The headline quotes Hinton out of context: he is not a victim of hysteria.
Hinton contends that most people currently view AI as a smart assistant, but humans are ceding control as AI gets smarter and more embedded in our day to day life. We simply cannot afford to have exploitative and unsafe AI models governing our lives.
Hinton considers some possible future scenarios, but look where we are right now. People no longer know what is real, because social media corporations have hijacked our attention to sell advertising. Chatbots are advising children on how to kill themselves.
This isn't an "according to state media" thing. I know people who have gone there for specialized care in the past (I live in Jamaica) and only had good things to say. We also had quite a few Cuban health professionals here for decades until the US forced us (and several other Caribbean countries) to end our agreement a couple months ago (news says other things of course, but none of it adds up). And I actually also know a few Cubans living there.
Incomes are sharply more unequal. Yes, tech professionals earn more in the USA. Plenty of people flip burgers or cut lawns, and 25 million or so can't afford health insurance.
If you take any kind of look at disparities in health outcomes, it becomes immediately apparent who is dragging down the mortality statistics. This is not something espresso-drinking researchers at WHO dreamed up to fight a culture war.
I'm not making an assessment of which economy or system is better. I'm saying that the modal American HN commenter would probably be significantly worse off financially in the UK NHS than on their own insurance, even factoring in how expensive insurance is.
That's true, and it is, but people's inability to be clear-eyed about the politics and the incentives are a big part of why we're locked in this situation. Proponents of payer-side reform are, from the perspective of a huge number of Americans, selling a bill of goods. Ordinary PMC suburban households will very likely be materially worse off.
We have done a number of things about it, most of which are more expensive and less effective than the very simple option of just adding them to Medicare, but expecting people to change from what they know and like to benefit less than 10% of the population is not a winning strategy.
Medicare shares almost the problems of the private system and adds others. The current Medicare scheme, of single-payer health care for the cohort most in need of health services, makes a lot of sense.
Medicare does have many problems and arguably isn't cheaper than our current private systems, but I would say a large portion of the uninsured also are part of the cohort most in need of health services (or they're young and healthy and cheap to insure/treat and largely irrelevant), which is why I think it would make sense to just roll them into some public plan instead of using EMTALA as a catastrophic insurer of last resort.
I agree and am generally sanguine with any service we want to roll out to the Medicaid cohort, but recoil from the idea of standardizing all health care in the US on Medicare, not because I'd be worse off (though, like every PMC household in the US, I probably would), but because Medicare is not good, and we'd basically be enshrining all the failures of our system in law and hiding the costs in the tax code.
If you look just at differences in treatment, ignoring preventable deaths, the disparity in mortality between the USA and other rich countries is just as evident.
This is a long-standing fact. It's difficult to interpret without concluding that something is badly wrong with US healthcare provision.
Causes of America’s Lagging Life Expectancy: An International Comparative Perspective (Jessica Ho); there's an amazing chart in the middle that breaks causes down between countries.
This squares with a general observation about US healthcare, which is that it is expensive and overprovisioned and generally achieves marginally better outcomes for a variety of common serious conditions, which is also what you'd expect if you've had extended contact with the system.
That sounds about right, if you ignore disparity of access to treatment, and look narrowly at the quality of the treatment itself. 25 million Americans do not have health insurance.
Looking just at treatable mortality (so not preventable deaths from cars and guns) the international ranking of mortality statistics changes only slightly. USA remains below the OECD average, behind comparably rich nations, down among middle income nations like Peru.
Enough sealioning. There are two charts. One is avoidable deaths. The other is treatable deaths. It doesn't matter which definition you use, USA is near the bottom of the table.
If you'd like to disengage, simply disengage. Incivility hurts your argument. Obviously, the US leads on avoidable deaths! We have huge numbers of car accidents, homicides, and drug overdoses. We also have huge amounts of CVD, but as I explained above, that's a regional phenomenon and the health care systems are the same in both kinds of regions.
You keep coming back with data that begs the question.
The administrative overhead is not trivial: probably about 25%.
Worse is the distortion of incentives for healthcare providers. The giant leaky insurance tit is there to be sucked on, creating corruption at every level.
When you are billed for a procedure you have no idea how much you are going to get charged or what you could get billed for. There could be gigantic opaque charges for things you have never heard of. Ticketmaster could only dream of such a rip-off.
Not to mention blatant over-billing for unnecessary diagnostics, etc. Every year new kickback schemes are discovered.
25% of what, and where are you getting that number? JAMA studied this on an encounter-by-encounter basis and found BIR costs were in the tens of dollars for normal visits to low (100-300) for inpatient surgery.
Price transparency is a real problem. Overbilling is a real problem, so is overprescription. Important to keep in mind that those are on the provider side, not the payer.
"Administrative costs have been estimated to represent 25% to 31% of total health care expenditures in the United States, a proportion twice that found in Canada and significantly greater than in all other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member nations for which such costs have been studied."
So before we even get into the proportion of admin costs from BIR, you have to cut your number in half. I don't think admin costs are going to end up the real story in US health care. It's overpaying practitioners and overprescribing procedures. There are more MRI machines in Massachusetts than in all of Canada.
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