The costs of trans visibility

actually, now that you mention, the AMA does appear to want fewer Nazis out there, so perhaps they are on our side afterall?

Do you believe everyone who supports limiting immigration is evil?

Seems like an awful lot of people in this country are anti-immigration, with a major reason usually being they don't want extra competition for their jobs. Do you think all those people are evil?

Didn't you just tell us that everyone acts for their own financial interests? So I guess we can't trust anyone.

We certainly can't trust presidents who use their political power to funnel money to their own hotels, right?

Everyone acts in his own self interest, but it's not always the case that a group self interest is in direct, complete contrast with public interest.

Not all games are 0 sum.

So who can you trust in general? Someone whose interest is at least vaguely aligned with yours.

Which is why people tend to trust people who (they believe) share their values at least in part, under the (not absurd) idea that if we share values we could perhaps have aligned interests more than if we didn't.

I do believe that anyone who supports limiting the immigration of *highly educated people in needed professions* is at the very least very very very bad at evaluating his self interest (if he opposes such immigration for reasons unrelated to his own financial prospects, like say any retired person opposing the immigration of skilled labor in sectors where demand is higher than supply), and banally evil (as in supporting policy that is disastrous for society but that he thinks could help him) if the reason for the opposition to skilled immigration is purported self interest.

The same applies for me to people supporting tariffs btw

Luckily only 19% of americans oppose highly skilled immigration, so the vast majority of Americans are neither particularly stupid nor evil, at least wrt this particular topic

Do you think the demand for healthcare increased more or less than 313/277 from 2010 to 2022?

I think it makes some sense for anyone to be against the immigration of anyone with the same skill set they have, regardless of whether or not it is good for society and find them equally selfish.

I also don't think it is self-evident that it is better for society to have more doctors than it is more immigrants of any other profession. Personally I think there is too much health care being done in the US already.

Lol no , unless they can carve out a specific exemption for their sector while benefitting from the skilled immigration in all other sectors.

But if the package they have to evaluate is "very strick legal immigration, even for highly skilled immigrants" vs "much easier highly skilled immigration", ie "should be vastly increase the scope and number of H1B VISAs"?, then it's in their self interest to be pro more highly skilled immigration.

Healthcare being too big a proportion of gdp (agreed) <> there are too many doctors in the USA

Btw i am pretty sure you don't think the USA needs more phds in sociology

Just as most Americans don't like the job their elected officials are doing, most doctors don't support the AMA and actually oppose their policies.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/cam...
"you get 1,093,472 physicians, [...] ultimately there are only 132,133 practicing physicians who are AMA members. That's 12.1%."

And to claim that physician salaries are a driver of US healthcare costs is also rather false. You can find some other source if you want, but I believe they all support that physicians are only 15% of total spending.
https://www.ama-assn.org/about/research/...

15% of total spending is 3% of gdp, approx the size of the militaries (including costs incurred in foreign countries).

Besides, we used AMA as a proxy of medical lobbying (for brevity and simplification), but of course many other medical associations act analogously wrt lobbying for supply restrictions.

But yes if you want to argue there are also plenty of other forces in the healthcare-industrial complex conspiring to keep prices artificially high, you would be very right. A self serving bureaucracy, patent evergreening shenanigans, regulatory capture at all levels, the obscene role of the FDA and so on

BAck to the topic of the thread, it's clearly not physicians exclusively that gain from the medicalization of trans-ness, all the other agents in the medical complex gain as well; but they need physicians and "experts" in general to spearhead the attempt to medicalize that otherwise non medical condition, so their interest are all aligned on this matter.

IDK, I assume the demand would be relatively stable other than the pandemic years. Good question though. It looks to be about a 12% increase, so if you have another explanation other than we are increasing the number of doctors per capita, I would be interested in that proof.

If your theory is correct, why would they pick such a small group to "medicalize" and not pick something that a much larger portion of the patient pool suffers from (like we saw with the opioid crisis by redefining pain management)?

Well they caused the opioid crisis by overprescribing massively as you mention, they already medicalized everything else lol.

The fact that academia has been recently captured by extreme leftist fringes (to the far left of the median democrat) doesn't help either and can explain the medicalization of a political hot demographics.

Remember that medicalization attempt is happening while other cultural forces (radical wokism) are trying to impose their worldview on the country, and we have just started fighting back to that.

So if they can settle the "science" and medicalize before the pendulum swings against them (in broader society) they have a permanent outpost for their culture war. That's why they were in a big hurry (just think about normal people in 2006, how they would take current claims about gender).

Now they might have misguessed the reaction given that a few places are actually starting to legislate against gender care, and a lot of how this ends will depend on who wins the 2024 presidential race

Why stable? Population is getting older, and demand for healthcare grows more than gdp everywhere

Does this mean you are against taxes or any and all collective monies to spread risk such as property and casualty and life insurance premiums? No union dues? No public companies and no stock market?

I am against all redistributive taxes, i am not an anarchist so for every function i think the government still is needed, we have to fund it and taxes are usually the best way to fund it (although segnoirage and public assets could fund a significant proportion of them).

I am not saying anything radical, just what the federal government was pre income tax amendment (+ i am ok with the federal reserve system which came later).

As for the rest of free market associations among people, i am ok with all of them as long as it's all volunteer and not backed by state violence (=legal mandates) at any step.

So when i was talking about "collectively decided" i meant under the "monopoly of violence" framework, ie the state. People can associate freely and decide among themselves, with whatever governance structure they prefer for their association, anything binding for the members of that association, point is it can't generalize to anyone who doesn't sign on that.

Except a very few things we need the state to do (police, tribunals, money, diplomatic corps, defense and the like)

Not sure though why i keep being asked about my policy preferences on unrelated matters...

So people can drive cars without insurance, doctors don't need malpractice coverage and no collecting social security from paychecks?

no mandatory savings no (social security), no mandated insurance for sure for elective services (ie you want an insured doctor, good for you, find one who is, same as non-smoking restaurants), trickier for car insurance we can discuss that on public roads, ofc no mandate on private property.

Anyway 2 states right now don't mandate car insurance and it's not like life is a living hell there so, presumably you can do without (a good rule of thumb is "if there is even a single place with a decent quality of life that doesn't mandate X, then you have proof enough X isn't indispensable to mandate then don't)

You said that we can't trust doctors' opinions on this because they clearly are just motivated by making money. You cited a stance of the AMA as evidence of this. Even though there exist other organizations of doctors, it is very much not clear to me that even close to a majority of doctors support maintaining such a scarcity. I don't know if I know any doctor who doesn't feel overworked and overwhelmed by the number of patients. I have not interacted with any doctor who is trying to create a larger population of patients for themselves.

So, I don't buy your argument. Those who work in pediatrics, in endocrinology, in psychiatry, and in psychology are the ones we should trust about trans issues because they understand them better than randos on the Internet.

Your conclusions seem to be based on completely different reasoning than others here so I find your preferences interesting and inquire accordingly.

I said we can't trust doctors' opinions on matter directly linked to their financial interests yes. I cited AMA as an example of lobbying against societal interest to further physicians' interest.

They don't want more patients and that's not what happens. They want the same patients but being paid more and more and more to treat them. Which is what happens.

If it was about science, and science alone, you wouldn't have dramatic differences among experts in pediatrics, endocrinology, psychiatry in first world country. The fact those differences exist for trans issue but don't for many other health issues, is proof that the topic of trans-ness, as treated by the american medical community, isn't a scientific one, rather a purely political one, covered by the financial interest dynamics mentioned (which aren't by any mean the only dynamic at play).

To be clear we find something similar, albeit to a lesser degree nowadays (but there is a resurgence of the culture war on the topic), about dietology and food recommendations, so the issue isn't exclusively about trans issues.

And in the past as cited by others we had a lot of trouble with "experts" opinions about mental health and mental health treatment in general.