Leon Maughan

Health insurance for my family of four in the Netherlands is abour €300 per month. The “own risk” which we in the States call “the deductible+out of pocket” is also about €300-400 per year. Basically a rounding error. Health insurance in the Netherlands is so low that I often don’t even include it in my family budgeting at all. Relative to US health insurance costs, it is relatively speaking… free in the Netherlands. A lot of Europeans have no conception of how expensive health insurance is in the US… And most Americans assume that the reason European healthcare is so affordable is because the quality is poor… I know a ton of European residents will chime in on this and claim waiting time this and shitty situation that… as if the US healthcare system is some sort of utopian high-tech luxury resort experience. Did you know that depending on where you are in the US… If you have an emergency… There’s a 10 to 30% chance that you’re going to be picked up and treated by local residents volunteering on their ambulance and rescue squad in that particular area? Many of them awoken from a deep sleep in the middle of the night to rush to their local squad building and rev up their rig to try to get to you quickly. I’m not saying these people are not trained… I would know because I was one of them for a decade… But a big part of the US healthcare system foundation is built on volunteers… It can’t even pay enough to incentivize people to work in EMS full-time as a career. There is no equivalent volunteer medical system in Europe. It is fully professionalized. Anyway back to insurance.. in the US, we’d probably be looking at somewhere between $3000 and $4000 per month for the exact same level of insurance coverage not to mention the deductible would literally be 1000% higher than in the NL. They’re just completely different planets when it comes to health insurance — driven by culture which then informs tax policy.

How does exclusive homosexuality persist, despite evolution? An evolutionary biology professor of mine during undergrad suggested that a hint might be found in the cultural trope of the "rich gay uncle." It's true that gay men tend to have somewhat more financial success than straight men, and it's also true that gay men tend to have more brothers (i.e., gay men are actually more likely to become rich uncles). Further, since the 1970s, evolutionary biologists have hypothesized that maybe homosexuality could persist via kin selection: instead of investing in a child with 50% of your genes, you invest more in your siblings' children, who have 25% of your genes. So, perhaps, in some cases, men might benefit from forgoing their own reproduction and obtaining resources to maximize investment in nieces and nephews. An unusual strategy sure, but, in principle, feasible...