Annie Lowrey: “To be sure, consumers have never had an easier time spending their money. You can choose from among millions of films on your iPhone in an instant, buy a plane ticket to Bali in minutes, get a restaurant meal delivered in an hour, and have a full house’s worth of furniture placed in your home in a few days. Yet businesses have also embedded countless frictions into the consumer experience. You might expect such hassles in health care, but they’re everywhere. We live in a world of ‘total bureaucracy,’ as the anthropologist David Graeber put it. Our grandparents bought goods and services outright, but we purchase subscriptions and rentals and insurance coverage and contracts, handling rebates and intermediaries and applications and enrollment periods. As of 2018, the country had 826,537,000 consumer-arbitration agreements in force, one study found. And that’s an undercount …
“The American government doesn’t help the situation. Washington wraps essential programs in red tape, forcing millions of people who have lost a job, lost their insurance coverage, developed a disability, given birth to a child, gotten divorced, or slid into poverty to pay a tithe in paperwork before accessing aid. The government shuns universal, direct services and opts for subsidies, grants, credits, and loan guarantees. It works through nonprofits and contractors and subgovernments, so people rarely know what is on offer and who is actually providing it.”
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Annie Lowrey: “To be sure, consumers have never had an easier time spending their money. You can choose from among millions of films on your iPhone in an instant, buy a plane ticket to Bali in minutes, get a restaurant meal delivered in an hour, and have a full house’s worth of furniture placed in your home in a few days. Yet businesses have also embedded countless frictions into the consumer experience. You might expect such hassles in health care, but they’re everywhere. We live in a world of ‘total bureaucracy,’ as the anthropologist David Graeber put it. Our grandparents bought goods and services outright, but we purchase subscriptions and rentals and insurance coverage and contracts, handling rebates and intermediaries and applications and enrollment periods. As of 2018, the country had 826,537,000 consumer-arbitration agreements in force, one study found. And that’s an undercount …
“The American government doesn’t help the situation. Washington wraps essential programs in red tape, forcing millions of people who have lost a job, lost their insurance coverage, developed a disability, given birth to a child, gotten divorced, or slid into poverty to pay a tithe in paperwork before accessing aid. The government shuns universal, direct services and opts for subsidies, grants, credits, and loan guarantees. It works through nonprofits and contractors and subgovernments, so people rarely know what is on offer and who is actually providing it.”
Read more: [https://theatln.tc/CnDgOFLb](https://theatln.tc/CnDgOFLb)