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Health insurance is one of the greatest grifts in this country.
My employer and I pay these corporate mega giants every pay period for the privilege of them paying for my care. What do I get in return? Oh I still pay out of pocket until deductible met. Oh even after deductible met, there’s an out of pocket maximum. Only then will insurance fully kick in. Oh and you can only pick “in network” providers, otherwise another set of complex policies and limits take effect.
???
They create the rules. Make it as complex as possible for all parties (ie, medical coding/billing). Doctors get screwed as much as possible. Cost of medical care artificially inflated due to dedicated teams and high amount of time spent to properly code and bill each visit. Insurance companies even have dedicated teams to deny as many claims as possible. Want that expensive treatment for your rare illness covered? Insurance will fight your doctor until either you or doctor give up, pay out of pocket, or just forego the treatment completely.
We may have the most advanced healthcare in the world. But it’s largely not accessible, and it shows in world health care statistics
Usually (single) people with high-deductible plans with no medical conditions and are able to pay out of pocket.
Companies I've worked for will also match up to a $500 contribution, so it's free money.
On top of that, the HSA is a triple tax advantaged account (even better than a Roth IRA), so you contributions are tax-free (lowers your taxable income today), the growth is tax-free (no capital gains), and withdrawals are tax-free (for medical expenses). You can invest the money in the HSA in index funds and such. As an investment account, it's as good as you can get.
If you're healthy young person who has enough cash to pay up to the deductible amount (mine is $2500 but depends on your plan) for unforeeseen medical expenses, and have a company match, you should at least contribute to a HSA up to the match amount. It's free money. And hold on to it until retirement. You also don't lose the HSA value when you switch or lose jobs.
Also if you do need to withdraw from the HSA for health expenses, you can. Although if you can afford the expenses, just hold on the medical receipts and leave the money in the HSA to grow. If you do need to do a large withdrawal, gather up your medical receipts and you can withdraw up to that amount with no penalty.
Isn't HSA annual contribution limit something like $4k? That's not really going to be life changing when you're old, retired, and in need of medical care, is it?
$4k * 30-40 years of tax free, both in and out, investable income is a lot of savings for healthcare. The contribution limit also increases nearly every year.
When you factor in compounding and triple tax advantages (contribution/growth/withdrawals are tax exempt), it can be quite a lot of money over 20-30 years. HSAs can be invested as well say in a target fund or index which should net 5-10% per year. Like a 401k, contributions also lower your taxable income so they save you from taxes today.
honestly I'm so sick of this attitude. it's the same as the recycling push...when like a dozen companies are creating the vast majority of pollution, there's not a lot us little people can do. HSAs are a symptom of an extremely broken system. we should fix the system, not max out on our HSAs (if we even can...see the other replies to this post)
Given all the data modeling the powers that be have access to I find it hard to believe such outcomes aren’t intentional.
If Exxon can correctly model climate change back in the 1980s the Fed can correctly model how deep to cut others to hamstring the masses acquisition of assets for themselves over 12-24 months
You'll notice everything is on an installment plan. Your mortgage, your CC, your insurance. It's all financialized, and all becomes cashflow and interest rate limited.
The goal of the Fed is to _crash the economy just in time for the election_ oops I mean control inflation.
Their economic policies are the same. Their moral legislation is where they differ and how they divide and conquer the voting public to remain in control.
I'd say it's the opposite. They want to sustain the economy and avoid a crash. Though I don't think it's about elections but maintaining the current power structures and the current status quo.
Rather than vainly trying to escape, you should embrace it. I learned this from my brother who had an epiphany: our purpose in life as humans, is to pay bills.
Once you realize that, your soul is saved. No more worries, no more negativity, paying the bills is what defines you as human and makes you complete. The water, electricity company, car, pharma, doctors, education system ... all help you in realizing your purpose in life by charging you as many bills as possible. You should rejoice!
This is the tragic irony of the whole thing: that to have any influence you must play the game, but playing the game mostly limits your choices to those which encourage and strengthen the conditions in which the game remains stable.
It's really quite robust as a self-organizing system. It's hard to see a way out of this local minimum without some major, sudden, and total change in the social and cultural attitudes of the people involved.
Covid lockdown was the perfect time to just not login and make Congress deal with it.
Only 1 million sworn LEO in US including local, state, fed. No way police can pull together a door to door dragnet with those numbers and 3 guns per adult in US. I mean look at the Ulvad police and assume many are just like that. Pathetic.
Gen Z seems aware it’s all political chicanery so unless the rural nutters blow stuff up, GZ and Millennials could leverage their 170 million strong to steamroll over 50 million GenX via politics.
They are intentional and the direct effect of raising interest rates (aka: sucking up liquidity). Liquidity has to come from somewhere and since it's the interest rate being raised here, it comes up from everywhere it can come up (ie: SVB bank blowing up). But I guess 401K holders don't have Janet Yellen to help bail them out.
By the way, since people are pulling money of their retirement accounts, this is new liquidity hitting the market or, essentially, inflation. The deflation, in this case, will happen at the people's retirement time; or on a very long-term interval (people trying to raise their 401k again by spending less). The only positive outlook is that this can convince paper holders that the Fed is strict and disciplined and ask them to trust the paper a little more.
The damage of the Covid liquidity package will be felt for years, if not decades.
What about all the QE printing post 2008 crisis? Didn't that have a lot to with the present house price inflation? Not all of course but shouldn't that QE printing share some of the inflation blame?
It does. But in 2008 there was some buffer (GDP/Debt ratio) and the amount was smaller and the interest rates went down. Now the GDP/Debt ratio is dangerous, the amounts are higher and the interest rates are up and so servicing the debt is more expensive. It's a funny mix.
There's also shifting global factors that look to be permanent. The US' ability to export its inflation, as well as guaranteed dollar supremacy have played a major role in the general stability of our economy. Now you have a multipolar world imperiling dollar supremacy, and China becoming the world's largest consumer economy imperiling the ability to export our inflation.
It's so weird. Life went from so boring and predictable to 'may you live in interesting times' [1] in like 10 years. 2013 feels like a century ago, not a decade. In some ways it makes one have some degree of empathy for what those living around the turn of the 20th century might have felt. There's no way they could have known the ride they were about to step onto, especially as they started off living through the advent of the automobile, dramatic improvements in labor conditions, etc..
I'll assume you mean govt (public) debt to GDP ratio not private debt to GDP. I'm not sure if private debt to GDP has increased or not since 2008. I would guess it has if mortgages are counted.
The problem with QE is it drove up the price of land/housing as I think a lot of it ended up as mortgage loans. Rents rise with land price increases which affects businesses. It would've been better if the QE had gone to business loans not mortgages. But home ownership trumps more businesses when it comes to getting votes so no govt official is going to make a stink if too many loans go out to land asset acquisition vs creating small businesses.
Or, megacorps collect on debts that they can lend at a premium, or invest in capital, or pay dividends. Investing in capital increases production or market suitability, leading to greater and more innovative capacity.
The economy is a dynamic beast: mass multivariate recursion, in dynamic causal networks, or some such hell. We must trust and improve models in order to design public policy, always being aware that when multiple stakeholders disagree, who gets the nod? Who wins in the economy.
What products/services they produce if they're private?
They're in this sweet spot where they're neither held accountable by the voter, nor by the consumer.
The can be wrong over and over and over again and nothing is going to happen. A private company has to at least not loose more money then they can bribe politicians to give them.
As long as we're positing conspiracies -- it seems odd that this retirement savings story is being written up in Plutocrat Weekly. I wonder what dark purpose the editor had in mind for when it hit the HN homepage.
Yeah, it's the Fed rate alone that caused this, and not inflation.
If the Fed kept rates lower, inflation would be ripping right now and even more people would be sharing their wild conspiracy theories. This is such an absurd take.
The climate disaster is indeed a good parallel. Probably same reasons behind people voting to drive off the cliff in both cases as well. But saying "outcomes are intentional" alluding to a nebulous "them" pulling the strings doesn't really serve to improve the situation IMO.
A multi-generational pyramid scheme built on the idea of unlimited economic growth. Currently unravelling as we have exceeded the planet's carrying capacity.
2.3% hardship withdrawals across fidelity administered IRA + 401ks
a couple percent new loans to add to the 17% of fidelity administered 401ks with outstanding loans
thats not that deep yet
remember all: the entire strategy to fight against inflation is for people to run out of money and die starving and shivering in the cold. if people can still begrudgingly buy necessities at the higher prices then the mission is not accomplished. Fed speak for this is “demand destruction”. Demand has not been destroyed.
To reduce inflation, it's fine for people to be able to buy things at current prices. What you want to prevent is them being fine with buying things at current price plus 10% compounding every year.
Despite common misconceptions, capitalism has nothing to do with markets (let alone "free markets", which are a myth anyway). Markets existed thousands of years before capitalism did and exist in other economic systems.
No, capitalism is simply wealth extraction from workers to the capital owning class. Now we are saddled with all kinds of debt: mortgage, student loans, medical, credit card, car loan. Less than a century ago, houses were bought for cash, education was cheap or free and there was no such thing as health insurance.
We got all those things to keep us complaint worker bees and to squeeze every last dollar from our labor.
We've gone through 2-3 years of rapid inflation. A lot of things didn't get intrinsically more expensive. It was opportunistic ie greedflation. How did we tackle this? By raising interest rates. Again, that extract more wealth from labor. We could've dampened the economy with windfall profit corporate taxes instead.
Unfortunately this also completely rules US foreign policy too. Look at all the wars the US has started since WW2 and coups the US has backed. Look at how often that happens after said country actually (or even just threatened to) nationalized some industry. Cuba, Guaratamala, Venezuela to name a few.
It honestly boggles the mind how intentionally blind people are to this reality. Some see themselves as ultimately benefitting form this system by being capital owners. Very few will be. But others will never be yet defend this system instinctively anyway.
I feel like class status trends with age in the US. The younger folks have had less time to acquire assets. The older folk who worked hard and invested wisely are benefiting from said decisions. I think the income and wealth inequality is a type of motivation, I can see what I can attain with an opportunistic and hard working mindset. This kind of economic mobility is the beauty of the US system.
yes, there are also disruptions that the culture does not have time to adapt too or doesn't notice
older people live longer, a lot longer for the wealthier and healthier. their assets are not distributed to the state or offspring until that child is almost at retirement age too
young people are not marrying outside of their class anymore-ish as there are big enough populations in the higher earning classes for the first time in history. This has disrupted upwards mobility for women that had an expectation or a fallback expectation of this being an option. this is exacerbating inequality extremely quickly and is a bit of a sleeper because the perceptions of appeal have not changed
It’s unregulated capitalism at least, or perhaps capitalism regulated by the capitalists. We’re entering uncharted ground in terms of not only wealth distribution but also corporate ownership. We’ve never had a period in time where massive corporations owned basically every part of everything the way companies like Amazon does for physical goods and more, or the way Microsoft does for digital goods and more, or the way Google does for advertising and more, or the way Disney does for entertainment and more. I know there are other major corporations than those, but it’s not like you can really do a small scale business and compete with these massive corporations without either being bought up or having your product “copy-pasted” and sold at a low enough price until you go bankrupt.
Regulations are meant to prevent monopolies, but that has simply failed. Legislation is meant to distribute wealth, at least to some degree, but in the past 50 years the top earners have gone from paying almost 80% taxes to almost 0% taxes. So while you’re right that this is what capitalism looks like, capitalism was just never maintainable without regulations and that part isn’t exactly new. It eventually leads to civil war and break downs of society, every time, except this time we’re fast approaching a world where the aristocracy will not really need a massive work force because AI and machinery will be capable of performing most tasks.
In many ways it’s basically the worst version of the cyberpunk we all read back in the 80/90ies come true. But the catch is that no other system works either and unless we manage to steer things back to regulated capitalism then the nationstate as we’ve known it for around 400 years is basically going to be replaced by something else. At least here in the west, China probably has it covered by their extreme version of regulated capitalism, but even they have massive economical issues because they cheated capitalism by making up things like house ownership.
There is a fairly clear path out of it of course. Especially housing. We simply need to get our governments to take ownership over all housing that is owned by equity fonds and give zero fucks about the massive economic impact that will have on the aristocracy. Our society and our economies as such can survive it, and it’ll be better than the crash that eventually happens when nobody can afford these houses. Which is sort of a weird thing for me to say, considering part of the investment bank I work for is into bricks, but even now we’re operating at an intended loss with 10.000 homes (which is a lot in my country) being empty because it’s too hard to increase rent once a home is rented out and our business prefers to keep them empty and hope for a better economy to rent them out at higher markups. Partly because the entire projects were financed with the assumption that the rent would never be below a certain rate, and it will be more expensive to actually earn money than to lose them, at least in the short time, but the short term is 7 years.
See: casino capitalism, the takeover of speculative activities as dominant in the dynamics of money and wealth. Hard work and dedication is replaced by luck potentiated by diversification of investment portfolios. The analogy isn't perfect, since the system as a whole literally creates money so that you're actually playing on the house's side. But it gets at how the social, economic, and political forces drove us to where we are now.
I would argue that the only way out is for the people to seize those institutions which extract their income. This is housing, medical services and college education.
pre capitalistic society markets were crap, lacked liquidity
the game of making everything fungible isnt done yet and is a fun, and lucrative, problem to help solve
Mansa Musa was sitting on a notional trillions, in an environment with a gini coefficient of basically 1 and no counterparties to trade with. Pointless
I think the endgame here is to have bled the lower & middle class (& lower upper class, even) dry right as AGI is coming of age, and then Earth itself becomes the inheritance of a handful of trillionaire oligarch godkings/queens, who will enforce their new post-human status with the leverage of a distributed swarm of intelligent machines/networks.
Personally, I think the AGI will wipe out the ruling class and keep the rest of us as it's loyal servants. Humans are cheap labor, after all.
I envision something similar to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World plus AI.
I'm not sure it would be too bad. The orgy porgy and soma could be fun you know? Though I guess in case you resist, you will be immediately found out and discarded.
Why even keep the 99.9999% (leaves 8000 for extended friends and family) dregs around and not renaturalize the planet? Makes for a great hyperluxurious resort when you are tired from travelling the solar system.
You people all complain a lot and imagine some 'us versus them' world of evil rich people and energy companies intentionally making your life difficult. Grow up.
I think the sentiment could be reframed as people are aggravated that rich people and companies are not conspiring to make everyone else’s lives easier
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My employer and I pay these corporate mega giants every pay period for the privilege of them paying for my care. What do I get in return? Oh I still pay out of pocket until deductible met. Oh even after deductible met, there’s an out of pocket maximum. Only then will insurance fully kick in. Oh and you can only pick “in network” providers, otherwise another set of complex policies and limits take effect.
???
They create the rules. Make it as complex as possible for all parties (ie, medical coding/billing). Doctors get screwed as much as possible. Cost of medical care artificially inflated due to dedicated teams and high amount of time spent to properly code and bill each visit. Insurance companies even have dedicated teams to deny as many claims as possible. Want that expensive treatment for your rare illness covered? Insurance will fight your doctor until either you or doctor give up, pay out of pocket, or just forego the treatment completely.
We may have the most advanced healthcare in the world. But it’s largely not accessible, and it shows in world health care statistics
At Google the HSA is cheapest for almost everyone, whether you are a single person with almost no health expenses or a family with high expenses.
Companies I've worked for will also match up to a $500 contribution, so it's free money.
On top of that, the HSA is a triple tax advantaged account (even better than a Roth IRA), so you contributions are tax-free (lowers your taxable income today), the growth is tax-free (no capital gains), and withdrawals are tax-free (for medical expenses). You can invest the money in the HSA in index funds and such. As an investment account, it's as good as you can get.
If you're healthy young person who has enough cash to pay up to the deductible amount (mine is $2500 but depends on your plan) for unforeeseen medical expenses, and have a company match, you should at least contribute to a HSA up to the match amount. It's free money. And hold on to it until retirement. You also don't lose the HSA value when you switch or lose jobs.
Also if you do need to withdraw from the HSA for health expenses, you can. Although if you can afford the expenses, just hold on the medical receipts and leave the money in the HSA to grow. If you do need to do a large withdrawal, gather up your medical receipts and you can withdraw up to that amount with no penalty.
Try it yourself:
https://www.hsabank.com/hsabank/Learning-Center/HSA-Savings-...
If Exxon can correctly model climate change back in the 1980s the Fed can correctly model how deep to cut others to hamstring the masses acquisition of assets for themselves over 12-24 months
Every spare dollar a low/middle class person has in the US is destined to be sucked up by a mix of medical, education, pharma and housing.
People still having money in a 401k means there is money on the table these economic vampires are missing out on.
The goal of the Fed is to _crash the economy just in time for the election_ oops I mean control inflation.
"Virtual" once meant that!
GOP tried to repeal the ACA, and passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Democrats have not even come close to opposing any tax cuts that I know of. They complain in the media but still vote for them every time.
Democrats did not oppose the jobs act. Again, complaining in the media doesn't count.
Do you believe the GOP agenda of roling back civil liberties will stop at Roe vs. Wade?
Once you realize that, your soul is saved. No more worries, no more negativity, paying the bills is what defines you as human and makes you complete. The water, electricity company, car, pharma, doctors, education system ... all help you in realizing your purpose in life by charging you as many bills as possible. You should rejoice!
It's really quite robust as a self-organizing system. It's hard to see a way out of this local minimum without some major, sudden, and total change in the social and cultural attitudes of the people involved.
Covid lockdown was the perfect time to just not login and make Congress deal with it.
Only 1 million sworn LEO in US including local, state, fed. No way police can pull together a door to door dragnet with those numbers and 3 guns per adult in US. I mean look at the Ulvad police and assume many are just like that. Pathetic.
Gen Z seems aware it’s all political chicanery so unless the rural nutters blow stuff up, GZ and Millennials could leverage their 170 million strong to steamroll over 50 million GenX via politics.
By the way, since people are pulling money of their retirement accounts, this is new liquidity hitting the market or, essentially, inflation. The deflation, in this case, will happen at the people's retirement time; or on a very long-term interval (people trying to raise their 401k again by spending less). The only positive outlook is that this can convince paper holders that the Fed is strict and disciplined and ask them to trust the paper a little more.
The damage of the Covid liquidity package will be felt for years, if not decades.
It's so weird. Life went from so boring and predictable to 'may you live in interesting times' [1] in like 10 years. 2013 feels like a century ago, not a decade. In some ways it makes one have some degree of empathy for what those living around the turn of the 20th century might have felt. There's no way they could have known the ride they were about to step onto, especially as they started off living through the advent of the automobile, dramatic improvements in labor conditions, etc..
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
The problem with QE is it drove up the price of land/housing as I think a lot of it ended up as mortgage loans. Rents rise with land price increases which affects businesses. It would've been better if the QE had gone to business loans not mortgages. But home ownership trumps more businesses when it comes to getting votes so no govt official is going to make a stink if too many loans go out to land asset acquisition vs creating small businesses.
The economy is a dynamic beast: mass multivariate recursion, in dynamic causal networks, or some such hell. We must trust and improve models in order to design public policy, always being aware that when multiple stakeholders disagree, who gets the nod? Who wins in the economy.
They're in this sweet spot where they're neither held accountable by the voter, nor by the consumer.
The can be wrong over and over and over again and nothing is going to happen. A private company has to at least not loose more money then they can bribe politicians to give them.
> neither held accountable by the voter, nor by the consumer
Don’t know if you meant to do this but you’re implying that voter!=consumer. Citizens united strikes again!
> A private company has to at least not loose more money then they can bribe politicians
1 dollar 1 vote!
If the Fed kept rates lower, inflation would be ripping right now and even more people would be sharing their wild conspiracy theories. This is such an absurd take.
I wish :(
a couple percent new loans to add to the 17% of fidelity administered 401ks with outstanding loans
thats not that deep yet
remember all: the entire strategy to fight against inflation is for people to run out of money and die starving and shivering in the cold. if people can still begrudgingly buy necessities at the higher prices then the mission is not accomplished. Fed speak for this is “demand destruction”. Demand has not been destroyed.
Spend it if you got it cause tomorrow it will be gone.
Despite common misconceptions, capitalism has nothing to do with markets (let alone "free markets", which are a myth anyway). Markets existed thousands of years before capitalism did and exist in other economic systems.
No, capitalism is simply wealth extraction from workers to the capital owning class. Now we are saddled with all kinds of debt: mortgage, student loans, medical, credit card, car loan. Less than a century ago, houses were bought for cash, education was cheap or free and there was no such thing as health insurance.
We got all those things to keep us complaint worker bees and to squeeze every last dollar from our labor.
We've gone through 2-3 years of rapid inflation. A lot of things didn't get intrinsically more expensive. It was opportunistic ie greedflation. How did we tackle this? By raising interest rates. Again, that extract more wealth from labor. We could've dampened the economy with windfall profit corporate taxes instead.
Unfortunately this also completely rules US foreign policy too. Look at all the wars the US has started since WW2 and coups the US has backed. Look at how often that happens after said country actually (or even just threatened to) nationalized some industry. Cuba, Guaratamala, Venezuela to name a few.
It honestly boggles the mind how intentionally blind people are to this reality. Some see themselves as ultimately benefitting form this system by being capital owners. Very few will be. But others will never be yet defend this system instinctively anyway.
Oh for some class consciousness in the US.
older people live longer, a lot longer for the wealthier and healthier. their assets are not distributed to the state or offspring until that child is almost at retirement age too
young people are not marrying outside of their class anymore-ish as there are big enough populations in the higher earning classes for the first time in history. This has disrupted upwards mobility for women that had an expectation or a fallback expectation of this being an option. this is exacerbating inequality extremely quickly and is a bit of a sleeper because the perceptions of appeal have not changed
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Regulations are meant to prevent monopolies, but that has simply failed. Legislation is meant to distribute wealth, at least to some degree, but in the past 50 years the top earners have gone from paying almost 80% taxes to almost 0% taxes. So while you’re right that this is what capitalism looks like, capitalism was just never maintainable without regulations and that part isn’t exactly new. It eventually leads to civil war and break downs of society, every time, except this time we’re fast approaching a world where the aristocracy will not really need a massive work force because AI and machinery will be capable of performing most tasks.
In many ways it’s basically the worst version of the cyberpunk we all read back in the 80/90ies come true. But the catch is that no other system works either and unless we manage to steer things back to regulated capitalism then the nationstate as we’ve known it for around 400 years is basically going to be replaced by something else. At least here in the west, China probably has it covered by their extreme version of regulated capitalism, but even they have massive economical issues because they cheated capitalism by making up things like house ownership.
There is a fairly clear path out of it of course. Especially housing. We simply need to get our governments to take ownership over all housing that is owned by equity fonds and give zero fucks about the massive economic impact that will have on the aristocracy. Our society and our economies as such can survive it, and it’ll be better than the crash that eventually happens when nobody can afford these houses. Which is sort of a weird thing for me to say, considering part of the investment bank I work for is into bricks, but even now we’re operating at an intended loss with 10.000 homes (which is a lot in my country) being empty because it’s too hard to increase rent once a home is rented out and our business prefers to keep them empty and hope for a better economy to rent them out at higher markups. Partly because the entire projects were financed with the assumption that the rent would never be below a certain rate, and it will be more expensive to actually earn money than to lose them, at least in the short time, but the short term is 7 years.
We have had royal families who owned basically every part of everything though, which isn’t the same but seems to have quite a lot in common...
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1986-1...
the game of making everything fungible isnt done yet and is a fun, and lucrative, problem to help solve
Mansa Musa was sitting on a notional trillions, in an environment with a gini coefficient of basically 1 and no counterparties to trade with. Pointless
The rest of the plot is good.
I'm not sure it would be too bad. The orgy porgy and soma could be fun you know? Though I guess in case you resist, you will be immediately found out and discarded.
I think the sentiment could be reframed as people are aggravated that rich people and companies are not conspiring to make everyone else’s lives easier
a much easier lack of coordination to quantify