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Ummm.... this would happen in Canada as well. Nursing home care is subsidized, but only after you have exhausted your own personal assets or income.
My grandfather went into a nursing home in Canada and the gov’t took 80% of his pension income and then subsidized the rest. That includes savings as well.
This will be unpopular...
He was rejected from our universal healthcare system because of the astronomical costs of keeping a 96 year old man (with a life ending disease) alive.
Those costs exist under every system regardless of whether or not the customer sees those costs.
This is not a defense of our "private" healthcare system. This is a defense of our public healthcare system. They made the rational decision to focus their resources on younger people with better chances of recovery. Dr. Lederman made the rational choice to sell his Nobel prize to extend his life. At least that option was available to him! The same can't be said for people like Charlie Gard.
This is a good point - and something ignored by some advocates of universal healthcare (I'm partial to the idea of universal healthcare, but would like to see more honest debate of the issue).
If well known, well off, high profile people like Lederman get wiped out by ill health and no one cares just think how much worse it must be for the more average person. I really enjoyed his "God Particle" book. RIP.
He sold a lot of those books. What happened to the money? It's not like he didn't do well as a scientist and director of a major Department of Energy lab, and $1 million that comes with the Nobel.
This is one of the things that convinced me as a teenager that our entire healthcare system is fucked. My mom died of an aggressive form of cancer after ONLY 15 months of treatment.
My dad, making an upper middle class wage in a low cost of living area with good insurance, was almost bankrupt by the end of it. He had to borrow money from his siblings to bury my mother. On top of that, he is the kind of guy that makes /r/personalfinance proud. If someone like him that shuns most luxuries and makes a top 10% salary in the US can have his bank account decimated in under 2 years, I shudder to think about the 90% of people that make less than him and have less self-control.
As a society (US) we HAVE to solve this problem. Our healthcare system is a disaster from top to bottom.
wow that was his book???
absolutely crazy what we have become here. and i thought this stuff was only happening in 3rd world countries (like russia) where world known scientist live in poverty conditions.
You would think that University of Chicago could sacrifice 0.1% of their endowment to help out someone who had brought them so much prestige.
But then how would we know the value of a Nobel prize? I'm sure the University of Chicago economists would tell us that you can't have an efficient market for Nobel medals without such transactions.
They probably weren't even aware of his situation when this happened.
The endowment is over $7.5 billion, so it would be .01% https://annualreport.uchicago.edu/page/endowment
My thoughts exactly. Or at the very least, help fundraising with current and former university students. I am sure a lot of them would have had contributed.
To face a horrible illness and have that be compounded by having to give up a symbol of your life's biggest achievement must have been awful. The UK isn't perfect, but I'm very glad to live in a country where this sort of thing doesn't happen.
How do you come to that conclusion? The UK government won't fund a nursing home unless you have exhausted most of your assets. See, for instance, https://www.carehome.co.uk/fees/feesadvice.cfm. I dare say it might still be better than the US but I don't know for certain.
Anyone else surprised he could get so much for it?
A Russian billionaire paid USD$4.1 million for James Watson's Nobel Prize. In an act of stunning decency he apparently returned the medal to James Watson.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/09/russian-bill...
> The United States routinely has health care prices well-above the rest of the country.
Above the rest of itself?
Yes, you need to shop for medical care, the costs can be drastically different from one hospital to the next... I think there's a website designed to help you do that but I can't find it right now.
Truly entering into a terminal infinite inflation spiral.
Very sad news. Dr. Lederman was an excellent teacher in addition to being a researcher. He encouraged lecture participation and making educated guesses (I had a freshman year class with him and I didn't even know he won a Nobel until the end of the semester).
sensational headline ...
tenured professors are the top 1% of academia and they have a pension no?
maybe he sold it to live out his final days with premium care.
maybe they decided his surviving wife would've rather had a liquid estate instead of a shiny medal in a closet.
Mostly no, they do not. PIs are typically paid little, given their worth on the market for their skills. Even though he was 'famous', he got his Nobel at ~70 years old, meaning that he spent most of his earning years 'unrecognized'. I know you can look up any University of California professor's earnings here: https://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/art...
For instance Professor Vickram Chandra of UC Berkeley [0] made ~$91k in 2016 [1]. Other professors make more, like Professor Alexandrova of UCLA who make ~$146k in 2016 [2]. You can poke around the UCs and compare. Do remember that most PIs labor in grad school for ~7 years, earning barely anything.
I do not know of other databases for other universities that do this, but many US states have sunshine laws that make professor's salaries public information. I know that Colorado also mandates that all public employee's emails are public information too and I think other states do this as well, though I do not have a list of them.
[0]https://english.berkeley.edu/profiles/22
[1]https://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/art...
[2]https://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/art...
Don't they also have fairly high salaries to boot?
This is extremely surprising to me. Healthcare plans from universities tend to be extremely good. How did this happen?
only in america, indeed! in many countries, he'd just die at home.
Hundreds of years from now, when this time period is documented in history books, my great great grandchildren will look back on our greed-driven for-profit healthcare system as a shameful black mark in American history, just like we look back at the history of slavery today. They’ll ask “How could a democracy have allowed random, treatable health conditions to ruin people financially?” They’ll be horrified by how greedy and barbaric we are as a people, same as how we look back at the Civil War era society that promoted slavery.
No they won't, it'll be whitewashed in textbooks and only those who study history will know. There's already so many so-called black marks that are worse and already quietly overlooked.
I think comparing this to slavery, the Indian wars, Jim Crow, etc. more than a little hyperbolic.
There's a big difference between using violence to control other people, take their land or systemic disenfranchisement and the best healthcare being affordable to a big chunk of the population.
Things that are Really Bad(TM) involve people actively doing things that we consider highly immoral today. Healthcare is just a case of failing to find a workable solution. The situations are very different.
From when it was sold[1]:
> "I'm shocked it sold at all," Lederman's wife, Ellen, told The Associated Press on Friday. "We would let little kids play with it and have their picture taken."
> Auction manager Laura Yntema told NBC News that the winning bid was placed online — but she declined to provide further information about the buyer, citing the auction house's confidentiality rules.
So an anonymous person provided for Lederman’s retirement in exchange for “ownership” of a piece of metal, with little intrinsic value, no sentimental value, and that will forever be know as “Lederman’s Nobel medal” never as belonging to the buyer.
Just another way to look at how the “mechanics of society” worked in the case.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/physicist-leon-...
How are nursing home costs handled in other healthcare systems?
I'm not actually certain that the Civil War era is viewed universally as a barbaric time, or that slavery is universally viewed as a black mark in American History. There is still plenty of popular music and subcultures that look on those times positively, perhaps even fondly. In some sense the culture behind the civil war is still very strong in America, and whether or not it was bad is still heavily debated.
I find it funny that you think in hundreds of years we are not going to be greedy or barbaric. It is basically hardwired into the human condition.
For one we are a Republic not a democracy. If we were a pure democracy its arguable whether we would be in better or worse shape. If we were a Republic as our constitution was drafted, prior to the supreme court gutting state and individual liberties with the commerce clause,etc. I think we would be in much better shape
Hundreds of years from now? I look at it that way now and I assume all decent people do too.
The fact that losing the birth-lottery and getting sick can make someone financially-poor through absolutely no fault of their own is astonishing.
That so many people I personally know in America are absolutely fine with this is something that blows my mind. I think it's insane, but I'm a "socialist" Canadian who shouldn't be pushing my crazy ideas on the southerners.
> losing the birth-lottery
The cited rate for skilled nursing care in the article is not accurate. US 10K/month is about normal for a SHARED room for someone who is NOT in a memory unit. It only goes higher from there.
There's something to be said for keeling over from a sudden heart attack as a septuagenarian.
This story isn't really about "losing the birth lottery", so to speak. Its about someone not being able to afford nursing home care.
The fact is that the US spends much of its money on caring for the elderly already, and there is, as the article notes, medicaid for those who cant afford to pay for nursing home care. As a result, im a bit confused as to why he had to sell his medal.
I'm currently living in Tanzania (I grew up in the US). My wife fell into a ditch and broke her tooth. The cost to get it fixed? 20,000TZS (~$10). The problem is with our third party payer system, not with the free market.
Lots of Americans agree with you. The problem is those that don't are:
1. Willing to gamble they'll never get sick 2. Don't want "their" tax dollars paying for other people's medical bills, other peoples anything for that matter. More aircraft carriers please! 3. Don't think there's a problem with the system because it hasn't destroyed them yet. 4. America is #1, best health care in the world, and any contrary information is ignored.
Unfortunately for a lot of people if a problem doesn't impact them directly, it's not a problem or doesn't really exist and anyone else can eff off. In a very real way it's not just anti-socialist, it's just anti-social.
>The cost of receiving care in a nursing home can also present a significant burden. A private room in a nursing facility costs, on average, $7,698 per month. And Medicare, which covers the vast majority of Americans over 65, generally does not cover long-term nursing care.
>Many Americans do end up getting Medicaid to cover nursing home bills — but that often requires selling off significant assets and dwindling down savings in order to fall below the public program’s income requirements.
The costs are so high is because much of that money goes to subsidizing Medicare and Medicaid, hence the socialist aspect of having to downsize your assets to qualify.
May be. But that's not all and not even scratching the surface of real reasons for healthcare mess. Do you think Insurance Companies should be the middle men for EVERY process with healthcare including a simple visit to the doctor ? The answer to that question will also help understand the crazy costs of healthcare.
Why do we need Health "Insurance" to just go see a doctor ? Why not pay the doctor directly which cuts out middlemen (insurance and billing companies) for simple stuff and keep insurance for you know the reason Insurance should exist: catastrophies.
The costs are so high because people are expensive and it requires a ton of skilled labor. Medicaid also spends a crazy amount on it.
We should consider the possibility that Dr. Lederman's financial problems happened by design.
After all, why should ordinary people be allowed to slowly amass modest fortunes to pass onto their heirs?
If you want to know who is truly elite in America, see whose debts cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.
People that do not benefit society at all, like celebrities that are known from that they are known, can buy a diamond ring for 1.5+ mil dollars. And the people awarded with highest, most prestigious award that human can receive for pushing humankind further and further can't afford to pay for medical bills. There is something really wrong with the world in which we live.