I feel like you in many others blame the insurance companies for basically everything which is fair, but what you are excluding conveniently is the fact that it’s not just the insurance companies that are doing this extortion, it’s also the leaders and people in charge. Hospital administration, pharmacy managers, and so many others. If everyone started saying no and stopped allowing this, it would never happen. If they cut out the insurance companies entirely and started making their own decisions on treatments and if the insurance doesn’t cover it, so be it, we’ll eat the cost, That’s kind of the way the world worked before insurance became so big and massive. We take care of people in our hospitals and health care system and figure out the payment and insurance later. Would that be costly, probably. But it’s not as bad as the fear mongers want people to think it would be, that’s what I feel. They want us to think that healthcare is so expensive without insurance that no one would ever possibly be able to afford it in a thousand years so we have to have insurance, when that’s not really the case, there were times when people simply did not have health insurance widely, and they still went to the doctor or went to the hospital. I mean hell look at other countries?

Thanks for the advice. I’m thinking next is my best option. There’s no telling who is going to get picked, and the severance seems like it’s pretty generous. Three or four months pay.

This is a very insensitive and honestly silly comment to make. What makes you think people aren’t budgeting? They would have to in order to survive in the world that we live in now but there are major costs that we can’t control for example rising housing and rent. Even if we stopped dining out every single day forever, and never got sodas or drinks or anything like that, it would still be a struggle to survive because the price of groceries keeps going up due to corporate greed, it has absolutely nothing to do with people not budgeting. When you budget, and things keep rising in that budget, that’s a huge issue

For example, if I budgeted 100% of my income out as 30% groceries, 70% savings, from the year 2005 to 2024, The percentage for groceries would dramatically increase. It would go 30% groceries in 2005, 45% groceries in 2015, 57% groceries in 2024. As you can see, in this simple example, I’m not buying more groceries or changing my investment or budget. All I’m buying is groceries, and the cost of groceries keeps rising infinitely without my pay rising. This is the problem with the idea that budgeting can help you.

Sorry, didn’t intend for it to sound man and realized afterwards. I edited that part out. Read my other response. I don’t believe it’s as easy to unionize here in the USA as it is in Denmark. Denmark is extremely restrictive with immigration and is such a tiny country. If they started losing workers in a large number it would be very difficult for them to replace them. In the USA, we have 50 states, and incredible amount of land mass. People move around quite a bit for jobs, and when people start unionizing, they just fire everyone or make everyone terrified to lose their job. Just look at what happened with The Home Depot, largest hardware store in the USA. Basically, Home Depot lobbies strongly against it and provides severe amounts of misinformation to mislead people into thinking that they’re going to be a lot worse off, that they’ll get rewarded for voting against unions. These people are basically fighting against themselves and trying as hard as they can to screw each other over in hopes of a reward that never comes. And it’s totally perfectly legal, companies can basically paint unions as a nightmare that you will never recover from

Sure, but what’s your idea for fixing that? It works in Germany where it’s extremely difficult to gain citizenship and immigration is extremely tight but in the USA when there are countless millions of people ready to fill in your job, and constant turnover due to the amount of people that live in the USA and the expensiveness of the country, what is your solution?

You need to organise yourselves better into unions. Then, you strike until you get what you deserve.

It’s a system of bargaining. But if you have nothing that they don’t already have, you can’t bargain. How can you unionize, when they have so many applicants they can just fire you or outsource you to India and your government will never stand up for you? It’s not possible. COLLECTIVE bargaining. It doesn’t work if a few people do it, and I can’t control others.

Is your last name is Lizzard? /s

Thanks for providing this really detailed and interesting reply. Lots of good insight here. For the ‘Postgraduate degree’ group, I wonder if they’re dramatically higher due to the frustrating problems associated with name changes? Like if you publish an academic paper with your full name, you can’t easily go back and change it, so that may affect it… huh.