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Google Protects Healthcare From Michael Moore
An anonymous reader suggests we stop over to ZDNet for a case where Google may be stepping on the wrong side of that famous Don't Be Evil line. A Google staffer is offering to help the healthcare industry contain the damage that Michael Moore's film is about to do. (Here is the original Google Health Advertisement blog post by Lauren Turner; in case it disappears, it is reproduced in full in the ZDNet post.) Quoting from the Google post: "Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through 'Get the Facts' or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them? We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company's assets while helping users find the information they seek."
Why the fuck not? Food and housing are for-profit enterprises--they're just better managed. If you're poor, the government will even help you pay for them. You get a nifty debit card and you get to buy all the groceries you need. Public housing doesn't work quite that well, though...
It should be a pretty fucking long flight of stairs before the lack of insurance makes a difference. Here's an idea, dumbasses: insurance is supposed to cover rare, catastrophic emergencies. I don't buy homeowner's insurance so some bureaucracy can pay for a plumber every time my pipes back up--I buy it in case my house burns down. I don't buy auto insurance so some bureaucracy can pay for my oil changes--I buy it in case I get rear-ended. The expense of "medical billing" comes from bad laws intended to benefit insurance companies. I would be far happier to just write you a check for setting a broken arm after falling down those stairs, thank you very much.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Help the U.S.A. rid of NIGGA! HEIL HITLER!!!
When you are hungry, the local loaves and fishes provides you with food.
When you need early cancer treatment to keep breast cancer from going terminal, and you have no money, where do you go for that? Nowhere, in capitalism. You die.
Breast cancer is instant and certain death for the poor.
I for one hope you get just that, right after your employer goes overseas and your stocks go south - oh and yes, it can indeed happen to men.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
you lost all crediblity right there. moore is a sensationalist idiot. note stupid mind you, he's very clever at getting people to believe his idiotic points of view.
the truth is, health funds payout something in the order of 90%+ of contributions by members. many people who are sick and dieing cling to unproven treatments which aren't covered by the funds for very good reasons, and they take out their fear and desperation on the funds.
one thing i do NOT agree with is funds paying out to bullshit artists like naturopaths, it's a waste of money and gets nil result for a lot of money.
why doesn't moore focus his engery on the real rip off artists, like reflexologists who claim they can cure you by tapping your feet with a piece of wood.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
People, really use your brain for a change, lets see, in Europe we pay taxes and have free health care, social security and lots of other stuff. In USA you ignorant people that still didn't have realised it pay INSURANCE to have that, you end up paying the same or even more and in the case of a fatality of life, either the insurance company finds some way out of it or you end up in debt by paying the cumulative insurance payments that get bigger and bigger with your disease.
If you just stopped being dumb you would understand that in Europe all the money goes to actually take care of people, in USA a part goes to take care of people and the other part goes to make insurance companies richer ... all this while your health care sucks compared to the European one ... what about starting being smart for once in your life?
I see, just because you turned well, you want others to suffer? It is your f*ckin health, for christ's sake! It affects your basic human right to live!!! There is something wrong with your country, if you let even 1/3 of the stuff on that movie happen to real people. And I know it is so, because I have friends there.
There is no basic human right to live. There is a basic human right to not have things taken away from you by violence, but that's not the same thing at all.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I do not doubt that the US health care system is really awful in many respects. The solution of socialized medicine does not necessarily follow from this observation though.
Who's liberty is taken when you pay taxes? Like the ones for public schools, libraries, roads? Why don't everyone just pave their own damned piece of road, and let everyone else suffer the consequences!
Taxes are collected through threat of violence. This threat is a quiet threat that is not usually overtly stated, but it is there all the same.
For the most part, my tax money is thoroughly and completely wasted. The government is generally extremely inefficient at turning tax money into useful services. This is because government is inherently more interested in the interests of wealthy and powerful people than it is in the interests of individuals. The more resources government has at it's command, the more it will cater to the interests of the wealthy and powerful because they have more to gain by influencing it.
So really, your solution of using tax money and funneling it through the government to somehow come out as a raised health care standard for most people is doomed by a flaw in your premises.
What will result is that poor people may (or may not, likely not in our country since we're not Canada) see an increase in health care quality. Middle and upper middle class people are likely to see a marked decline. The very rich will see no change at all.
So, you want to use the healthcare system to contribute to the shrinking middle class.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
No it is not. If the CEO compensation and the compensation of employees diverge by a factor of 500, even if profits of some shareholders are proportional (an unlikely scenario since the CEO pay is well known to be wholly independent of the profitability of companies, and in fact tends to be astronomical especially when the company itself is about to fold and more stunning the incompetence and corruption of the CEO, better the pay apparently) then the society has no longer any need for allowing the corporate charter to exist. The purpose of allowing the corporations to come to being is to benefit the society as a whole not a few feudal lords, otherwise known as billionaire stockholders, and their semi-loyal vassals, the CEOs, at the expense of everyone else.
It is truly mind boggling how many excuses people like you come up with in order to justify the galloping return to feudalism-in-all-but-name, which is so advanced already in the USA. Not only that, many of you are apparently not satisifed about how fast can you become wholly owned and operated by your "betters". "Give me liberty or give me death" my ass.
And before you start going off about how average Joe American is a stockholder too, be sure to realize that 90% of all stocks in the USA are owned by less then 20% of the population, with over 30% of all companies owned by just the top 1%.
Absolutely.
The entire utility, and cleverness, of the concept of "capitalism" was to take the evil vice of greed and try to harness it for the good of the society, based on the recognition of the fact that those afflicted by the disease of greed seem, for the most part, uncurable. That is, the idea was to collar the pathologically greedy and force them to pull some useful payload attached to their leash behind them as they struggle, driven despertately by their disease, wheezing and coughing all the way.
However, as soon as they break away from that leash, it is no longer useful for the society to allow these greed-aflicted individuals to run amok and their activities must be curtailed, or a very large number of people will be severely harmed by the diseased ones in their insane efforts to own everything and everyone.
This is the very lesson which seems to have been forgotten in the USA, and so now the greed-mongers are pretty much free to do as they please, with the resulting effects such as rapid deterioration of the standard of living for most Americans, non-existant competition between gigantic oligopolies and duo-polies, accelerating concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, superiority of corporations over citizenry in the sphere of politics, globalization of corporate profits but not employee benefits, socialized corporate losses and privatized corporate profits, etc and so on.
A good indication that the takover of the US by the parasitic greed-mongers is entering the final stages is the recent emergence of corporate mercenary armies, on a scale rivalling that of the regular US armed forces. The fat lady is truly about to sing for the Republic.