I don’t love Kaiser - the prices still suck. But they sometimes suck less, and their system is far more streamlined than I’ve had with other insurance providers. Still ridiculous to be trapped in a system with no control over or transparency into costs.

It would convert nicely enough to a single payer. Granted costs might suck but if they were just absorbed into the system, I wouldn’t really care. I could at least believe they are trying to be efficient. As it is, I’m left believing I get charged as much as they think they can get away with. And wth else am I going to do? Kaiser is much cheaper than my employer’s other option (there are literally 2), and I’ve had the other before. It just sucks (slightly) differently.

Why does law only matter when applied to workers? They’d be better off just ghosting than pocket lines, admittedly.

Is this really a cycle? The interesting thing to me is, as others have pointed out, it’s mostly dropped right along with the stock market. Not looking so much like an uncorrelated asset.

Right? Overpaid for by a lot, too. Just so he could turn it off whenever his buddy Putin asked.

He sees a model of oligarchy he likes. What else is needed? He has more money than anyone could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes. But now he has power, and it was so, so easy for him.

Not really. He was born wealthy, remember?

But for the most part, patients aren’t really their customers. Employers are. They may want to decrease premiums, but making changes is difficult and at most an annual event. It is very, very far from a free market in the US.

That’s a non argument. The VAST majority of wealth we are talking about is in equities which absolutely have a clear price. All that other stuff is noise to confuse the point. You really think the wealthy will put all their money in art that has no intrinsic value? And wait a sec, even if they did, what did they just pay for it? That seems like a perfectly valid basis for tax.

None of these values are ever perfect. The point is, we pay a small percentage of our assets every year, but the wealthy have convinced us they couldn’t possibly. Most don’t even “own” anything, it’s all under tax and liability protected companies.

This is what bothers me. We say it’s impossible to do for the wealthy like this. Yet we regular folks get taxed like this every year. Property taxes. We have to pay for the illiquid shit we own, but it’s impossible for the wealthy?