I know it’s a mistake to read anything in the mainstream press almost always, but this article that purports to discuss why health care costs rise so much in comparison to inflation only half-touches on two partial reasons and doesn’t actually discuss the root causes at all.

The first and main reason that health care costs spike skyward every year is that insurance is itself inflationary. No, I am not saying eliminate insurance but just like a loan for a house or student loans, the more money available in a market the more prices rise. This is one of the few completely correct areas of economics IMO and this is what has happened in the health care market and will continue to happen absent some other huge force counteracting this tendency.

That the insurers and hospitals have adversarial relations probably does more to promote that than if they were all one entity (no, I am not advocating that hospitals and insurers merge — also a terrible solution). By the way, inflation doesn’t just mean raising prices in the medical context, it means unnecessary tests, procedures, surgeries and all of that too.

This is not like car insurance (though that is inflationary too in some markets) because medical care is more obligatory — more akin to an oil change (not insured) or having brake pads replaced. Imagine how much an oil change would cost if insurance were mandated by law for this common need, and everywhere available to perform the procedure accepted insurance, and it was illegal to do it yourself. (Back of the envelope calcs suggest an oil change would cost somewhere around $1,000 in that environment.)

Ok, already tired of the car metaphors.

The second huge omission of the article is that doctors in America and Canada are hugely overpaid (and overtrained) compared to the rest of the world.

The third cause is that human labor — which the health care depends on in spades — gets more expensive relatively in relation to what can be automated. Meaning over time that the labor share of cost rises as compared to say the cost of a scalpel.

There are other causes of rising costs — I am not implying only three. But how can an article like this miss the greatest cause (that to be fair most others also miss) which is that the more money in a market, the more something will cost? So easy but completely outside of the comprehension of the “educated.”

I’m not into mysticism. I’ve always strongly identified with the more scientific-minded.

However, recognizing that, as one who’s not really math-minded or much interested in contaminating my mind in that way, it’s easy to see how the structure of the supposed impartiality of math is used in “objective” fields to impose and reify pre-existing prejudices. The “science” of economics is mostly bogus* math masquerading as objective truth, for instance.

It must have been a real blow to the “everything can be understood tidily in a neat system of simple equations” crowd then when quantum entanglement was discovered. (Yes, I know about Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” but that must have been just the tip of a massive iceberg.)

For instance, take a look at this description from Wikipedia:

The above result may or may not be perceived as surprising. A classical system would display the same property, and a hidden variable theory (see below) would certainly be required to do so, based on conservation of angular momentum in classical and quantum mechanics alike. The difference is that a classical system has definite values for all the observables all along while the quantum system does not. In a sense to be discussed below, the quantum system considered here seems to acquire a probability distribution for the outcome of a measurement of the spin along any axis of the other particle upon measurement of the first particle. This probability distribution is in general different from what it would be without measurement of the first particle. This may certainly be perceived as surprising in the case of spatially separated entangled particles.

You can tell this fundamentally bothers the math-brained people from this description alone. “May or may not be perceived as surprising” and then a bunch of weird equivocating.

Unless one wishes to posit some method of faster-than-light signaling (for which there is no evidence, and much evidence against) well yeah, I’d say it’s pretty darn surprising.

I’m not saying quantum entanglement and that the fact that electrons have memory can never be explained mathematically (though I personally doubt it), or that there is some mystical explanation — rather that Hamlet’s admonition to Horatio is for the most part as true in the “hard” fields as it is in the soft ones: more things in heaven and earth and all that.

I’m not interested in pseudoscience or mysticism at all, except sociologically. Physics is remarkable in that we know so very much about the universe. However, don’t let the math-brained con you into believing that their systems of understanding are that predictive about very much. They simply are not and probably never will be.

See the above about how we don’t have any fundamental understanding at all about some pretty basic features of our universe and likely never will.

Yes, I know quantum entanglement can’t be used to pass information, yadda yadda, so it has no real impact on causality, blah blah, but it’s one area that makes me laugh because it’s clear that something completely bizarre is going on and physicists’ minds glitch when they contemplate it. For that matter, most math-brained people have mental glitches when try to to contemplate something that can’t be neatly systematized (and then they try to do it anyway, and then pronounce it truth.)

*Yes, the economists have equations that work out. Cool. I’ve even worked out some of them myself. But the models having anything to do with reality? Nope.