Health Care Costs

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

But there is a link between "the entire population" and individuals of various
groups. After all, people do catch diseases from each other, and contagion has
some tendency to cross class, and other lines. A few years ago, for example,
there were examples of underpaid food service workers, who were immigrants from
the Caribbean and Central American, communicating tropical intestinal parasites
to up-scale restaurant customers. The more recent West-Nile Virus scare, though
hyped by Giuliani for his own opaque purposes, is another example, having
apparently been imported from Israel. And recently we had our first Ebola
scare, with someone who flew in from Africa. She didn't have it, but she could
have.

So subjectivism gets less rational and efficient as communications improve.
We're a long way from the time when Irish immigrants on the famine ships had
time to die on the way over and get buried at sea.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema.

Chris Burford wrote:


> The US system is massively economically inefficient, if your goal is to
> secure the entire population against the misery of remediable health risks.
>
> The US system is probably more efficient if you consider it as a market for
> individual choice of a subjective nature.
>
> It is inefficient if you consider that even in an era of unprecedented
> surplus wealth, the insecurities of ill health remain one of the biggest
> worries that trouble human beings, quite rightly.
>
> There is a major battle about whether consumer capitalism is the answer,
> which will take some decades to answer, probably because it will also have
> to be fought out at a global level.
>
> Chris Burford
>
> London