Medical pricing should be simple, upfront and direct. It should not require lots of clerks and "billing professionals"
It shouldn't required armies of expensive lawyers to settle disputes. Whether the bill was not paid by the customer, or the doctor failed to deliver what the customer paid for.
As for billing, who would they bill - I've never had a bill from the NHS or even heard of someone getting a bill from the NHS? In some parts of the UK you have to pay a small amount for prescription medicines but that doesn't go to the NHS etc.
It literally is "free at the point of delivery".
Edit: The NHS directly employs about 1.4 million people https://fullfact.org/health/how-many-nhs-employees-are-there... - and that's not including people who work in GP practices or dentists or opticians who do NHS work but aren't employed by the NHS.
As soon as you have a heterogenous group arguments will break out about what's right and wrong, how people should live, who gets what stuff...
What bulletproofing? Humanity has operated on an extremely high trust basis since the beginning of civilization - it's the only reason we've been able to grow so fast and reshape the planet. It's why McDonald's employee don't check someone's ID at the pick up window and why social engineering works so well. It's the reason why we even have power grids, indoor plumbing, and modern medicine - all of those systems require extreme levels of trust.
That's not hyperbole: A decent sized power plant joining the grid out of phase can crash the entire system, destroying - aka exploding - other power plants and distribution infrastructure. Our water supply systems and reservoirs are almost completely unprotected and vulnerable to malicious actors. A significant fraction of our health and safety regulations operate on scout's honor and personal liability: the FDA approved the diagnostic tests at the clinical labs I've worked at because they trust some certified lab managers (that we hired) to review our procedures and quality control - for life or death clinical testing - without a regulator ever stepping foot in the lab. Our species has even scraped our noses against nuclear war several times, ending in some low level officer deciding "nah... not today."
As a species we are weak: we can't run fast or climb very well, our stomachs and immune systems aren't worth squat in the wild, and it takes us longer to raise our young than most animals' life expectancies. It is only through intelligence and trust have we been able to overcome those limitations to build the world we have today.
The problem isn't individual morality, it's the systemic incentives built up over millennia of societal debt, tribalism, and a dash of corruption. Trying to moralize at an individual level is a big reason why so many people are anti-religious to begin with.
A lot of 'social technology' exists, in part, to help increase our ability to scale trust up. This includes things such as nations and religions. As people become more irreligious and nationalism declines (including into an us vs them mentality within the nation - simple cheerleading of your country is not what I mean by nationalism), trust declines, and people are more likely to scam, grift, and fleece others. And once it is gone, it is very hard to get back.
Because no such framework exists? If we remove totalitarian pressure to enforce one coherent moral framework (either religious or secular) to all, we end up with pluralistic society in which various persons have fundamentally different moral intuitions, and therefore it needs extensive formal system for cooperation and conflict solving.
My wife came from a splinter of that group.
I skimmed the article. It is missing the most important cultural part -- Amish even when sick will continue to work and eventually simply die. Culturally they do not try to extend life at any cost.
> Amish people are more willing to stop interventions earlier and resist invasive therapies than the general population because, while they long for healing, they also have a profound respect for God’s will. This means taking modest steps toward healing sick bodies, giving preference to natural remedies, setting common-sense limits, and believing that in the end their bodies are in God’s hands.
>The Amish health care system has an easier job than ours does. It has to take care of people who are generally healthy and less interested in extreme end-of-life care.
But there is no universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Even the seemingly most basic rule: don't hurt anyone, has so many exceptions.
There is no 'small' set of rules you can use to describe morality. Reality is messy, human interactions even more so. We need to teach people to be empathic, and to be willing to try and understand the others position and view
> If you wanted to get more complicated its, "consider the well-being".
Those two are not a set of moral rules, they just seem like the 'heuristic' that I already stated. But it does not help you with the trolley problem, for example.
I also never said that religion is/should/can be the answer to the messyness of moral questions.
This is my problem with Evangelical Atheism. The people who go hard against religion (well, two of the large three for political reasons) refuse to accept that there are good things that come with the structure and that some people really take to that.
Reminds me of playing https://ncase.me/trust/
For a more detailed breakdown, take a look at _The Four Cardinal Virtues_ by Josef Pieper
Given the numerous genocides committed in the name of religion, I would reckon that religion has failed to do so as well.
Clever retort. But even if proven true somehow is it the religion that made the bad do good or agreed upon ethics with consequences for those who broke them? Must it include belief in some unprovable future consequence?
Truth is the Amish self select as the young ones can leave if they find the rules too constricting.
Granted, everyone in the world is suddenly moral and of utmost integrity and everyone gets used to this new reality. The economic upside in lying/cheating is now so high that a few minutes later the world is back to exactly what it was, except for the first few persons to decide that lying wasn't such a bad idea, who are now a few billion dollars richer.
> Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable
This is your daily reminder that the Catholic Church is the organization with the most identified pedophiles in the world. (I'd have written "convicted", but they work really hard - and are really good - at preventing that outcome).
By definition, it is not integrity if you give it up immediately to gain an advantage by lying and cheating.
>This is your daily reminder that the Catholic Church is the organization with the most identified pedophiles in the world. (I'd have written "convicted", but they work really hard - and are really good - at preventing that outcome).
This a non-sequitur when you consider that there are over 4000 religions in the world, all with their own morality frameworks.
Within my personal morality framework, it is completely ethical to lean into rage if you can hold your logic, and those few persons have just sacrificed themselves to becoming a lesson.
There's a great saying which is "if you're incapable of violence, you're never peaceful, merely harmless." It's time we start talking about was is and is not okay within the context of intentional harm and suffering. What are the pros and cons of punishment? When should it be applied? How?
I'd say a week of waterboarding could be enough to get someone very adamantly expressing "it wasn't worth it." Those words would never go unsaid by these culprits. "It wasn't worth it" should be the slogan of every evil deed.
Although as of today? Yes I totally agree.
That the central problem of human life. "Hell is other people."
Arguably, cities are a bad idea. There's no a priori reason to expect our so-called civilization to work. In evolutionary time-frame it has only just appeared and it shows every evidence of being an ephemeral flash-in-the-pan. I mean, not only are we about to roast ourselves in our own waste heat, but a single virus has deranged our whole global economic structure.
It may well turn out that coming down out of the trees and inventing digital watches was wrong, and the Orangutans and Dolphins have got it right all along.
Government (kings and whatnot) is a kind of machine to manage human wickedness.
> ...a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. ... What do we have now in their place?
The simple answer is e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
>...the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them from insurance companies, who are constantly trying to scam providers however they can. Much of the increase in health care costs is “administrative expenses”, and much of these administrative expenses is hiring an army of lawyers, clerks, and billing professionals to thwart insurance companies’ attempts to cheat their way out of paying. If you are an honorable Amish person and the hospital knows you will pay your bill on time with zero fuss, they can waive all this.
Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. But instead, we have to bulletproof everything (largely without success) from people who scheme and scam their way through life. We sink enormous costs into this, and it slows the progress and complicates life for everyone else.
I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable. What do we have now in their place?