I got 2 friends who work in amazon warehouses. They say compared to other places the work is very easy. The benefits are pretty solid, 401k, they get 2 shares of amazon every 2 years which is about 1300 right now. Lots of vacation/paid time off. Monthly production bonuses. Tons of opportunity to move up in the company. Help pay for school up to like 5k a year. Offer free classes for things like microsoft excel/word, resume stuff, bunch of job training stuff. And they both started at the bottom of the barrel loading packages onto trailers and make like $20/h now after 2 years. Not great but not too bad for guys who didn't have education beyond high school or any trade skills.

Said it's way better than any other warehouse they've worked for. Might be a CA thing though so dunno. That said Bezo's could obviously do way more.

They did also mention though they'll literally hire anyone pretty much, so you get a ton of people who never had a real job and end up quitting.

Obviously working in any warehouse isn't going to be easy physically.

One of the first lines in that article: "We don't know much"

Yeah, seems like a good summary of conservatives and health care.

Lol that's what I was thinking

Disagree. We have single payer already, just for a certain segment of the population. Just extend that to everyone.

By letting rich liberals figure it out?

Well, these guys taking a shot at it seems like a win/win. Nothing prevents congress from trying to fix things. Maybe the three amigos come up with something revolutionary?

Three liberal business owners finding a way to drive costs down for there employees.

Agree there's ~no downside. Can't say I'm hopeful for something revolutionary though.

Don't you think if whatever they come up with works it eventually becomes universal?

Well, congrats to people who work for certain mega corps then. That would not have helped the lotto winner.

Pre-ACA, how is this guy getting covered?

Once again you forget that your side doesn't want people to have health insurance. You just cried over this guy's grave about how our healthcare policy isn't liberal enough!

Your friends are the outliers

The thing is we have plenty of evidence on how to push down costs. I think Bezos could do better than most, if only because consolidation in the healthcare has created benifits, but those benifits are explicitly recycled to shareholders and management because the rent seeking of large mega consolidations while Bezos' explicitly rolls them back into customers.

But there's a reason why only the world's richest people are doing this versus, what we would imagine in a free market society, of companies big and small trying a variety of tactics and that's because oligopoly means theyre the only ones who have the money to overcome the stacked deck.

Of course Bezos is being bankrolled by investors that assume eventually he'll start kicking a profit back to them

Guess we've entered the Alanis Morrisett phase of the simulation.

You oughta know?
Hand in my pocket?
Ironic?
Thank U?

Her cover of My Humps?

I thought this didn't exist. Apparently it does and the video is pretty funny though the song itself is still unremarkable.

Maybe.

Or he woke up an was yellow as a punkin, or had a seizure due to his brain mets, etc. etc.

All are possible and none of it matters. If he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer he was a dead man walking several years ago.

It's just the sort of story that the press likes, anyway - twist at the end.

None of which takes away from the fact, which I noted, that the health care system is a mess. At least Ryan had to back away from his plans to gut Medicare.

MM MD

In an interesting twist, our healthcare system may solve its problems by not being able to take care of anyone, no matter if they're insured or not.

In the last week, we've been advised that
1) we're out of the most useful drug to treat common cardiac arrhythmias with (diltiazem) (I took care of a VA patient last night that they put into asystole using a beta blocker on him)
2) we're down to a 10 day supply of narcotics for IV pain control (which as I practice at a trauma center, is gonna be a problem) - we were advised to give IV lidocaine for kidney stone patients instead, but
3) Today we're out of lidocaine for local and IV anaesthetic/cardiac purposes. We have (for now) buvipicaine, but it hasn't been studied in cardiac or renal patients.

So, don't get sick/injured, kids.

MM MD

Why the shortages?

What we've been told (who knows if it's true) is for the lidocaine and diltiazem the Puerto Rico hurricane is to blame (I forgot to note that we're running out of .9 normal saline too - trying to run a hospital without it is like running a pizza joint with no cheese) - there were some odd tax benefits to making drugs/medical stuff down there - and the factories all got flooded/blown down>

For the injection-type narcotics, apparently some asshat at the FDA put out a missive that implied that the manufactures needed to clamp down on the supply of narcotics flooding America. Which was true for the Vicodin/Percocet pushers, but it also shut down hospital meds. They're supposedly ramping up again, but it's gonna be a few weeks.

Only 20 months to retirement.....

MM MD

Both of my sister's are pharmacists in hospitals, and over Christmas they were talking about severe shortages. Altering their standard protocols, even using expired meds because there were no other good alternatives. I don't remember the specific meds/supplies they were short on. It seems Puerto Rico is the main and sometimes only place we manufacture some of these things. I haven't talked to them about it lately but I'm sure it's only gotten worse.

We're having trouble getting saline for research because clinics and hospitals are getting higher priority, as they should.

The funny thing about that article is that we could have affordable healthcare if Amazon, JP MorganChase and Warren Buffet, along with the pharmaceutical industry, simply paid taxes like they are supposed to.

Big Pharma has $500 billion offshore which, thanks to the Trump tax bill, they can repatriate at ridiculous rates.

And now they are bringing that money in and spending it on dividends and stock buybacks, which is simply a massive transfer of wealth from poor people to rich people.

Also, corruption within the pharma industry is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions annually. So if the government addressed the issue of corruption in Big Pharma, instead of worrying about FIFA - because soccer is way more important than healthcare - costs would go done substantially.

"Also, corruption within the pharma industry is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions annually."

Wait, what? Cite please?

or define corruption, at least. I'm not saying I necessarily disagree - I'd be prepared to believe most anything about drug companies.

MM MD