"capitalism is a horrible system that tried to bankrupt my family though medical expenses.
But don't fight it, support it by giving them your money anyway, and then any that you earn after that.
You are a fool of you don't buckle to the whims of big business"
"support it via ✨️ g a m b l i n g ✨️"
Bruh, it's not gambling if you know you're gonna win *taps forehead meme*
I mean, honestly what else are we supposed to do?
Be on the forefront of the revolution!
Which means posting snarky memes
What's extra annoying about this is that in his story, his mom gets screwed over by the hospital so rather than thinking to complain or go elsewhere he thinks 'yah im gonna invest in that'. Investing in bad actors like that just reinforces their shitty behavior.
Are you fucking joking that a hospital is on the stock market? I know, its the company that owns the hospital, but its still fucked up. Should not be allowed.
Why not? Companies that make pharmaceuticals, prosthetics, imaging devices, etc are all on the stock market too, so if hospitals weren't on there, you could build a portfolio to approximate it by buying producers of medical equipment.
The real issue isn't whether something is publicly traded, but collusion between groups to keep prices high. For example, it's mutually beneficial for insurance, hospitals, and medical equipment providers to increase costs. Higher equipment costs means care providers can charge more (what's another few hundred when the bill is in the thousands?), and higher total bills means insurance companies can charge higher premiums (they're usually limited to a certain percent of cost as profit). Hospitals generally don't have direct competitors since it's prohibitively expensive to build one and there's lots of bureaucracy based on "need," so you can't just go next door to an org that's not involved in the collusion.
Here's some YouTube videos about it:
There are lots of viable solutions here, but banning them from the stock market isn't going to solve anything. The first order of business imo is making everything more transparent.
Market competition is fine, but corporations are specifically obligated to focus on profits over other considerations, and in this case that is inappropriate and creates perverse incentives. Consider people like in the OP who have cynically bought in (or are in some retirement fund that bought in on their behalf) and now their financial wellbeing depends on hospitals continuing to be allowed to extract significant money out of people. Are they going to vote for candidates pushing actually effective measures to reduce how much people pay for medical care, if that means the stock will go down? Probably not.
The real issue isn't whether something is publicly traded, but collusion between groups to keep prices high. For example, it's mutually beneficial for insurance, hospitals, and medical equipment providers to increase costs. Higher equipment costs means care providers can charge more (what's another few hundred when the bill is in the thousands?
This isn't how pricing is set for medical equipment....... Nor is high equipment cost the reason behind the pricing increase.
Every hospital that accepts Medicare utilizes CMS guidelines when it comes to billing. Medicare sets the general price for items, factoring in things like historic pricing, cost of purchase from vendor, and the price of labour required to fit or make the device function.
The complex and expensive aspect of hospital billing stems from the introduction of private insurance companies. The ones that require more paperwork and processing time than Medicare, and will attempt to make the process as hard as possible.
Hospitals generally don't have direct competitors since it's prohibitively expensive to build one and there's lots of bureaucracy based on "need," so you can't just go next door to an org that's not involved in the collusion.
Because hospitals are a natural monopoly, not only are they prohibitedly expensive, but it's also extremely hard to profit from them in the long term. Which is why there's a large amount of bureaucracy to get them built.
Pretty much every ER room in America is a huge money sink that the rest of the hospital has to economically support. You add too many hospitals, and the services that are profitable get too spread across the area to support their individual ER operations.
Which is why about 10-15 years ago there was a large push from venture capital to build "hospitals" without trauma rooms. These hospitals began to eat up all the funding in the area and began shutting down hospitals with trauma wards. This is when a lot of states adopted legislation that would help curb this behavior.
There are lots of viable solutions here, but banning them from the stock market isn't going to solve anything. The first order of business imo is making everything more transparent.
Banning private insurance is the only thing that would lower prices for Americans. None of the issues you covered are even close to the reason why things are getting expensive.
Because demand and supply don't self-regulate healthcare. How much do you value your health? How about your own life? Oh, you're willing to pay ANYTHING to live? Even if it's not life threatening as long as it leaves you crippled, unable to work, you may as well be dead.
As a customer the only way to be an informed buyer is to be a physician yourself. Even if a treatment doesn't work you still get charged, no refunds!
For-profit healthcare is fundamentally inhumane and is incompatible with capitalism. The forces that would usually regulate the market are non-existant. Demand is infinite, undercutting is pointless, customers have no way to be informed.
Inflation (when considering the rise of cost of living): 6%
Returns of investment funds my bank offers: 5%
Disposable income to use for investing: 0Yeah, the math works out just fine on this one.
Investment returns of broad market: 10-15%. Don't invest with your bank, invest with a brokerage.
That doesn't exactly work if you don't have money to begin with though...
Step 1. Have money
Well I guess we're fucked.
The first rule of making money: Have money.
Don't forget to short the stock prior to the malpractice lawsuit when mom dies
Let me just reach into thin air and pull out some gold bars so I can buy some of these stocks too, asshole
Better figure out how to turn lead into gold, and quickly!. Alchemy revival, so haaawt this year!
Big “let them eat cake” energy.
Yes this is a wonderful idea when you live in a magical fantasy world where the vast majority of people do not have any ability to invest in any stocks whatsoever.
These idiots truly just actually think everyone is slightly different versions of themselves.
Assuming constant moderate growth (compared to the historical world-wide average), with even as little as 20currency/month over your entire working lifetime (* 45 years = ~10k), you can expect to gain about ~30k through stocks.
How much you earn scales linearly with your savings rate (the ratio stays the same), so this can be scaled up or down.
Even if your ability to invest isn't great, it's still worth doing.
I'm sure buying stocks right before a major depression is going to work out well.
So this is absolutely a capitalist horror story, but investing in stocks is one of the best long-term strategies to counter inflation. Just not so much in the short term like the OOP says, due to the heightened risk.
If you can't beat em join em!
All shareholders are liable for the actions of the company they own and control. When a company commits a crime, the shareholders should be held personally accountable. No fines. Jail time.
I disagree. Shareholders don't have a say in how the company is run, and buying shares in a company doesn't really change anything about how the company is run.
I do think execs and board members should be jailed for committing crimes though. If you have a part in the decision making, you're culpable.
I sort of disagree. It should be tackled from both sides. Shareholders do have some culpability for investing in unethical businessed and not doing enough due diligence. Your average person saving for retirement probably did nothing wrong, dumped the money in an ETF or IRA or 401k and the investment company handled it, but the investment company should have been looking at business practices and not solely stock performance.
Jail time for the decision makers. We already have a way to punish shareholders: Fines on the company. They should just stop being small fines and start at the very least exceeding the amount the company made through crime.
Jailing the decision makers will discourage crime to some extent. The temptation will still be there to pump numbers and make a lot of money. Hitting investors and investment firms in the wallet will encourage a culture of giving a shit about where you're putting your money.
Major shareholders only. People just trying to retire aren't the problem.
So people with IRAs should be punished for using an investment vehicle that actually allows them to retire?
This is what I did with my banking fees....
I bought enough stock that the dividend covers my monthly fees. I reinvest the dividend so the yield keeps increasing. It's a Canadian bank so it's safe AF and not going anywhere and it's up like 18%+ since I started the other year so I'm not going backwards there either.
Weird way to cover my fees but seems to be working.
This is a weird way to say "Things cost too much? Have you tried not being poor?"
I mean yeah. I also own a house and have set my life up in such a way that I can afford to live what most people consider a normal life.
I'll be honest if you can't afford ~$1,000 in savings. Which is the sum that it took to cover my bank fees in dividend returns then it's not about being rich or poor, it's about being poor with your financial decisions. I grew up poor. Literally bankrupt poor, moving from place to place as we ran from bills. I started paying for my own clothes at age 9 and foot the bill for my entire life since age 12. Having $1,000 in the bank is not just for rich people. I've had that in the bank since I was 15 years old. Sometimes it wasn't any more than that, but even when I was living on my own with zero support and bills up to my eyeballs, there was still a chunk of money earning me money along the way.
I bought enough stock that the dividend covers my monthly fees.
That's already a good bit of capital locked in stocks just for banking fees. Not saying that's not worth it but not everyone has the luxury of having that capital.
it’s up like 18%+ since I started the other year so I’m not going backwards there either.
Note that this is mostly due to the current economic situation. As the world as a whole recovers from the pandemic, global indices rise.
With this sort of strategy, you must expect draw downs of just as much however; a crisis usually sends stock prices down faster and further than a recovery period like ours sends them up by. As an example: The start of the Palestine war last year sent the FTSE-All-World index down 5% in just a week or so.
Historically, the stock prices as a whole have grown around 7% p.a., so if the historical average growth continues, investing in a broad spectrum of stocks is a winning strategy.
