by Dread Pirate Roberts
Jan. 16, 2025
Today, January 16th 2025, The Midway just strategically cornered themselves. How could their writers now possibly make their argument that Lab Liberty’s posts come at some great exterior consequence when, for the past few weeks they have been cooking up this monstrosity of an article which, in many institutions, would necessitate a suspension for the writer.
First, to address the attack on American healthcare, and then to address the shock value:
The writer makes the claim that American healthcare is too expensive, and that there is a ”wealth shield” to providing Americans with better coverage. This is misleading and wrong. The reason this claim is misleading is because 1) products in the richer country’s are typically priced higher because time is more valuable. As Gary Becker, famous economist and after whom the University of Chicago named one of it’s most impressive halls, once wrote ”the most fundamental constraint is limited time. Economic and medical progress have greatly increased length of life, but not the physical flow of time itself, which always restricts everyone to twenty-four hours per day.” 2)people in richer countries will spend more 3)the US healthcare system does NOT have high profit margins.
High spending on health is because more people spend on it, because the country is richer, not because its exorbitantly expensive. The US spends more money on health but not in a way that could not be predicted by its wealth. With a correlation coefficient of 0.944, this is not coincidence.
On that same note, however, the United States is in no way shape or form an economy with the most expensive healthcare, because while products in modern economies become more expensive, less time is spent to acquire them(hence why the loaf of bread, which would have been priced at a days work previously now costs less than 1/3 of even a minimum wage’s hourly compensation). So, while things may cost more per dollar amount, citizens are getting more value. Here is a graph demonstrating the same relationship between income and spending, demonstrating we properly scale linearly, but keeping mind mind real incomes in the US are much larger than the countries below them:
The writer claims that bankruptcy occurs most often because of high healthcare costs. You could say the same thing about our relatively high mortality rate, though, because while we have the best healthcare, our people are not as healthy. Gun violence, obesity etc. make the difference.
To confront the writer’s claims of the wealth shield more directly, possibly the graph that puts this edgy, shocking bourgeois article to shame is the relationship between the profitability of different sectors. *Please note that healthcare is at the very bottom*
And to finish off my point about this article, and maybe to offer a few pointers on how not to lose the popular vote next time, when you write something like this:
”Mr. Mangione’s mother suffered and suffered because she didn’t receive proper care for her condition, and he himself endured years of chronic back pain – and I would bet that had that been my own mother, I would’ve been homicidal, too.”
Expect alienation from whatever side of politics that is, a shift many of my left leaning friends have felt is best, because posing yourself as a homicidal person isn’t usually compelling.
A final point:
Colleges don’t like that either.
Lab Liberty 