conservatives that want to replicate the American system in Canada so that they can rival their American peers.

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53 points
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Heaven forbid life expectancy factors be TWO things!

Obviously easy access to healthcare AND a non corn syrup based diet are important factors in determining longevity.

Edit: Does anyone know what this category of logical fallacy is called? Basically the fallacy where a person incorrectly tries to attribute an outcome to a single cause.

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21 points

In East Texas the further one is away from Houston the less their life expectancy. We all eat the same stuff, I think. The difference maxes out to 5 years average less per person, near Louisiana, but if you look at the actuary stats it’s a straight line correlation between medical center distance and how long we live, on average

This honestly is repeated for many states in the USA. The metro areas have same life expectancies as Europe and Japan, but it’s balanced out by rural lack of access and fewer preventative cares.

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17 points

It is a lot easier to survive a heart attack and stroke if you can reach a hospital or comparable medical service in a reasonable amount of time.

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9 points

Yes, that too, but the way it was explained to me is that high blood pressure, diabetes and easy to diagnose diseases which make up the majority. All solved by regular checkups

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2 points

Look up food deserts and reconsider whether urban and rural citizens in America have the same diet.

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1 point

Food deserts do exist in many places, but majority of people in my area need vehicle access to get any groceries, or work. One usually does not walk down to the local dollar general.

And with vehicles come access to real grocery stores

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Causal oversimplification is a specific kind of false dilemma where conjoint possibilities are ignored.

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11 points

Reductionism? Oversimplification?

Einstein supposedly said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”

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4 points

Yes but life expectancy has been rising in those countries despite worse diets and obesity rising. So it seems access to healthcare is a stronger factor.

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3 points

It is not two things, it is several things. Life expectancy in the US is lower mainly because of one thing though.

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27 points

It would be funny if the punchline wasn’t the first thing you read.

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16 points
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Edit, realized the second comment adds nothing too, enjoy the jpeg.

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12 points

The internet is just one giant network of that one annoying kid in elementary school who kept repeating jokes other people made 30 seconds ago.

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4 points

We were all that kid in a way

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3 points

I mean its also the better food, American food is so stuffed with pointless corn syrup that Americans who spend time in Europe consistently lose weight even if they don’t change their eating habbits, the UK is going the same way so fast that I’m turning into a vegetarian because the meat in my price range is genuinely becomming cyberpunk levels of bad (It basically just tastes like starchy mush with no resemblence to meat in flavour or texture at this point)

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