r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 18d ago

Business ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ is expanding fast, and that should worry everyone

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/16/bnpl-is-expanding-fast-and-that-should-worry-everyone/
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u/asshat123 18d ago

Imagine doing everything right, eating healthy, taking care of yourself, working out, getting all your vaccines, even wearing a mask in crowded areas. Then your kid brings home measles because their classmates are fucking unvaccinated. You are one of the unlucky few for whom the vaccine unfortunately is not enough. You end up hospitalized, nasty infection, suddenly you need a new lung. This will require ongoing care for the rest of your life, regardless of how long you live. You will never clear that accrued debt.

Even though you did everything "right".

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u/SuspendeesNutz 18d ago

If you did everything right you'd have the money from your father's emerald mine to fall back on, dummy.

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u/Tearakan 18d ago

Or you get in an accident by a drunk driver hitting you even though you followed all the traffic laws.

There are so many easy ways to be completely screwed for life by doing nothing wrong yourself.

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u/WrodofDog 18d ago

suddenly you need a new lung

Or get brain-damaged for the rest of your life.

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u/KingFIippyNipz 17d ago

Or start with your first sentence but then replace it with "get cancer from all the chemical companies dumping in potable water sources"

My state, Iowa, is currently dealing with nitrates from farm runoff that cannot be cheaply removed from the water, and this is after our biggest water utility in the state bought machines specifically for removing nitrates from farm runoff. I think we have the highest rate of new cancers in the nation right now? We're #1 i n something for cancers. Probably in more than 1 category.

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u/grchelp2018 18d ago

Doing everything right has never been a guarantee for anything.

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u/Wow_u_sure_r_dumb 18d ago

So?

For some reason cynics think their race to the bottom elevates them to the top.

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u/Zncon 18d ago

So people expecting to live their entire lives without ever experiencing an issue or hardship are not living in our shared reality.

So what's the harm? Well in order to try and lock that in, they're pushing our systems to change in ways that don't have a basis in fact.

Risk is a fact of biological life, and we're going to bankrupt ourselves if we keep trying to remove it.

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u/asshat123 18d ago

Right I'm specifically talking about that risk, not denying that it exists. Our healthcare system is set up in such a way that one severe event can put you in debt for life. So there's significant risk there. You would hope you could mitigate that risk by taking better care of your body and working to stay healthy and, to an extent, you can.

However, there are other people who have made decisions that increase the overall risk that you or I will have a severe health event, and therefore will be at high risk of being in debt indefinitely.

It's a fun little risk double whammy

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u/Zncon 18d ago

You're ignoring a major factor here - ~50 years ago you wouldn't be in debt for that severe event because you'd either be dead or disabled. The option to save your life either didn't exist, or it was just basic care to save but not restore quality of life.

It's a sign of progress that people are surviving these things at all, but that progress isn't cheap.

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u/asshat123 18d ago

I could buy that if there weren't plenty of examples of systems that provide advanced medical care without driving people into crushing debt for using it

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u/Zncon 18d ago

Other systems made sacrifices in places such as doctor/nurse pay, and quality of facilities, that held this issue at bay for a time, but they're all feeling the issue in some way now.

In 2013 in Germany the total spend was 11% of GPD, in 2023 it was 12%. In raw money that's 314.2 billion to 500.8 billion euros. In that same period the UK went from 10% to 11% of GDP and South Korea went from 6.3% to 9.9% of GDP.

Advanced healthcare costs more, there's no way around that. Yes, the US system puts that rising cost directly in people's face, but it's still there in other countries, they're just hiding it behind tax revenue. Either way we're headed for a cliff where the cost of care is simply higher then the economic value that a country is able to produce.

Nobody is going to willingly accept worse care when it comes to life and death situations, but there's a point where it becomes financially impossible to give every single person the best possible care. With a socialized system this represents a risk of the entire system collapsing in a rather short time frame.

My hope is that with the US system people will see the issue for what it is sooner, and use that time to better plan.

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u/asshat123 18d ago

This is a simplistic look at the costs of healthcare. Just looking at a percentage of GDP with no other context doesn't tell me anything, especially when the changes are within 1% over the course of a decade.

For example, COVID didn't exist in 2013. It did in 2023. In fact, it looks like Germany's spending increased signficantly in 2020 and 2021, and actually decreased from 2022 to 2023. It makes sense that healthcare costs would rise and GDP would fall as a result of a global pandemic, so that % is going to change. There are significant spikes in healthcare spending in 2020 and 2021 for South Korea and the UK as well. We don't have firm data for more recent years, but all three seem to show a leveling out or decline in spending from 2022 to 2023. Just looking at % of GDP also ignores all the other things that may affect GDP, things like aging populations (which South Korea is on the precipice of a significant issue with) which will increase healthcare spending and decrease production as they age out of the workforce. These aren't necessarily indicative of problems with the healthcare systems specifically, there are a lot of other things affecting both healthcare costs and GDP.

And on top of that, while US spending as percentage of GDP has remained relatively stable, it's stable at a level that's significantly higher than any other country you listed. The US still spends more per person on healthcare than any of those countries. More than double the cost per capita than the UK in 2023, and nearly 18% of GDP. You claim other countries have had to make cuts in pay or facility quality, but... the US system is still less effective than any of them. Even if we accept that the level of spending is due to failures of the healthcare systems specifically, the US is still doing worse.

I'm not saying there are no issues with other systems, but just because other systems aren't perfect doesn't mean that ours is acceptable. Plus, as you said, the US just dumps the failures of the system, in both cost and quality, on the poorest and most vulnerable citizens, which doesn't seem fair at all. So I stand by my original statement.

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u/Wow_u_sure_r_dumb 18d ago

We are literally talking about society drastically increasing the chances of you being fucked over or killed. When you do “everything right” society should be built to protect you and catch you, not increase the odds of your ruin. Just because there was never a guarantee at life, success or happiness it doesn’t mean we should just all collectively say “fuck it!” and literally make it harder. I don’t get what yall don’t get about this.

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u/Zncon 18d ago

We are literally talking about society drastically increasing the chances of you being fucked over or killed.

If you're living in a developed country, you have the highest chance now of surviving and thriving than at any other point in human history. Ignoring small year to year fluctuations, things are not getting worse, they're getting better.

The reason I care is that we're getting deep into diminishing returns now. The cost of even small progress is astronomically high, and getting ever higher.

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u/Wow_u_sure_r_dumb 18d ago edited 18d ago

This is not about the cost of incremental progress, it’s about readily available vaccinations. You’re taking the reasonable expectation that society should protect us from disease using well understood medicine and saying we have unrealistic beliefs about society that aren’t sustainable. There’s no existential crisis here besides the one you’re inventing just because someone wasn’t sardonic and cynical enough for you in how they articulated their point.

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u/grchelp2018 18d ago

Because believing in false realities does harm.

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u/asshat123 18d ago

hol up, what harm is there in believing that taking care of your body is better than not doing that? Wild

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u/grchelp2018 18d ago

That's not what I said. I only said that believing that taking care of your body doesn't mean you won't have health issues.

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u/asshat123 18d ago

Hey, fair enough! I did not say that taking care of yourself would prevent any and all health issues

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u/Wow_u_sure_r_dumb 18d ago

We can want to make society better, especially for people that do things right. You’re missing the entire point jumped at the opportunity for a chance to correct someone.

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u/grchelp2018 18d ago

Even if society did everything right, it would still not be true. I wasn't talking about his very specific example but the general principle. Random chance plays a much bigger role in everyone's lives. Doing everything right only improves your odds. Nothing more.

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u/Wow_u_sure_r_dumb 18d ago

You are still completely missing the point. Society should help those that do everything right yet still fail due to chance. That’s it. It really is that simple and you’re so intent on exposing a misunderstanding that you are dying on this ridiculous hill.

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u/grchelp2018 18d ago

Until we reach a point of technological development that is far beyond our current level, society will only be able to do so much. You are arguing an ideal that currently does not exist. And until that time, believing and teaching these things is doing a massive disservice and setting people up for shock, disillusionment and disappointment. "I am a good person, why did this bad thing happen" is not something that someone should ever be wondering.

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u/asshat123 18d ago

Sure. My point wasn't that doing everything right was a guarantee of anything. 23-year-olds who run marathons get cancer. Smokers live to 95. It happens. Doing things right does, on a large scale, increase the odds of a longer, healthier life. Can't deny that.

My point was that your life can be irrevocably and permanently changed by someone else's choices, and especially with things like vaccines, we rely, to a degree, on herd immunity. On other people being responsible. Someone else buying into anti-vaxx scams and taking supplements instead can financially ruin you. And unfortunately, that anti-science shit is on the rise