Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

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> What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from?

Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries because they don't have health insurance, or don't have non-shitty health insurance. Quite a few of of them are suffering from childhood malnutrition, leading to lifelong cognitive and developmental defects. On the lowest rung, they are suffering from homelessness and all the deprivation and desperation that comes with it.

You're trying to tell us that someone to trying to raise kids in a rotting, roach-infested apartment in a drug-haunted slum, with no chance at a decent education and no real hope of advancement, is really perfectly all right because at least they're not actually living in a Delhi sewer. Or are you not even aware that this happens in America? You sound like the closest you've ever come to actually knowing a poor person is tossing a quarter to a homeless man in the subway.

Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries...

If that were the case, the increasing access to health care should make them healthier. It didn't.

http://www.nber.org/oregon/

Do you have evidence for childhood malnutrition?

Once you come up with a definition of "rotting, roach-infested", feel free to check what fraction of poor Americans actually fit that definition. See table 2-4: http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

Suffice it to say, probably the majority of my friends are poor by American standards. But then again, I live in India. And even when I was a poor American I still lived better than they do. Though I'm usually told that grad school doesn't count as poverty, even though the economics of it are the same.

It is sad that completely factual, sourced and on-topic comments get downvoted on HN just because they go against the political beliefs of downvoters who don't even bother responding.

No, I don't get what yummyfajitas is getting from his own sources. The Oregon experiment article he linked to stated, verbatim, that 25% more people reported themselves healthier thanks to increased health coverage, and 10% better mental health. Yet he is using this link to claim better health insurance does nothing for poor people.

Also, using a pre-2008 crisis census report to argue that everything is fine today is extremely intellectually disingenuous. It's almost like he's openly trolling.

Measured health outcomes did not go up, only self reported health did. Further, the increase in self reported health was present even before people had a chance to go to the doctor.

Better health insurance makes people feel better. That's not the same thing as making them healthier.

If you think the data changed between 2008 and the next AHS survey, feel free to prove it. Or just call me a troll, far less work.

> Measured health outcomes did not go up, only self reported health did. Further, the increase in self reported health was present even before people had a chance to go to the doctor.

That's BS, that report only presents no change in points on some physical health metrics which are dependent on lifestyle and not medical attention anyways.

> If you think the data changed between 2008 and the next AHS survey, feel free to prove it.

Sure, have a go at it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble

It's clearly disingenuous to claim that the housing situation today is represented by a report concluded before the crisis where everyone lost their homes and/or jobs.

I don't understand. From my brief reading it looks like measured outcomes did improve significantly (see diabetes, depression, cholesterol). Am I misreading this?

The outcomes did not change statistically significantly. Note the CI's indicated on the graphs.

Diabetes was diagnosed more.

So, what is the answer? Wait for poor-people parity? We can only move forward in the US if all of the other poor people in the world are at the same level?

And, if that is the case, which direction do we go? Do we push the poor people in the US down or raise up the poor people elsewhere or a combination of both?

I'd rather raise others up while helping our own. Free markets are fine as long as they don't become a race to the bottom and create perverse incentives to keep the poor poor.

As the world economic power, along with our wealthy allied nations, we need to tie positive social movement, like raising the minimum wage, access to nutritious food, clean water, medical care, social mobility etc. to access to our markets.

If the people's lot doesn't improve, their elites don't get rich. Simple as that.

You've forgotten the original question. The question was whether we should harm very poor people in other countries in order to benefit not very poor at all people in the US.

I argued that it would be horrendously immoral to do so.

How do we pull up the poor when the elites filter the entire economy through their pockets?

If the goal is to pull everyone out of poverty, is there a way to accelerate the process? I'd say, yes. Predicate the elites selling their people's labor to wealthier powers on improving labor's situation in that country. They are not doing it on their own, at least not fast as they could.

I think we can help both the poor people in the US and everywhere else. We just need to squeeze the top a bit harder.

> If that were the case, the increasing access to health care should make them healthier. It didn't. http://www.nber.org/oregon/*
What evidence for your position do you see in that article? It seems to say the opposite of what you think it does. I'm looking at "Medicaid increased the probability that people report themselves in good to excellent health (compared with fair or poor health) by 25 percent" and "Medicaid reduced observed rates of depression by 30%."

> Do you have evidence for childhood malnutrition?*

The WHO doesn't seem to have much data on actual malnutrition rates for many nations, including the US, after a few minutes of searching, but "Some 13 million American children live in homes with limited access to food, and an average one in three children receive food assistance via the food stamp program..." (http://www.livestrong.com/article/487412-malnutrition-in-ame...)

It is absolutely true that poverty in India is deeper and more widespread than in America. That doesn't remotely mean that American poverty isn't real or that people aren't suffering. By your logic, a man with a broken finger isn't allowed to complain if a man with a broken leg exists, and that man isn't allowed to complain if a paraplegic exists, and so on down the oneupsmanship scale of wretchedness. Where, exactly, is the cutoff point beyond which we're no longer allowed to care about human misery?

If you want to argue that poverty in India and worldwide is a huge problem, and that the Western world could and should do more to address it, I'll agree heartily. But what you said was that poverty in America is not a problem and that poor Americans aren't suffering, and that's bullshit.

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