This is the longest shitpost in history.

I just don’t have the time or want to devote the effort to refuting all of it, but essentially it relies on a circular argument, obfuscated Kevin Drum-style very cleverly. That specious argument is that because health care costs more and takes up more of the economy, people pay more. Brilliant insight, bud. You didn’t really need a million graphs to show that.

I can’t believe I bothered to read all that to find some argument that, if stated in simpler terms, would not fool a five-year-old.

Meanwhile, my boss went to an urgent care facility for treatment for a small cut that was bleeding profusely and was charged $2,000 for a five-minute visit. He didn’t even see a doctor.

More seriously, this is a great example of how experts hoodwink you. In fact, it’s one of the best examples I’ve ever seen. The person who wrote this is obviously high IQ — definitely 130 or above. More probably in the 140-160 range. There are not many people who can hang with him and he knows it. This gives him power as the stuff he’s citing as evidence would be incomprehensible or impenetrable without great study to most people. And none of it is “wrong,” viewed alone. That is the danger of high-IQ experts — they can marshal an argument that is subtly twisted, just a bit sinuous and slanted, that it takes another high-IQ person to even understand what they’ve done and how. Well, I can hang and I can tell you that what he’s spewing is pure hooey.

This is what makes expertise particularly under corporate hegemony so very dangerous. Your life is essentially dominated by corporate propaganda subtly perverted from somewhat-valid science and research. Russian propaganda by comparison is obvious and heavy-handed.

There’s a lot else wrong with what he cites. For instance, it classifies health care consumption as some voluntary act rather than a necessity. And this might be true with another way all this is distorted, in that it’s mostly a portrayal of how the rich consume health care in the US. It doesn’t really consider inequality at all — in fact, it deliberately conceals it to get the numbers RCA was looking for.

Furthermore, health care is most likely a Giffen good that is strongly deflationary in nature to the economy as a whole. If you’re looking for why the economy is nearly deflationary despite massive QE and other efforts, health care is where you might want to start.

The RCA contention that the US consumes more healthcare because we are in reality secretly so super-rich is just asinine on its face. And on its ass. It’s just absurd. That’s why it’s obfuscated behind highly technical argumentation and a scad of graphs.

I waste my time reading all of this so you don’t have to.