China and other manufacturing behemoths are producing dramatically more than they were before the pandemic and we are importing and buying all of those foreign goods.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=117Ig
I don't know about where you live but I see a lot more automation in service industries where I live. We continue to innovate. There's a labor shortage and we are below the natural unemployment rate, and it's not that those workers are doing less, as real GDP continues to grow
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=117IF
The inflation we've seen is almost all demand driven. There's plenty of supply of goods and services compared to pre pandemic. Your narrative doesn't fit the data.
Everyone got their stimmy check, paid down their debt, quit commuting, and realized they could buy more stuff. They did that for a couple of years. Now that credit card balances are peaking again (and at higher rates!), demand will slow and there will be a recession. The fed, always looking in the crystal ball but mostly reacting to what's in the rearview, will ease off rates and the economy will level out. The fed can't get rid of business and credit cycles, but they can try to quiet the amplitude. They have blunt tools to do that.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=117MH
That doesn't seem to have stopped most other countries from having free or near-free healthcare. You shouldn't even have to think about money when dealing with hospitals.
This language isn't very helpful. It is likely paid for from general tax revenue. That might be a better implementation but it certainly isn't "free". And if it isn't explicitly paid for via tax revenue it will end up being paid for via inflation if the government spending is out of line with its revenue.
The language is fine because that's what the word "free" means. Do you complain that a cloud provider's free tier isn't really free because it's paid for by other customers?
It seems it's only with healthcare people forget the meaning of the word.
Many people really don't connect the dots between tax policies and health care insurance/payment policies. Saying that health care/insurance is "free" makes it difficult to have a coherent policy discussion.
I know the ship has sailed on this but it I continue to see people truly believe that they are not paying for health care and that sort of misguided understanding of economics shouldn't be encouraged as it makes it difficult to have coherent discussions about many different public policies.
College education should be free...
College loans should be free (even when they weren't when the loan was taken out)...
Income should be free (UBI schemes)...
If you switch to "subsidized" from "free" the list expands exponentially.
As is common in these discussions, I’ll reference the French system as I experienced it.
If you have to go to the hospital, that’s not billed to you.
If you see your GP, they charge you up front. There’s no copay as in the US system, the doctor just charges what they want. The doctor doesn’t keep any significant medicine on prem. If you need a vaccine, they write a script that you take to the pharmacy and return with. In either case, you submit your paperwork after the fact and get reimbursed. For office visits it’s 80% of the “reasonable and customary” changes. For medicine it’s usually 50-60%.
You can purchase additional insurance that covers more of these costs, but I didn’t see any value in it for my situation.
When I left, French insurance companies were setting up US style networks with doctors. If you saw an in-network provider, you were reimbursed more.
Only the truly indigent get “free” healthcare under the French system.
The cost of the thing is effectively irrelevant if you both need it and don't get the bills for weeks/months. If patients are expected to self-ration, they need the info up front...
Government restricts the resources available for health care with the idea that it costs to much to have extra.
So my local hospital just does whatever and charges Medicare their CAH rates, doesn't matter a lot if they suck or could be cheaper, no one else can open a hospital (both by state law and because Medicare probably wouldn't agree to pay them).
their claim is that they are agents for their client states (which in none (or at least the vast majority) of the publicized cases) has been Israel. i.e. it was state sponsored espionage, where they were the state's agent (be it saudi, or any other state).
Personally, I don't see how this claim works, if a foreign govt pays someone to spy, that person still goes to jail if they get caught.
also as the justice dept came out against their claim, it would seem they dont really have much of anyone "in their pocket".
You've got a fully compliant (in terms of anti money laundering), whitelisted counterparties only, decentralized lending and borrowing platform that completely eliminates the friction of a typical corporate treasury banking experience.
You deposit dollars, you earn yield in dollars. If you want exposure to eth or BTC, you can exchange dollars for either or borrow at transparent rates. The transaction settles in seconds and the fees are fractions of what it costs to wire funds.
My organization uses Wells Fargo for similar services (sans BTC and ETH) and pays considerably more for the pleasure of receiving less in return. Aave achieves it with virtually none of the back-office or legacy COBOL based software that these dinosaur, heavily entrenched, ethically challenged financial institutions require. It's like pre-acquisition WhatsApp compared to at&t efficiency comparison.
There's innovation and value creation happening in crypto, whether you choose to see it or not.
The hostility to crypto from a bunch of SV engineers who have scammed society out of billions (trillions?) of dollars pitching ineffective digital marketing is not without irony. Not to mention the societal and political fallout from the uncontrolled spread of misinformation, aided and abetted by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and other SV darlings. Pushing ads to fuel consumerism and coming on here to complain about emissions from proof of work Blockchains. It's rich.
It's not easy to build software that actually solves large scale problems. Most of the companies/apps in crypto will fail, just like internet startups. What succeeds will likely disrupt the financial system.
Isn't this a circular argument? The question was what "useful" things do these crypto solutions/companies provide, and your example is a product which allows regulated entities to invest in crypto.
"Why is X valuable? Because X allows you to invest in... X."
Also, in this specific example (Arc), is the solution even considered DeFi? There's a centralized list of whitelister entities and you can only participate if you're a customer of these entities. So they're like banks.
Whitelisted counterparties borrowing and lending to each other without having to trust a third party to intermediate, such as fedwire, swift, or dtcc, is clearly not a scam. It's a b2b product with at least 30 sizable informed and willing institutional participants. They could take their capital anywhere else in financial markets but choose to take it to Aave.
It's the same platform Aave offers anyone else on Ethereum, polygon, arbitrum, and other chains coming soon. The customers of the arc product have a regulatory compliance burden that arc solves for them but the tech is the same.
I see crypto as a guy had this beautiful idea that the little guy could topple big powerful banks, and then all that happened is powerful people will find a way to exploit it for more power.
Snooze. What is charged in healthcare is a distraction.
This is likely a supply that would be used in an inpatient setting and will be completely written off as a "contractual discount and allowance" after the insurer pays the negotiated rate, which is based on the overall case and it's severity, not what supplies are used.
This is lazy journalism meant to generate outrage without discussing the substance of the problem.
Relax medical licensure requirements. Cap medical malpractice damages and chase the doctors' licenses instead of their pocketbooks. Allow nurse practitioners to provide higher level care. Allow telehealth and reciprocity for out-of-state licensure. Publicly fund more medical schools and residencies. Reduce burdensome documentation requirements and Medicare billing audit penalties.
Just a few ideas that I think are more meaningful options for addressing healthcare costs.
Get rid of onerous documentation requirements. There - you cut 10%-20% of hospital administration costs, and you haven't changed how much doctors are being paid per hour, but you have increased their productivity, so they can see more patients for the same salary.
Find me a payer who will agree to it and I'll show you the solution to healthcare bloat.
The documentation requirements did not come out of thin air. Some docs during the 80s/90s/00s made out extremely well. One of the infamous ones is ortho surgeons hitting everyone with dubious back surgeries since it was all paid for by Medicare even though there was little evidence back surgeries worked.
A lot of the doctors/dentists/pharmacists made out very well in previous decades, resulting in the healthcare expenditures becoming a political flashpoint, culminating in ACA, and thus the pendulum starts swinging the other way. Sucks for newer generation of doctors.
theres still billions in fraud, waste, and abuse. I don't think the increased documentatiom addressed the problem you describe and created many new problems of its own.
Authors point about trustless commitments, ignoring the semantic arguments posed in the comments, is important.
Not mentioned but I would argue as equally or of greater importance is interoperability. If you lose trust in the commitment you've made, you can move your capital/identity/etc. To the new thing relatively seamlessly. This is the DeFi experience already built that's so amazing to interact with relative to traditional banking and capital markets. If you apply that same functionality to other markets, such as social media or healthcare (using zero knowledge rollups to protect private data), I think that's inevitably an a-ha moment.
It's like the Amazon API mandate - https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes... - if you build with interoperability at the core, the knock-on effects can be exponential. It's a game changer. The consumer is no longer captive to walled gardens.
Drop play money into a low fee blockchain, stick to a stablecoin, and mess around with some of the DeFi apps. I think it's easy to become a believer if you do that and compare to your normal banking experience.
The important part is the network itself. Bank of America is free to build on top of the network but by doing so it enters into competition with the rest of the network.
You don't need them for a bank account so if you don't like their services then you can take your funds elsewhere. In my opinion this is a critical piece of what is missing in our current society. These corporations and government agencies have become too entrenched and too big to fail. We need to inject competition back into the system.
China and other manufacturing behemoths are producing dramatically more than they were before the pandemic and we are importing and buying all of those foreign goods. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=117Ig
I don't know about where you live but I see a lot more automation in service industries where I live. We continue to innovate. There's a labor shortage and we are below the natural unemployment rate, and it's not that those workers are doing less, as real GDP continues to grow https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=117IF
The inflation we've seen is almost all demand driven. There's plenty of supply of goods and services compared to pre pandemic. Your narrative doesn't fit the data.
On the other hand, Bridgewater's October 2021 analysis has been spot on. https://www.bridgewater.com/its-mostly-a-demand-shock-not-a-...
Everyone got their stimmy check, paid down their debt, quit commuting, and realized they could buy more stuff. They did that for a couple of years. Now that credit card balances are peaking again (and at higher rates!), demand will slow and there will be a recession. The fed, always looking in the crystal ball but mostly reacting to what's in the rearview, will ease off rates and the economy will level out. The fed can't get rid of business and credit cycles, but they can try to quiet the amplitude. They have blunt tools to do that. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=117MH