[QUOTE="Vuurk"][QUOTE="Admiral_Dudeman"][[QUOTE="Mafiree"] For his time he was fine....... There has been tons of advancement in modeling and econometrics in the field during his life and since he died. The Austrian school does not fully utilize this advancement imo. Which, is why it is taken less seriously. Indeed. Also, he was the only person in the realm of Austrian economics that wasn't completely insane. Love generalizations. Keep them coming. The generalization was warranted. The Austrians, by and large, had pronounced ideological biases and attacked anything other than laissez faire on moral grounds as virulently as pragmatic ones.
As it stands, it is not yet problematic. However, if the growth of debt is left unaddressed -- and current projections leave me with precious little reason to be optimistic, considering how little inclined D.C. is to make any meaningful attempts to address the issue -- It certainly can become a problem in the future.
[[QUOTE="Mafiree"] For his time he was fine....... There has been tons of advancement in modeling and econometrics in the field during his life and since he died. The Austrian school does not fully utilize this advancement imo. Which, is why it is taken less seriously. Indeed. Also, he was the only person in the realm of Austrian economics that wasn't completely insane.
The reason that the U.S. spends 200-300% that which the rest of the world does has not to do exclusively with the fact that insurance companies make profit. Yes, there is ~ a 3% profit margin, but that only begins to tell the story. Administrative overhead costs amount to 31% of health insurance spending in the U.S. When there are numerous different bureaucratic agencies doing exactly the same thing, there are many redundancies and economies of scale aren't efficiently developed. This is why Medicare administrative costs as a proportion of spending is dwarfed by their private competitors. There is also that other countries by pharacuetical products in bulk due to centralized purchasing power -- which again reduces costs drastically. Moving on, for all of our talk about shorter waits for MRIs, the fact of the matter that the U.S. spends an astronomical amount of cash on underused, highly expensive medical equipment. Whereas other countries will simply purchase and maintain enough to suit their needs, the competitive nature of the industry, everyone wants the equipment, leading to greater expenditures on underused equipment. Finally, our tort laws are sh!te and also add to the picture. The other countries in the western world don't allow as much in the way of malpractice spending as we do, either.
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