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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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No, a “public option” is not the solution. The solution is deregulation. Medical treatments that were perfected 40 years ago should be basically free, and administered (if that’s even necessary) by a low wage technician.

A “public option” is just a shift of control from private companies to the government.

A solution is less preventive care, which does not save money despite the hype. how about a return to people only seeking healthcare when actually sick.

Ah, the medishare option.

The solution is deregulation. Medical treatments that were perfected 40 years ago should be basically free, and administered (if that’s even necessary) by a low wage technician.

Most of medicine is based on prescribing drugs, for which a person needs to understand drug interactions, risk-benefit ratios, and basic biochemistry. And most of the other part is surgery, which requires an experienced hand. You know, like a doctor.

So who's going to pay for the drugs people need? And who's going to pay for the drug development? And who's going to cut your appendix out when you have appendicitis? A "low wage technician"?

All of that could be handled by a technician with a good GPT bot

I've been waiting for decades for laser eye surgery to be perfected and standardized to the point that I can get my severe nearsightedness corrected to 20/20 or better, forever, by a robot at my local CVS for $9.95.

Laser Eye surgery today is miles better than the procedure was even 20 years ago. Here in the UK you can get the full procedure done on both your eyes for $2000 combined as an outpatient case. If you're willing to spend $2500+ you can get some of the fancy bells and whistles where each little patch of your cornea gets corrected exactly rather than a uniform correction being applied all over (this is something you couldn't get done in the year 2000 for example).

Lasik is unironically used as an example of a field that insurance doesn't touch that has in fact gotten orders of magnitude better and cheaper over the years.

I realize you’re likely joking but you should def get lazik, my vision is now better than 2020. Very much worth it

who is going to tell you about drug interactions

The same people who do now: pharmacists.

Drug development

Keep developing. Somehow every other industry seems to be developing new and interesting things without needing a protection cartel to allow them to do so.

Surgeries

This is what insurance should be for.