Today I Learned...

I am leaving my families cell phone plan, and need both a new phone and a new carrier. Carrier wise, month-to-month plans are both cheaper and yet the only place you can get unlimited data. I'm concerned, but it's probably fine. But I don't know how to pick one, so let's look for phones first.

First, I look for phones with physical keyboards, but those no longer exist. Fine, can we at least get one that fits in one hand? Using http://smartphones.findthebest.com/ , I enter the following constraints: android 4.2, <4 inches, 4g. There is one phone. It comes with " Samsung's own TouchWiz interface and apps suite on top" even if you buy it unlocked. This discourages me, until I stumble on a post explaining to me that if I want stock android with timely updates, it's a nexus or nothing. Beyond that, it's just a matter of how much bloatware. A friend informs me that samsung and HTC are the worst offenders, although you can get stock HTC one through the google play store, for a mere $650 dollars.

Okay, let's relax and allow android 4.1. That brings up several more samsungs (bloatware), a ZTE imperial that will only run on US Cellular (never heard of it, I check, it's not a good carrier), and LG Adapt (Verizon only). Still no good.

I hadn't realized bloatware could come from manufacturers, I thought it was just carriers. Become outraged. I accept that my relationship with carriers, like airlines, is about them delivering me the worst experience they possibly can while I pay them as little as possible. But if I am buying an unsubsidized, unlocked phone, it is *my* phone and it will behave accordingly. Further realize internet uses bloatware to describe custom skins, which do annoy me but at least it's not ruining my porn TED talk viewing experience to auto-update an app I don't want it to install. Decide to stick to principles and buy stock phone, if only because it narrows down my choices.

Check http://smartphones.findthebest.com/ again. The only nexus with a screen < 4.5 inches is 29 months old.

Look up size of too-big current phone (4") and just-right previous phone (3.7). Sigh.

Go to google's website, only place guaranteed to have stock phones. Hate device store with violent burning passion. Take *many* seconds to find and check prices on all phones. HTC one and Samsung galaxy S4 are $600 and $650 respectively. Nexus 4 is much more reasonable $200-$250, if only it were still for sale (kudos to google for designing the page such that the thing it does not have in stock is the only phone it appears to be selling).

Check Boost and Straight Talk. Neither offers a nexus, unclear what a nexus would need to be compatible with them. Remind self that phones are returnable and one month of a prepaid carrier is not that expensive. Check virgin mobile and discover it has a 3.5 inch phone with qwerty keyboard. And it provides unlimited data for $35/month.

Look at unlocked nexuses on amazon for a while.

Call virgin mobile, discover they don't work with outside phones. Call Boost, same deal. So my choices are now a nexus on straight talk, or the keyboard phone on virgin.

An amazon question says the nexus 4 will work on virgin, but I don't believe them. I could probably take an existing sim card and put it in my own phone, but they won't sell me a sim card without a phone. Find an article listing the best carrier-intermediaries for your nexus 4.

Decide I really like the idea of not being locked into a single provider and am still angry about the bloatware thing. Consider waiting until upcoming nexus 5 announcement before buying phone. Decide I can always return phone or hope credit card has price matching. Order phone and straight talk sim card.

Marvel at lack of analysis paralysis, and how I don't feel exhausted even though research took forever.

I've been on stimulants of some sort twice before- cortisol for hypoadrenia (I spent the first night vibrating like a hummingbird and didn't eat or sleep a week and then it was pretty much like normal except I could wake up in < 2 hours) and suadfed + armor thyroid + cortisol (doctor said it was okay, but three hours pacing around the office followed by collapsing under my desk say she was wrong). Vyvanse doesn't feel anything like either of those, or the jittery feeling my doctor warned me I about. I do not feel sped up at all. There is a mild lightheaded feeling, similar to after a good workout, and my back has a lot less pain and tension.

I was way more productive at work today, but I was also much, much happier. I could actually stick to what I was doing and produce something. I don't even want to look at facebook because it's so noisy. I didn't put on music all day either. It's easier to get into pleasure reading. Even when I was taking a break, I stuck to one thing a time rather than jumping back and forth.

But the biggest difference is that a problem I didn't notice I had is now gone. It used to be any time I had a thing I wanted to do (say, code a thing that does a thing), and it took a second or a step longer to complete than I thought it should, I'd feel like a failure. It should be done, why is it not done, it's not done because I'm stupid. It was the GTD loops theory, that your brain doesn't understand the concept of "working on", it just knows what should have already happened. But I only felt that while I was working on the thing I needed to do- there is no deadline or end goal to reading tvtropes, so I wasn't failing at it.

Things like e-mail or even facebook used to give me a little productivity ping, which was awesome. Real projects never gave me that on account of the constant low level feeling of failure.* I haven't done the exact math, but it feels like I'm getting the exact same number of local productivity hits as I was before, but now they're in a thing I actually wanted to produce. I think this explains some of my compulsive phone use in meetings- the second we weren't making progress towards The Goal I had to go find something I could Accomplish, even if that thing was liking a picture of a cat in a boot.

I haven't tested it with the co-workers with no indoor voices yet, but other people and their associated noises felt easier today. Exchanging mandatory pleasantries no longer feels like people are stealing from me. My ability to sit still and connect with my body** has gone up, which is pretty much the opposite of what I expected. I'm naturally more aware, and I can connect and listen deeper without feeling overwhelmed.

It's supposed to be a 12 hour pill, but it very clearly starts wearing off around 8 hours in for me, and is gone by 10. Suddenly everything is hard. I'm back to fucking around on the internet. Nothing sounds fun.

*A friend of mine more or less banished the sims from her life for this reason. It's major selling point was a quick hit of productivity. Do you know when that is most fun? When there is a large, unpleasant but mandatory thing you are avoiding.

**not a euphamism for masturbation

Long long ago, Penny Arcade made a comic that included the phrase "raped to sleep by dickwolves." I though the original comic was fine- not safe space appropriate, but not trivializing rape either. To the extent it was a cheap shock-laugh, that was sort of the point of the comic.

Lots of people weren't okay with the comic. Some of them were perfectly respectful about it. I've seen claims that others were not, although I haven't seen direct links to back this up. Penny Arcade responded with a strip that really definitely trivialized rape and dismissed all criticism of them as hysterical. Meanwhile, some of their supporters on twitter were threatening to rape their critics (no direct link for that either, but enjoy the #teamrape hashtag).

Penny Arcade responded with a Team Dickwolves t-shirt. I thought this was annoying when I first heard about it but just now put together that they essentially sold a shirt that said Team Rapist while their followers were threatening to rape people. I think that is the point where they lose the benefit of a doubt. Some time later they pulled the shirt.

3 years later, !Gabe was asked what he regretted most in his time running Pax, and he said something that could have been interpreted as "pulling the dickwolves shirt". Later he posted a clarification on his blog.

So let me start by saying I like the Dickwolves strip. I think it’s a strong comic and I still think the joke is funny. Would we make that strip today? Knowing what we know now and seeing how it hurt people, no. We wouldn’t. But at the time, it seemed pretty benign. With that said I absolutely regret everything we did after that comic. I regret the follow up strip, I regret making the merchandise, I regret pulling the merchandise and I regret being such an asshole on twitter to people who were upset. I don’t think any of those things were good ideas. If we had just stopped with the strip and moved on, the Dickwolf never would have become what it is today. Which is a joke at the expense of rape victims or a symbol of the dismissal of people who have suffered a sexual assault. the comic itself obviously points out the absurd morality of the average MMO where you are actually forced to help some people and ignore others in the same situation. Oddly enough, the first comic by itself is exactly the opposite of what this whole thing has turned into.

What I read from this is that !Gabe genuinely regrets hurting people, and also the tremendous amount of work doing so created for him. He does not understand why people are so upset about this and does not plan on any effort to dp so.

Ta-Nehisi Coates had this to say about white Southerners grappling with the Confederate flag:

If you accept that the Confederacy fought to preserve and expand slavery, then you might begin to understand how the descendants of the enslaved might regard symbols of that era. And you might also begin to understand that "offense" doesn't even begin to cover it. Reading Penthouse while having Christmas dinner with your grandmother is offensive. Donning the symbols of those who fought for right to sell Henry Brown's wife and child is immoral.

Nothing is changed by banishing the Confederate Flag out of a desire to be polite or inoffensive. The Confederate Flag should not die because black people have come to feel a certain way about their country, it should die when white people come to feel a certain way about themselves. It can't be for me. It has to be for you.

This is about how I feel about dickwolves. To the extent people who want a Team Dickwolves t-shirt exist, I want them to wear it so I know who they are. What I want from !Gabe is an understanding of why people found the comic and especially his follow up and really especially the Team Rapist T-shirt so hurtful and so scary. I don't think he gets that he's not the the victim in this situation

I'm on a recruiting trip for work and have noticed something interesting. To my surprise, the hours of talking with undergrads have not been draining. They've either been outright energizing, or left me with the kind of good tired you get after a good workout. For three hours, I only thought about what I was doing, and that was wonderful. On the other hand, dinner with my co-workers left me wanting to cut my wrists with a spork.

I think I've been misusing the word "drained." Three hours of pitching to sophomores left me drained, but I was really happy I'd done it. I needed to rest afterwords, but I enjoyed the hell out of that rest, like a really good netflix session after weight training. There was no amount of energy that would have made interaction with my co-workers fun. It might have made me less miserable under other circumstances, but honestly, no. They were boring and I wanted to go discuss medieval economics with my boyfriend or creedal vs. non-creedal religions with my friend. Afterwords I needed to recover, not rest. This was like a netflix session while seriously ill- it beats going outside, but I'm still miserable. "Get sick and watch TV" does not sound like an excellent day the way "bike 20 miles and then watch TV" does." Let's call this icky feeling leeched.

Now that I know what good drained feels like, I can see all the interactions I thought were draining but were actually leeching. I thought I could solve those problems by resting more, but I can't. It is time to look at other options. And not just dodging unpleasant things either. No more running, I aim to misbehave.

Some anecdotes I think illustrate a common thread:

• Megan McArdle has a blog post up about how many women in Harvard Business School in particular and prestigious, demanding jobs in general drop out of the work force. The comments go off on a tangent about how high performing men who previously would have married secretaries are now marrying women much closer to their own achievement level, but post marriage logistics win out and the wives' careers are either dropped entirely or they shift into something emotionally rewarding but undemanding.
  
• The "generous, discrete" business man who messaged me on okcupid, looking for "smart, beautiful, intelligent" women to "share an evening with" while he was in town for work.
  
• That guy I went out with once who talked about how much he enjoyed smart women, how he couldn't imagine dating a dumb woman, but also couldn't imagine dating someone who wasn't at least five years younger than himself. He also believed all women were two drinks away from bisexuality.
  
• A former friend who started dating a 19 year old college student when he was 26 and several years into a career, and claimed she was so smart and mature until the break up, at which point she started "acting her age." AKA she was smart and doing what he told her, and then she stopped.
  
• Hugo Schwyzer (noted student-fucking professor), who claims he was never tempted to increase the grade of a student he was fucking because “The only students I was interested in were already A students. It’s not just a pretty face. It’s also intellectual ability.”.
  

That last one is extra on my my mind this week because I'm at my alma matter on a recruiting trip. I took a walk around the bookstore, and what I found myself most nostalgic for was a time in my life when the success criteria were determined by someone else and reachable via an obvious path. I could sign up and someone would stuff knowledge in my brain and I would get a reward for it. Relative to the real world, college required a lot of effort but very little executive function. Now, a good chunk of my job is deciding what my job should be and getting everyone else on board with it, and that's exhausting.

Simultaneously, what I most regret about my time at college is that I stuck to such a very strict path. I chose my first (very demanding) major when I was 12, committed to a second (also very demanding) my first semester, and had no time left over to explore. I avoided fuzzy classes both because I found the uncertainty inherently scary, and because my schedule genuinely didn't allow for anything to go wrong. I wanted a second major because otherwise all my credits from high school would have me graduating from college in two years, and I really wanted four. It never occurred to me I could use those extra two years to just explore a bunch of interesting things that might be interesting, without a clear use case for them. I was living Alfie Kohn's nightmare.

At the same time, that second major is what got me my current career, a career that has given me untold freedom in my adulthood. That's worth something too.

There are any number of reasons a very smart person could be getting less than an A in Hugo Schwyzer's class. Maybe she has to work to put herself through school or take care of family members and it cuts into her homework time. Maybe her dad died the day before an exam and she didn't know she could ask for a delay. Maybe she's brilliant in a different area and took this class deliberately to stretch herself. Maybe she did exemplary work that challenged Schwyzer's views and he lowered her grade subconsciously as punishment. Maybe she had grad school interviews that semester and they severely disrupted her study schedule. My point is that if Schwyzer is only fucking students getting As in his class, he's not selecting for intelligence, he's selecting for skill at following his rules.

That would be problematic to all on its own, and becomes worse when the perpetrator tries to mask it under something socially acceptable like an intelligence fetish. But I find it almost tragic in this case, because I'm pretty sure Schwyzer has done more to help me recognize this pattern than anyone else I've read or talked to. He is the one that explained that the sign of a good partnership isn't an absence of conflict, it's the presence of conflict that leads to growth for both parties- that "iron sharpens iron"- and that looking for less than that is a failure of moral courage. I'm not surprised he failed to live up this, because his writing always sounded like a dry drunk, but I am sad.

You'll notice a rather cryptic "Yet" at the end of my last post. At one point the idea of grabbing extrovert privilege for myself would have been anathema. But over the last few weeks there have been several times I felt the feeling I describe as "introverted out", yet really wanted to see specific people. I had to hold myself back because I knew if I went out I would disengage and everyone would be miserable, but that that was an intellectual understanding, not a gut level call for hibernation.

I'm coming to the conclusion that I was not sick of people, I was in sensory overload, and people happen to be highly stimulatory. This would explain why I keep telling people I'm going to relax by playing video games and then spend four hours doing a puzzle, and why I kept "wasting" my bus commute just listening to music instead of efficiently watching TV, or at least listening to a podcast. It explains why my misophonia has been worse lately, to the point I'm wearing earplugs to meetings and I don't even care if my co-workers think I'm weird. It explains why I'm intensely picky about touch some times but not others.

These explanations aren't exactly antithetical- there's a lot of evidence that introverts find life in general and social interaction in particular more stimulating than extroverts (which is why extroverts are more likely to have adrenaline-junkie hobbies, and introverts solo hobbies trend towards the quiet). And I've undoubtedly had genuine needs to introvert in the past. But trying to recharge these last few weeks felt like trying to force in a peg that wasn't quite fitting, and now it feels smooth. I feel more true to myself, and more hopeful about finding ways to make myself happy.

As is my custom when sick, I've been watching depressing documentaries on Netflix. Here are my opinions:

Hot Coffee: opinion piece saying tort reform has been driven by corporations, that said corporations have used money to corrupt the justice system to their advantage, and that the popular examples of lawsuits gone awry were legitimate suits distorted by the media. They raise some interesting points that run counter to my existing beliefs, and I want to acknowledge that this makes me defensive. Nonetheless, I think documentaries are a bad medium for disputes of fact, and it fails to do a good job at documentaries' natural role, sharing the emotional truth of something.

Bully: follows five children who were viciously bullied. This did a great job of conveying emotional truth, in that I WILL KILL THAT BITCH PRINCIPLE IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO HOW DARE YOU TELL A VICTIM IT'S THEIR FAULT FOR BEING BULLIED BECAUSE THEY REFUSE TO PRETEND IT'S NOT HAPPENING. Bully is this illness's winner of the coveted "I'm stupid for watching this when I'm low on cope" award.

The House I Live In: "The drug war is bad and not motivated by genuine concerns of public safety." Somewhere in between. It's definitely advocating a position, but it also works to show some of the feelings of devastation the drug war brings. I was already well on board with its position, but I did learn a new fact or two. I don't have a single friend who isn't already convinced the war on drugs is an excuse to control and destroy poor people, and I can't judge how it would do with the uncoverted.

Lost Angels: Skid Row is My Home: how life feels to residents of Skid Row, Los Angeles. This is what documentaries are supposed to be. It makes me retroactively downgrade The House I Live In because it's so much better at being a documentary.

I have finally found a convincing counterargument to my belief that cash aid is better than in-kind and restricted aid (e.g. public housing and housing vouchers). My belief was based on the following:

1. Data showing that cash transfers are better at lifting people out of poverty than specific aid.
   
2. Intuition that people are generally better at knowing what they need than the government
   
3. Intuition that if they don't, they need to learn, and this is how to do it.
   
4. A willingness to let mentally competent adults starve for their own bad decisions.
   
5. Belief that the government claiming to best know how people should spend their money was inherently paternalistic and poisonous to a healthy citizenry even when it's government provided money.
   

My goal in anti-poverty intervention is not to eliminate poverty or suffering, but to make sure that an individual's suffering is mostly a result of their own, recent choices, and not bad luck, environmental factors outside their control, other humans, or shitty choices they made when they were 15. Or even mildly poor choices they made a month ago, depending on the cost to do so.

Here are two things I have thought of recently. One, decision fatigue is a thing. There is space to recognize and accommodate that without creating a cycle of dependency. Of course, our current programs often manage to be condescending and induce decision fatigue, so this is no defense of them, but the theory is there.

The second specifically applies to housing, and other consumables requiring extended contracts. Low, and especially high variance, income can easily lead to a poor credit rating. Poor credit makes housing harder to find, lower quality, and more expensive- and justifiably so, since tenants with low credit ratings are more likely to miss payments. You can compensate with a higher deposit, but that doesn't help the poor. A dedicated housing allowance that is paid to the landlord in a timely manner (which the current housing voucher system demonstrably does not do) credibly commits you to paying for housing. That insulates people not only from their own past poor decisions, but from the decisions of other poor people who have created the statistical association between poverty and irregular payment. Stable housing is almost fundamental in establishing a stable life and pulling out of poverty.

I am more and more seeing poverty not as a problem of too-low income, but of unpredictable income. And some sort of minimum income guarantee makes a really credible solution.

I'm dissatisfied with the current discourse around introversion. I'm glad we're noticing that the rules for expressing love and respect in America were written by extroverts, and that introverts have a set of internal mechanics such that following these rules exacts a huge toll. I'm glad that the internet has given introverts a way to feel belonging and solidarity without exhausting them, and if the forums tend to get taken over by the problems of the socially anxious and misanthropic... oh well, they need belonging too.

But I think it's time we moved on to some more interesting questions. For example, it is great that we have explained to our extroverted family members that we don't hate them, that we need alone time after family gatherings even if we had really excellent times. But that doesn't change the fact that many people live far away from their family, that plane tickets and hotel rooms and time off of work are expensive. Reality being what it is, introverts need to spend a lot more money and travel time per unit interaction with their family. Assuming a respectful if imperfect family, how do you get the most out of your relationships with them at minimal cost? How do you steel yourself to stay home alone when everyone else is having fun together, and you want to join them but need time alone? How do you recharge "efficiently"? How do you know when the desire to do so driven is by an extroverted culture that allows us alone time only in service of together time, versus really wanting to do specific social things and not being able to? How do you separate culture pressure that says you're a loser for staying in from a genuine desire to go out? Do other introverts genuinely feel like they have a battery, with a clear indicator of remaining charge and shut down upon depletion, or are they like me, where they can overshoot and not notice for, worst case scenario, weeks?

I would also like to see more pieces like this video from zefrank, explaining how his extroversion feels to him


or Howard Stern on his introversion (long, but the relevant part is right at the beginning)


because I want to get past this idea of a linear spectrum of introversion and extroversion and into a framework of accepting individual needs and wants with neither judgement nor obligation.

The health care debate has gotten very, very muddled. Most of my reading on the subject is by progressives (writing either for other progressives or for a general audience as an attempt at conversion), or by libertarians for libertarians. There is a pattern I have noticed that I think is worth addressing: progressives tend to see either One Big Healthcare Issue, or lots of issues with the same solution. Libertarians (as personified by me) tend to see hundreds of small issues that are going to need individual solutions. Which is interesting, because it's the reverse of the usual pattern, in which I think everything could be solved by introducing competition and progressives think we need an expert to tailor a solution to the specific problem.

So here are some of the individual problems I see, and short versions of my preferred solutions.

Problem: People can't afford health insurance/health care.

Give them money. To be fair, this is my solution for all problems relating to poverty. It sounds glib, but I'm being sincere. If we want to place a floor on the consumption of adults, we should just do that. If people are not using the money on the things we want them to, we should reevaluate our wishes or their ability to take care of themselves. Alas, this gets considerably more complicated if children are involved.


Problem: Health insurance is too expensive/increasingly expensive.

Insurance profits are reasonable and have not been rising in recent years. What you are seeing is a rise in the price of health care itself.


Problem: Health care is too expensive/increasingly expensive.

This is sometimes called "health care inflation", which is misleading, because much of the increase comes from the introduction of new things to buy. It's like saying we've had smart phone inflation since 2000. You could make the problem go away by not buying new things.

Some of it is that we're consuming more things. I am maybe the only person who liked Obamacare more after she heard about the death panels, because the alternative was everyone deciding for themselves how much of other people's money they wanted to spend on their own health care. Also, it's still not inflation in the technical sense of the word, any more than we experience produce inflation when I double my banana consumption.

However, some of it is genuine inflation , brought on by Baumol's cost disease (short version: if you have two sectors, and one gets more labor efficient, the other one experiences inflation). There are three solutions: pay workers less for the same job (which every politician ever has promised not to do, because health care professionals are sympathetic, have money, and vote), shift work to lower-wage workers (which we are trying, via things like nurse practitioners and physician's assistants. I am in favor of this but think it bears monitoring before we declare it a total success), or invent labor saving devices (which we have actually done some good at, but since in many cases the replacements are themselves expensive, we won't see returns until they go off patent). I am totally in favor of investment, both public and private, in labor saving devices. But we can't do that by wishing really hard, we have to work with the market we have and adjust if it improves later.

Problem: Wait a minute, you skipped over a possible solution. We could just pay less for the new things.

Okay, technically that's true, but it's a one time savings. Profits are what motivate pharmaceutical companies to make new things that let me live longer. I think our patent system actually does an excellent job here, providing some time to make money and then providing the drugs nearly at cost for all eternity (I have no opinion on the proper length of that first period).


Problem: why don't we just cut out the middle man and do it ourselves?

That is a good idea. There are definitely inefficiencies in the current model. But how do we do that? University research isn't directly translatable into usable drugs. There are many possible improvements to this model, and I am fully in favor of government funding for them as pilot projects, but I would like to see them work before we shoot the old model in the back of the head.

Problem: Even if the increase in insurance costs are due to care costs, couldn't we get a one time boost by removing their inefficiencies?

Yeah, maybe. There certainly are inefficiencies introduced by having 40 different billing systems. But considering that the government's systems are the most complicated and time consuming of all, I don't see them fixing it.

Problem: Health insurance is linked to employment.

Yes, this is deeply stupid. There are two causes: one is that the government subsidizes employer-provided insurance by not taxing it as income. This is stupid and they need to stop doing it.

The second is that employment is a way to get around adverse selection and the resulting insurance death spiral. This one is harder to solve. We probably can't fix the information asymmetry, which leaves mandating everyone purchase insurance. There are two problems with this: done by the federal government, it is either unconstitutional or stretches the commerce clause to the point that it can do anything. State governments can do it constitutionally, but still risk what happened in Massachusetts: originally advertised as mandating only catastrophic (i.e. true) insurance, the bill bloated until it mandated all kinds of care (because lobbyists bought the clauses), raising the premiums considerably. (My impression is that the conclusion progressives draw from this is lobbyists and/or money has too much power over politicians. The conclusion I draw is that we should minimize the number of things government can mandate so that there's no point in bribing politicians).

Note that Obamacare introduced mandatory issue (insurers must insure everyone that asks) and community rating (insurers may not charge more for riskier people) years before mandating purchase (everyone *must* purchase insurance). This is the worst possible thing.

So it's a stupid system, but it will be very hard to transition to something else.

Problem: what was that snarking about "true" insurance?

Insurance means insulating you from rare, extremely costly, unpredictable events, like car accidents and cancer. What gets called insurance today is often just 3rd parties paying for routine care, like vaccines and annual check ups.

Kathleen Sbelius, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, got this exactly backwards .

Problem: but preventative care lowers the costs for the insurance company, so it still makes sense for them to pay for it.

This is just not true. Very little preventative care lowers the total cost of care over someone's life, because we just keep treating you until you die. Everyone dies of something, and the causes get more interesting and expensive the older you get. Even if the cost was exactly the same, you've been alive for longer and sucked up more money for annual care. The only things proven to actually lower costs are vaccines, dental care, and pre-natal care. You can argue about preventative care being a more cost effective way to raise life span or Quality Adjusted Life Years, but that is a different issue. To the extent that it is true, the gains don't accrue to the insurance company. This doesn't mean preventative care isn't an excellent thing, but excellence and money saving are not synonymous

Problem: The same care costs a lot more when you pay out of pocket than when insurance covers it, and with a lot more uncertainty and anxiety too.

This is a big problem. I don't know how to solve it and am interested in hearing ideas.

This is all very hard to argue at cocktail parties. The other side has some very good visuals and easy to explain solutions. I have a lot of graphs and arguments about highly distributed long term consequences.