Its not a semantic nicety, its interpreting statistics in a meaningful way.
"Rather than quibbling about semantic niceties, why don't you dig up some facts to refute the NIH report."
Great, the only thing you have to back up your arguments is a quote from a government agency where they claim they are valuable. Why dont you explain to me why you think those tens of billions spent every year by big pharma have no value?
Re:An argument for doing away with drug patents
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Thats the real world. Every company even those that rely heavily on R&D like big pharma spend less on R&D than they do other stuff. Being in business is expensive. Unless we are going to abolish all companies that rely on R&D things will always be that way. It isnt just pharma. Frankly, pharma has a better ratio than most other industries.
Since this is slashdot here are some heavy R&D companies revenues and R&D budgets for comparison over the past 12 months. (i hope this formats correctly)
Billions on R&D Billions in Revenue Microsoft: 6.5 44 Google: 1 10.5 IBM: 6.1 100
At the end of the day even though these guys are all spending more money on other costs related to running a company they are still adding plenty of value.
And big pharma does do basic research, they just spend 3 times as much on applied research. Both numbers are still huge, applied is just three times as huge. Incidentally, do you really believe that those 10s of billions spent every year are producing no value? I havent heard a direct answer to that yet from anyone.
Re:Read the grandparent more carefully
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* A study by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scholar found that publicly funded research played a part in discovering 67% of the most important drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992.
* 90% of the top-selling drugs from 1992-1997 received government funding for some phase of development.
You are twisting statistics there. The only thing those really say is that 33% of drugs between 1965 and 1992 were 100% privately funded and 10% of drugs between 1992 and 1997 were 100% privately funded. You try to imply that the rest of the group was 100% publicly funded, but that is obviously false. I would be surprised if any major drugs were 100% publicly funded or even if a significant percentage were funded more by the public than private organizations.
* The NIH report discovered that only 14 percent of the drug industry's total R&D spending went to basic research, while 38 percent went to applied research and 48 percent was spent on product development. The report concluded, "To the extent that basic research into the underlying mechanisms of disease drive new medical advances, the R&D in industry is not performing the role played by public research funding."
And what on earth is wrong with applied research? Or even product development for that matter? You act as though they arent contributing anything, when in reality they are spending huge fortunes every year without which these drugs would not see the light of day.
Re:An argument for doing away with drug patents
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Patents Don't Pay
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I have always wondered where people get this idea that drug companies dont do research, they just take something from universities, slap a patent on it and sell it. Yes, some of this stuff is based on things that had some basic work done in universities, but guess who funds that research! Yup, evil old big pharma! These university departments get huge sums of money from those nasty drug companies.
Pfizer spent 8 billion dollars on research and development last year. Merck spent 5 billion. Novartis spent 5 billion. And so on, all the big pharma companies have R&D budgets of that size.
So my question then, is if you honestly believe that this R&D isnt producing anything meaningful, where on earth is this money going? You think they are just flushing money down a rathole since according to you they have never actually produced anything meaningful? Really, I want to know, do you seriously believe that all these billions in R&D are just wasted? Do you think that for the past century they have continued blowing all this money, never seen any results from it, and noone ever stopped to say "oh hey where are all those billions going?"
Drug companies may try to game the system some with patents, but its not like they are just sitting there not producing anything of value. There may be some validity to the complaints people have about big pharma, but you lose credibility when you claim that they dont produce anything of value.
Re:I would agree back then, but not today.
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>> If you hear that a competitor is working on something, you can file a patent for "a process that..." and then fill in whatever you want.
If a competitor has already shown the concept then you cant run out and patent it because of the prior art clause. You can lock out people who would potentially compete with you but once someone already has prior art you dont have a legal leg to stand on. Yes, I realize that there are some patents that have plenty of prior art filed by researchers under pressure to produce, but legally those patents dont really mean much. And honestly, they are in the minority.
Dont get me wrong, I am not a fan of our current patent system, but this idea that 90%+ of patents out there are for things that have already been done by someone else is a little off.
Re:Its about raising the barrier of entry
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I'm not suggesting anything either way, just making the observation that there is real financial incentive there which the article in question seems to claim is false. There are pros and cons to both sides. As an example, look at all the innovation that IBM produced in decades past so they could keep their patent spam going. Just because they were monopolistic and using it to lock out competitors doesnt mean that there wasnt real innovation being produced as a result.
Its about raising the barrier of entry
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If the big companies all file for a bunch of patents it raises the barrier of entry very high for would be competitors. They may not get any revenue from these patents but they save a lot from not having to deal with smaller companies taking their business.
I mean the whole point of the patent is to give its inventor exclusive license to be free from competition, the author of this piece doesnt take that into account at all. Im not saying that this is good or bad for innovation, just that there is significant financial incentive that the writer fails to account for.
In software engineering there is a tradeoff between cost/time and quality. In the real world errors may be acceptable for some applications given how much time and money would have to be expended to make the system perfect. Making claims based on absolutes about how "Error handling isnt optional" doesnt take this into account. Sure, if you are writing say, the flight control software for an airplane then I can see "Error handling isnt optional" but if you are writing some program that is used to generate log files given a bunch of data from different sources and will only ever be used by one person then handling every case that could come up might be a waste of time.
It isnt just 'bad' software engineers, its also ones who consider the value that their time has and act appropriately.
This may be the case at MIT, but at your average school thats not in the top 25 for whatever field we are talking about (which is where most professors go, right?) I doubt that this is the case. I admit that this opinion is based on my experiences as an undergraduate and a lot of secondhand knowledge from what people who did take this route tell me. I do believe that unless you are in that small group that is absolutely driven to teach at one of the top schools in the nation and be nationally recognized, it can be pretty easy. 90% of Phds are not in that top 10% that you seem to be referring to.
The salaries may be the same but everything else isnt. Software engineers in the real world work extremely hard, I dont know of any who ever do less than 40 hours a week. Working as a professor in academia you get extremely flexible hours that are typically lower than that of a programmer, a crapton of time off, great job security, pensions, etc. Overall I would say that professors have it pretty good, you cant just look at salaries straight up, in terms of lifestyle they win. There is a reason that people compete for these jobs tooth and nail whereas companies have to compete for programmers to work for them.
So you guys are mad that there isnt going to be a law forcing states to be locked into ODF? Can you imagine the outrage if it was the other way around and there was a law requiring some open MS standard to be used for all government work? Is it really so ridiculous to say that people should just use whatever standard they feel is best for the task at hand. Personally I would think any law locking people in to one standard is a terrible idea regardless of whether its by IBM, MS, or any other big tech corporation.
OOXML is an open standard. People are making a mountain out of a molehill based on the corner case of importing a document from wordperfect of many years ago and having a clause in the formatting that just says "this footer here shall be aligned as it would be in wordperfect x.y" or whatever. For all intents and purposes its open, people are just nitpicking over the fact that importing files from long ago and having the description for how a few obscure formatting issues should be handled is a little vague.
These corner cases are starting to seem a little outlandish. Yes, if someone on the same subnet as you is spoofing your mac/ip address you can be incorrectly identified. Does anyone honestly believe this would ever happen? I mean really? This has gotta be equivalent to the one out of a billion type odds that they give on dna tests. I cant imagine that address spoofing to share copyrighted files is in any way something worth worrying about. Thats like saying that just because the police traced a call back to your house it doesnt mean anything because someone could have spliced the wires leading into your house and and made a phone call that way. Technically true, but not really very realistic.
The only realistic argument I can see is someone downloading stuff through your unsecured wireless router, the other stuff just seems like a huge reach. Even that seems like it would account for probably around.000001% of all copyrighted files being shared online though.
I dont really have a problem with 'socialism' as you define it, which is really just industrial democracy with a few state run programs and some regulations. Under your definition the US isnt really that far away from being socialist either.
I would argue that europe is really not socialist as long as most of its businesses are under private control, capital and decisions on how it should be used are in the hands of private citizens/corporations, etc. Most classical definitions of socialism involve state control of the economy, industry, etc. The state doesnt control most businesses in Europe and there isnt much in the way of centralized planning. But we are just argueing semantics at this point.
Also, I still take issue with your statement that the communist states didnt start out on a level playing field. Russia was not an agrarian backwater before the Bolsheviks seized power. They were very much in the midst of an industrial revolution and had infrastructure such as railroads and whatnot in place, if it was behind Europe at all in 1917 it wasnt by much. The country the reds started out with had a very solid economic foundation. After world war II everyone's economy was devastated with the exception of the US. France was no better off than any of the countries liberated by the red army. Education levels in east germany were just as good if not better than France as well. Many of these eastern block countries were considered to be very advanced before they fell under Stalin's rule.
OK, so what is it that these socialist governments needed to succeed that they didnt have? Landmass? Nope, they had that, more than the industrial democracies. Natural resources? Nope, they had that, arguably more than the industrial democracies as well depending which resources we are talking about. So what then? What do socialist governments need to succeed economically?
There was a point in time when most of the worlds population was living under socialist governments. If socialism was the better economic system then capitalist countries should have been fearing economic embargo from them, not the other way around. And yet, somehow it seems that even with most of the people in the world and a practically endless amount of natural resources they still failed to produce an economy that was even a fraction as prosperous as our own.
"1- It has been sabotaged at every turn, it's failures are engineered, not due to an inherent flaw."
OK, some of the socialist leaders may have been thrown out of militarilly but look at how many have stayed in power and yet their countries still do not prosper. Vietnam, every country in eastern europe, china, russia, cuba, the list goes on forever. All of them gave it a serious try that lasted decades. All of them failed to produce any meaningful kind of prosperity for their people. All of them have either abandoned or are in the process of abandoning these failed systems.
The fact that Cuba is right below the US on that list should speak more to the problems with the US healthcare system, not to how wonderful the cuban economy is. You even point out that the Cuban economic system doesnt have much going for it.
I think socialism is a bad idea because its been attempted in many different countries and every time it has failed to prosper. It may be 'just' for everyone to have the same amount of money but at the end of the day everyone is better off under capitalism. Note that I dont consider western Europe socialist, I am mainly talking about those countries where the government controls all or most industry and capital.
My opinion of Michael Moore is based off of the fact that a lot of the things he says in his movies are deliberately misleading. He often ruins good, persuasive movies by adding misleading and inflammatory statements. I am not a fan of the Iraq war or Bush or the healthcare system. But when tries to tell us that Cuba's system is better than the US he loses his credibility. Cuba's economy is so bad that it spills over into the healthcare system and they have serious problems there.
Other publicly traded companies dont try to pull this. If I pay for a computer and have it shipped to me dell doesnt immediately go back and start trying to dream up ways to deny sending the computer to save money. Its possible to make an honest buck as a corporation. The problem isnt the corporation, the problem is the health insurance industry.
OK, I will bite. What does he say about the american health insurance companies that is untrue? Im not talking about the cuba trip, or his fascination with socialism in general, just want to know what you think is untrue about the health insurance companies. I am not defending him as a filmmaker, I know a lot of what he says is horribly misleading. But he really cant help but be correct when he talks about the health insurance industry because there are serious problems there. So what is he saying about the health insurance companies that is untrue?
Forget Moore's general idiocy for one moment and concentrate on the health insurance industry. Everything he is saying about the american health insurance industry is true. They do give bonuses to their employees for finding excuses to deny patients operations they desperately need. They do everything they can to weasel out of their obligations when other people's lives are on the line.
The insurance companies deny payments for life saving operations to their clients because they know they can get away with it. This is evil. This is not closed source kind of evil. This is not copyrighting music kind of evil. This is killing honest hardworking americans who are paying them kind of evil. I think the term 'blood money' is totally appropriate.
Thats the whole point of insurance. People each contribute on the offchance they need super expensive surgery and if they end up needing it they can get it. If it werent for the chance of one day needing some high dollar surgery then noone would bother with health insurance. If you believe that a persons life isnt worth that much money and expensive surgeries should not be done as a rule then you should also be questioning why insurance companies exist in the first place.
Their job is to collect premiums and then if a client needs his medical bills covered, they pay for it. The issue is that they are trying to weasel out of the second part here and people are dieing over it. Their job is to pay when a client has medical bills. Its what they agreed to do. Trying to get out of it when the bills come due shouldnt be just a part of their jobs. Many times they do not do their jobs and honor their agreements. Given how desperately needed that money is by patients their actions are evil.
I am not one to throw the 'evil' label around lightly. I roll my eyes when I see it used to describe closed source, outsourcing jobs, or strong arm business tactics, but I think it is appropriate here.
I understand that there are problems in other countries as well, Im not trying to defend them. But it makes me angry to know that hardworking americans who pay their bills are getting screwed over by the insurance companies and suffering very tragic consequences as a result.
Maybe there is a better solution. Personally, I have always thought that the issue of whether or not the insurance company pays and how much should be handled by a nuetral third party. Its a massive conflict of interest to have the insurance company making these payment decisions.
Moore may be a hack. Socialism may be a bad idea. But at the end of the day, the things he says about insurance companies actually are true. They do deny care to clients who deserve it because they know they can get away with it and they save money by doing it. People die because of this.
Dont get me wrong, I have a pretty low opinion of Michael Moore, but his criticisms of the health insurance industry are very accurate. They do routinely find ways to deny life saving operations to people who have been paying their premiums their entire lives. Let me repeat that, people who have been paying for the insurance their entire lives die because the insurance companies want to save a few bucks. This is very evil. Moore cant help but be accurate in his criticisms of the HMOs, its so easy to find outragous stories about what they have done to their clients. Socialism may be a bad idea, but something does need to be done about these insurance companies letting their clients die. Shame on google for trying to help them with their image. If they want to clean up their image they should stop trying to find ways to let their clients die.
Slashdot Mirror
"Rather than quibbling about semantic niceties"
Its not a semantic nicety, its interpreting statistics in a meaningful way.
"Rather than quibbling about semantic niceties, why don't you dig up some facts to refute the NIH report."
Great, the only thing you have to back up your arguments is a quote from a government agency where they claim they are valuable. Why dont you explain to me why you think those tens of billions spent every year by big pharma have no value?
Thats the real world. Every company even those that rely heavily on R&D like big pharma spend less on R&D than they do other stuff. Being in business is expensive. Unless we are going to abolish all companies that rely on R&D things will always be that way. It isnt just pharma. Frankly, pharma has a better ratio than most other industries.
Since this is slashdot here are some heavy R&D companies revenues and R&D budgets for comparison over the past 12 months. (i hope this formats correctly)
Billions on R&D Billions in Revenue
Microsoft: 6.5 44
Google: 1 10.5
IBM: 6.1 100
At the end of the day even though these guys are all spending more money on other costs related to running a company they are still adding plenty of value.
And big pharma does do basic research, they just spend 3 times as much on applied research. Both numbers are still huge, applied is just three times as huge. Incidentally, do you really believe that those 10s of billions spent every year are producing no value? I havent heard a direct answer to that yet from anyone.
* A study by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scholar found that publicly funded research played a part in discovering 67% of the most important drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992.
* 90% of the top-selling drugs from 1992-1997 received government funding for some phase of development.
You are twisting statistics there. The only thing those really say is that 33% of drugs between 1965 and 1992 were 100% privately funded and 10% of drugs between 1992 and 1997 were 100% privately funded. You try to imply that the rest of the group was 100% publicly funded, but that is obviously false. I would be surprised if any major drugs were 100% publicly funded or even if a significant percentage were funded more by the public than private organizations.
* The NIH report discovered that only 14 percent of the drug industry's total R&D spending went to basic research, while 38 percent went to applied research and 48 percent was spent on product development. The report concluded, "To the extent that basic research into the underlying mechanisms of disease drive new medical advances, the R&D in industry is not performing the role played by public research funding."
And what on earth is wrong with applied research? Or even product development for that matter? You act as though they arent contributing anything, when in reality they are spending huge fortunes every year without which these drugs would not see the light of day.
I have always wondered where people get this idea that drug companies dont do research, they just take something from universities, slap a patent on it and sell it. Yes, some of this stuff is based on things that had some basic work done in universities, but guess who funds that research! Yup, evil old big pharma! These university departments get huge sums of money from those nasty drug companies.
Pfizer spent 8 billion dollars on research and development last year.
Merck spent 5 billion.
Novartis spent 5 billion.
And so on, all the big pharma companies have R&D budgets of that size.
So my question then, is if you honestly believe that this R&D isnt producing anything meaningful, where on earth is this money going? You think they are just flushing money down a rathole since according to you they have never actually produced anything meaningful? Really, I want to know, do you seriously believe that all these billions in R&D are just wasted? Do you think that for the past century they have continued blowing all this money, never seen any results from it, and noone ever stopped to say "oh hey where are all those billions going?"
Drug companies may try to game the system some with patents, but its not like they are just sitting there not producing anything of value. There may be some validity to the complaints people have about big pharma, but you lose credibility when you claim that they dont produce anything of value.
>> If you hear that a competitor is working on something, you can file a patent for "a process that ..." and then fill in whatever you want.
If a competitor has already shown the concept then you cant run out and patent it because of the prior art clause. You can lock out people who would potentially compete with you but once someone already has prior art you dont have a legal leg to stand on. Yes, I realize that there are some patents that have plenty of prior art filed by researchers under pressure to produce, but legally those patents dont really mean much. And honestly, they are in the minority.
Dont get me wrong, I am not a fan of our current patent system, but this idea that 90%+ of patents out there are for things that have already been done by someone else is a little off.
I'm not suggesting anything either way, just making the observation that there is real financial incentive there which the article in question seems to claim is false. There are pros and cons to both sides. As an example, look at all the innovation that IBM produced in decades past so they could keep their patent spam going. Just because they were monopolistic and using it to lock out competitors doesnt mean that there wasnt real innovation being produced as a result.
If the big companies all file for a bunch of patents it raises the barrier of entry very high for would be competitors. They may not get any revenue from these patents but they save a lot from not having to deal with smaller companies taking their business.
I mean the whole point of the patent is to give its inventor exclusive license to be free from competition, the author of this piece doesnt take that into account at all. Im not saying that this is good or bad for innovation, just that there is significant financial incentive that the writer fails to account for.
In software engineering there is a tradeoff between cost/time and quality. In the real world errors may be acceptable for some applications given how much time and money would have to be expended to make the system perfect. Making claims based on absolutes about how "Error handling isnt optional" doesnt take this into account. Sure, if you are writing say, the flight control software for an airplane then I can see "Error handling isnt optional" but if you are writing some program that is used to generate log files given a bunch of data from different sources and will only ever be used by one person then handling every case that could come up might be a waste of time.
It isnt just 'bad' software engineers, its also ones who consider the value that their time has and act appropriately.
This may be the case at MIT, but at your average school thats not in the top 25 for whatever field we are talking about (which is where most professors go, right?) I doubt that this is the case. I admit that this opinion is based on my experiences as an undergraduate and a lot of secondhand knowledge from what people who did take this route tell me. I do believe that unless you are in that small group that is absolutely driven to teach at one of the top schools in the nation and be nationally recognized, it can be pretty easy. 90% of Phds are not in that top 10% that you seem to be referring to.
The salaries may be the same but everything else isnt. Software engineers in the real world work extremely hard, I dont know of any who ever do less than 40 hours a week. Working as a professor in academia you get extremely flexible hours that are typically lower than that of a programmer, a crapton of time off, great job security, pensions, etc. Overall I would say that professors have it pretty good, you cant just look at salaries straight up, in terms of lifestyle they win. There is a reason that people compete for these jobs tooth and nail whereas companies have to compete for programmers to work for them.
Awesome game! Does anyone else remember this one?
So you guys are mad that there isnt going to be a law forcing states to be locked into ODF? Can you imagine the outrage if it was the other way around and there was a law requiring some open MS standard to be used for all government work? Is it really so ridiculous to say that people should just use whatever standard they feel is best for the task at hand. Personally I would think any law locking people in to one standard is a terrible idea regardless of whether its by IBM, MS, or any other big tech corporation.
OOXML is an open standard. People are making a mountain out of a molehill based on the corner case of importing a document from wordperfect of many years ago and having a clause in the formatting that just says "this footer here shall be aligned as it would be in wordperfect x.y" or whatever. For all intents and purposes its open, people are just nitpicking over the fact that importing files from long ago and having the description for how a few obscure formatting issues should be handled is a little vague.
These corner cases are starting to seem a little outlandish. Yes, if someone on the same subnet as you is spoofing your mac/ip address you can be incorrectly identified. Does anyone honestly believe this would ever happen? I mean really? This has gotta be equivalent to the one out of a billion type odds that they give on dna tests. I cant imagine that address spoofing to share copyrighted files is in any way something worth worrying about. Thats like saying that just because the police traced a call back to your house it doesnt mean anything because someone could have spliced the wires leading into your house and and made a phone call that way. Technically true, but not really very realistic.
.000001% of all copyrighted files being shared online though.
The only realistic argument I can see is someone downloading stuff through your unsecured wireless router, the other stuff just seems like a huge reach. Even that seems like it would account for probably around
I dont really have a problem with 'socialism' as you define it, which is really just industrial democracy with a few state run programs and some regulations. Under your definition the US isnt really that far away from being socialist either.
I would argue that europe is really not socialist as long as most of its businesses are under private control, capital and decisions on how it should be used are in the hands of private citizens/corporations, etc. Most classical definitions of socialism involve state control of the economy, industry, etc. The state doesnt control most businesses in Europe and there isnt much in the way of centralized planning. But we are just argueing semantics at this point.
Also, I still take issue with your statement that the communist states didnt start out on a level playing field. Russia was not an agrarian backwater before the Bolsheviks seized power. They were very much in the midst of an industrial revolution and had infrastructure such as railroads and whatnot in place, if it was behind Europe at all in 1917 it wasnt by much. The country the reds started out with had a very solid economic foundation. After world war II everyone's economy was devastated with the exception of the US. France was no better off than any of the countries liberated by the red army. Education levels in east germany were just as good if not better than France as well. Many of these eastern block countries were considered to be very advanced before they fell under Stalin's rule.
OK, so what is it that these socialist governments needed to succeed that they didnt have? Landmass? Nope, they had that, more than the industrial democracies. Natural resources? Nope, they had that, arguably more than the industrial democracies as well depending which resources we are talking about. So what then? What do socialist governments need to succeed economically?
There was a point in time when most of the worlds population was living under socialist governments. If socialism was the better economic system then capitalist countries should have been fearing economic embargo from them, not the other way around. And yet, somehow it seems that even with most of the people in the world and a practically endless amount of natural resources they still failed to produce an economy that was even a fraction as prosperous as our own.
"1- It has been sabotaged at every turn, it's failures are engineered, not due to an inherent flaw."
OK, some of the socialist leaders may have been thrown out of militarilly but look at how many have stayed in power and yet their countries still do not prosper. Vietnam, every country in eastern europe, china, russia, cuba, the list goes on forever. All of them gave it a serious try that lasted decades. All of them failed to produce any meaningful kind of prosperity for their people. All of them have either abandoned or are in the process of abandoning these failed systems.
The fact that Cuba is right below the US on that list should speak more to the problems with the US healthcare system, not to how wonderful the cuban economy is. You even point out that the Cuban economic system doesnt have much going for it.
I think socialism is a bad idea because its been attempted in many different countries and every time it has failed to prosper. It may be 'just' for everyone to have the same amount of money but at the end of the day everyone is better off under capitalism. Note that I dont consider western Europe socialist, I am mainly talking about those countries where the government controls all or most industry and capital.
My opinion of Michael Moore is based off of the fact that a lot of the things he says in his movies are deliberately misleading. He often ruins good, persuasive movies by adding misleading and inflammatory statements. I am not a fan of the Iraq war or Bush or the healthcare system. But when tries to tell us that Cuba's system is better than the US he loses his credibility. Cuba's economy is so bad that it spills over into the healthcare system and they have serious problems there.
Other publicly traded companies dont try to pull this. If I pay for a computer and have it shipped to me dell doesnt immediately go back and start trying to dream up ways to deny sending the computer to save money. Its possible to make an honest buck as a corporation. The problem isnt the corporation, the problem is the health insurance industry.
OK, I will bite. What does he say about the american health insurance companies that is untrue? Im not talking about the cuba trip, or his fascination with socialism in general, just want to know what you think is untrue about the health insurance companies. I am not defending him as a filmmaker, I know a lot of what he says is horribly misleading. But he really cant help but be correct when he talks about the health insurance industry because there are serious problems there. So what is he saying about the health insurance companies that is untrue?
Forget Moore's general idiocy for one moment and concentrate on the health insurance industry. Everything he is saying about the american health insurance industry is true. They do give bonuses to their employees for finding excuses to deny patients operations they desperately need. They do everything they can to weasel out of their obligations when other people's lives are on the line.
The insurance companies deny payments for life saving operations to their clients because they know they can get away with it. This is evil. This is not closed source kind of evil. This is not copyrighting music kind of evil. This is killing honest hardworking americans who are paying them kind of evil. I think the term 'blood money' is totally appropriate.
Thats the whole point of insurance. People each contribute on the offchance they need super expensive surgery and if they end up needing it they can get it. If it werent for the chance of one day needing some high dollar surgery then noone would bother with health insurance. If you believe that a persons life isnt worth that much money and expensive surgeries should not be done as a rule then you should also be questioning why insurance companies exist in the first place.
Their job is to collect premiums and then if a client needs his medical bills covered, they pay for it. The issue is that they are trying to weasel out of the second part here and people are dieing over it. Their job is to pay when a client has medical bills. Its what they agreed to do. Trying to get out of it when the bills come due shouldnt be just a part of their jobs. Many times they do not do their jobs and honor their agreements. Given how desperately needed that money is by patients their actions are evil.
I am not one to throw the 'evil' label around lightly. I roll my eyes when I see it used to describe closed source, outsourcing jobs, or strong arm business tactics, but I think it is appropriate here.
I understand that there are problems in other countries as well, Im not trying to defend them. But it makes me angry to know that hardworking americans who pay their bills are getting screwed over by the insurance companies and suffering very tragic consequences as a result.
Maybe there is a better solution. Personally, I have always thought that the issue of whether or not the insurance company pays and how much should be handled by a nuetral third party. Its a massive conflict of interest to have the insurance company making these payment decisions.
Moore may be a hack. Socialism may be a bad idea. But at the end of the day, the things he says about insurance companies actually are true. They do deny care to clients who deserve it because they know they can get away with it and they save money by doing it. People die because of this.
Dont get me wrong, I have a pretty low opinion of Michael Moore, but his criticisms of the health insurance industry are very accurate. They do routinely find ways to deny life saving operations to people who have been paying their premiums their entire lives. Let me repeat that, people who have been paying for the insurance their entire lives die because the insurance companies want to save a few bucks. This is very evil. Moore cant help but be accurate in his criticisms of the HMOs, its so easy to find outragous stories about what they have done to their clients. Socialism may be a bad idea, but something does need to be done about these insurance companies letting their clients die. Shame on google for trying to help them with their image. If they want to clean up their image they should stop trying to find ways to let their clients die.