No, it doesnt give them too much power because in a free market economy the guy next door would say "Ill do it for $X-$1000!". This is the same reason it is ok to trust the free markets with providing other critical goods and services like food. Sure, they can charge whatever they want, as long as the guy next door can come along and do it for cheaper.
This by the way, is the reason why health care is so expensive now. We have taken away a lot of competition and incentive to price shop. As far as cost goes, insurance is doing a lot more harm than good.
There is inflation just as there is in every game where higher end monsters drop substantially higher valued items. Whenever a new game comes out you see a market for low end items spring up, with in a few months though it gets killed. This is because it simply isnt worth the bother to sell low end items because their value is so low to even be worth putting a few minutes of time into it. This is why game economies are typically only functional at the highest levels.
The average guy working in a factory in China makes less than $2 an hour. I doubt someone who gets to sit around playing computer games makes as much as that. So with $1 worth of labor they can make 100-200 gold. Thats not a bad deal.
In defense of the chinese however, it should be noted that a) wages are rising very fast in china, when they first started their economic reforms the average guy in china made the equivalent of about 3 cents an hour, and b) you can actually buy stuff with a few dollars in china.
I have no doubt that they could do it cheaper, but there is a key difference here. You dont want private corporations to be in control of things like police because it gives them too much power. Nobody really wants a private company to be able to go around arresting people. Private companies are good at providing goods and services, like food, transportation, and computers. If the markets were freer they would likely do a better job of providing health care as well.
Your example is very extreme. 4 people and only one is working and barely making above minimum wage. In reality there are jobs available to people with no skills that pay 15 dollars an hour. And in your example only one person is working to support a family of 4, there is no reason why two people shouldnt be working.
Even on an income of 22000 dollars the basic necessities are affordable to a group of four people. As long as you consider things like a cell phone and a big screen tv to be luxuries they can afford to live even if only one person works at a job that pays barely above minimum wage. Im not saying its a high standard of living, really the parents in this situation should be putting more effort into providing for their kids. But they can afford to live,
Production costs are tiny for prescription drugs, although you are correct that research costs are high.
Take for example viagra, cialis and levitra. All are fairly expensive per pill and all are patented. These should really be directly competing with each other on a combination of price and effectiveness. However, the way our current system works the patient goes in and gets a prescription from a doctor and then goes to a pharmacy and pays the high price that was basically fixed. If the patient instead had the option of buying any set of pills he wanted anywhere he wanted and pharmacies had to compete on price that would not be the case. You would see a lot of the money that is currently spent on things like sales reps and commercials (although they would surely still be advetised) instead being used to reduce price. You would see "buy one get one free" specials at pharmacies. You would see a lot more pills being sold as a result too. This is the reason that generic, nonprescription drugs are very affordable for the most part.
Now admittedly this scenario may work out better than most others since you have three different products that do basically the same thing and should be directly competing with one another. However, it is likely that this would happen over time with most drugs and there are many other examples where prices should be falling, not rising.
You are correct that capitalists wont provide help without "poking, prodding, and benevolence". That is the reason we need a free market system in place that incentives them to provide things cheaper than the other guy.
I would argue that the problem with your situation is that the markets arent free enough. Say for the sake of argument you had tried to get that MRI in a world where noone had insurance. Then instead of the MRI people pulling out some random number from their ass and you hoping insurance doesnt screw you, you would go get quoted from two or three different MRI people, not unlike what you might do if your car needed body work and a paint job. If every patient did this then they have to be competitive, this would drive costs down and you would likely end up paying less than the 300 dollars they originally quoted as their rock bottom price.
Multimillion dollar surgeries are the exception not the rule. I do not have a problem with catastrophic insurance covering hugely expensive things like that. The problem is when it starts covering things like prescription drugs, doctor visits, or even the cheaper surgeries that cost less than ten thousand dollars. You used the example of "TVs, radios, cars, and stuff that people can afford to buy". Cars would be phenomenally expensive if we didnt have market forces keeping prices down. There is no reason that 99% of health care shouldnt be cheaper than a car.
Free market health care very much does spark innovation. We all love to hate the drug companies for charging lots of money. But the fact that they know how much money there is to be made is the reason that they pour billions every year into research. Do you think viagra would have been invented if Pfizer hadnt been acutely aware of how many people would pay money for it?
Just because the United Nations uses those statistics doesnt mean they arent politically motivated. The UN isnt a perfect ivory tower, if anything most of the people involved in any way with it are very politically motivated. Simply including one US professor at an expensive university does not mean it isnt biased. There are a great many professors out there who are happy to pain the US as an evil capitalist country that cannibalizes its poor. I have no doubt that I could rearrange the weights on the variables in such a way as to put the US at the top of the list, it doesnt mean the US is best, just that whoever controls the weights controls the outcome. Citing a list that shows "the US is X% worse than Finland!" doesnt lend a great deal of credibility to anything.
I dont have a problem with catastrophic insurance for hugely expensive things. (I dont know how much that surgery would cost, I doubt its on the order of hundreds of thousands though) The problem is that we have removed free markets from so much of healthcare in the name of providing access and it has crippled the ability to get affordable health care or insurance. Things like prescription drugs, imaging, etc. should not be covered. These would be affordable in a true free market society.
The problem is that he cant afford it precisely because the free markets havent been able to do their job here. As one example that you listed, Imaging should not be a hugely expensive thing. But because of artificially high barriers of entry for people who provide such services and health insurance removing consumers incentive to price shop it is very pricey.
You can weight the different factors to make the countries appear in any order you want on that list. Kind of like how when USNews started ranking schools they hired guys who went to princeton to do it. Guess who consistently wins, Princeton. Same kind of thing, he who controls the weights controls the order of the list.
you're not getting this so I'm going to explain it to you: the vast majority of people don't have thousands of dollars just laying around that they can use to take care of large medical bills. The point of insurance is to spread risk, to make sure that if something big did happen, the insurance would pay for it. that way you didn't default on your medical bills or worse, can't pay for life-saving medical care. Insurance has evolved from something that was meant to cover catastophic events that the middle class couldnt afford to something that is driving costs up in all areas. Things like a broken leg should not cost the huge amount of money that it does now. The cost of prescription drugs is driven up dramatically because health insurance covers them. If the consumer was responsible for covering the cost him/herself they would be forced to price shop for different drugs and costs would drop dramatically.
To clarify my position I am not against the idea of health insurance for the very high end catastrophic needs. I am against it for things that dont cost fourty thousand dollars. If the average consumer bore those costs themselves, they would be far far better off for it.
The AMA, while it does some good things has done a lot to drive costs up as well. They make the barriers of entry artificially high in a lot of areas where it does not need to be. This restricts the supply of potential health care providers and as a result will actually decrease the quality even though their goal with extremely high barriers of entry was supposedly to increase quality.
You are clueless. Do you really think that anyone who is against socialized medicine feels that way because they dont like poor people and they think they are better than them? The vast majority of us who want a free market for health insurance do so because we know that in the long run, everyone including the poor will be much better off. Free markets a) promote innovation and better health care and b) drive costs down. People who are against socialized medicine understand this and we have better arguments than saying that everyone who isnt on our side hates poor people.
This is a good thing. We need more free market forces at work in medicine. The entire civilized world seems to have fallen into this belief that its normal for health care to cost vast sums of money even for relatively simple and routine things. We wouldnt have this problem of people not being able to pay for most health care related services to begin with if it werent for the fact that we have removed the efficiencies that should exist in a market based economy. If we simply did away with all of the things that cause prices to be artificially inflated like insurance (whether government or private) people would be far better off in the long run.
Thats true, you do generally have to pick it up yourself. The cost comes in the form of lost productivity from all the time you spend trying to figure out how to do new stuff or why something doesnt work the way you think it should.
> yes about that, do you have any examples where the license cost justifies staying with MS?
Like I was saying in my original post any salesman can make it sound one that one is better than the other. If you go to MS's website you can find case studies where it was cheaper. If you go to Sun's website you can find case studies where their stuff is cheaper. Both have som basis in fact and both are going to be slanted slightly to favor their respective authors. If you really want examples just look at those two web sites.
> if you're going to count support and training into the equation you can't just ignore liscense fees now can you?
License fees are tiny next to the cost of operating an IT department and any productivity gains/losses. A handful of guys working in IT will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Even if you have a lopsided ratio and a few IT guys are supporting hundreds of people that is still a one time cost of a few tens of thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands a year.
> As for training, you're reasoning seems to be that if it isn't exactly the same as MS it will cost boatloads more and that's a load of ****.
It is generally true. Most job applicants out there are familiar with MS software and have used it extensively in the past. Ergo, the software learning curve for a new employee is generally lower.
That is true, no doubt. But it still isnt very cut and dry. What happens 4+ years from now when everyone and their cat knows Office 2007 (not an unlikely scenario) and every new employee needs to be retrained on OO.org? Then it becomes more expensive.
Also, using the new file formats (which was the original discussion here) doesnt necessarily entail using the new software. You could continue using Office 2003 and use the newer file formats at the same time.
License fees dont begin to cover the real cost of software. You need to have an IT department to support it, you have to train users on it, etc. A $100 dollar license fee seems negligable pretty fast when contrasted with the IT budget for a company and any productivity gains/losses that result from using different software.
This is often referred to as TCO (Total Cost of Operating) and salesmen love it cause they can always put up graphs that indicate that their product is clearly the best from that perspective. A lot of people roll their eyes when they hear this term because they dont think much of the aforementioned salesmen's BS. But it really is foolish to factor licensing fees into your decision about what software to use from a cost perspective unless those fees are truly exorbitant.
This isnt about providing real security. Its about myspace getting some publicity and paying lip service to doing the right thing. Its more symbolic than anything. Sure, people will still get around it, but myspace will be able to say "hey, we are doing our best to stop them".
Thats nonsense, a personal computer is a computer designed for individuals. Boot sectors have nothing to do with it. (for what its worth wikipedia agrees with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer)
I suspect you have just been watching too many mac commercials and gotten the idea that there is a difference somehow related to pcs wearing ties and macs wearing trendy metrosexual clothing.:)
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesnt give them too much power because in a free market economy the guy next door would say "Ill do it for $X-$1000!". This is the same reason it is ok to trust the free markets with providing other critical goods and services like food. Sure, they can charge whatever they want, as long as the guy next door can come along and do it for cheaper.
This by the way, is the reason why health care is so expensive now. We have taken away a lot of competition and incentive to price shop. As far as cost goes, insurance is doing a lot more harm than good.
There is inflation just as there is in every game where higher end monsters drop substantially higher valued items. Whenever a new game comes out you see a market for low end items spring up, with in a few months though it gets killed. This is because it simply isnt worth the bother to sell low end items because their value is so low to even be worth putting a few minutes of time into it. This is why game economies are typically only functional at the highest levels.
The emergency room is a special case and you know it. Most health care costs come from non-emergency care.
The average guy working in a factory in China makes less than $2 an hour. I doubt someone who gets to sit around playing computer games makes as much as that. So with $1 worth of labor they can make 100-200 gold. Thats not a bad deal.
In defense of the chinese however, it should be noted that a) wages are rising very fast in china, when they first started their economic reforms the average guy in china made the equivalent of about 3 cents an hour, and b) you can actually buy stuff with a few dollars in china.
I have no doubt that they could do it cheaper, but there is a key difference here. You dont want private corporations to be in control of things like police because it gives them too much power. Nobody really wants a private company to be able to go around arresting people. Private companies are good at providing goods and services, like food, transportation, and computers. If the markets were freer they would likely do a better job of providing health care as well.
Your example is very extreme. 4 people and only one is working and barely making above minimum wage. In reality there are jobs available to people with no skills that pay 15 dollars an hour. And in your example only one person is working to support a family of 4, there is no reason why two people shouldnt be working.
Even on an income of 22000 dollars the basic necessities are affordable to a group of four people. As long as you consider things like a cell phone and a big screen tv to be luxuries they can afford to live even if only one person works at a job that pays barely above minimum wage. Im not saying its a high standard of living, really the parents in this situation should be putting more effort into providing for their kids. But they can afford to live,
Production costs are tiny for prescription drugs, although you are correct that research costs are high.
Take for example viagra, cialis and levitra. All are fairly expensive per pill and all are patented. These should really be directly competing with each other on a combination of price and effectiveness. However, the way our current system works the patient goes in and gets a prescription from a doctor and then goes to a pharmacy and pays the high price that was basically fixed. If the patient instead had the option of buying any set of pills he wanted anywhere he wanted and pharmacies had to compete on price that would not be the case. You would see a lot of the money that is currently spent on things like sales reps and commercials (although they would surely still be advetised) instead being used to reduce price. You would see "buy one get one free" specials at pharmacies. You would see a lot more pills being sold as a result too. This is the reason that generic, nonprescription drugs are very affordable for the most part.
Now admittedly this scenario may work out better than most others since you have three different products that do basically the same thing and should be directly competing with one another. However, it is likely that this would happen over time with most drugs and there are many other examples where prices should be falling, not rising.
You are correct that capitalists wont provide help without "poking, prodding, and benevolence". That is the reason we need a free market system in place that incentives them to provide things cheaper than the other guy.
I would argue that the problem with your situation is that the markets arent free enough. Say for the sake of argument you had tried to get that MRI in a world where noone had insurance. Then instead of the MRI people pulling out some random number from their ass and you hoping insurance doesnt screw you, you would go get quoted from two or three different MRI people, not unlike what you might do if your car needed body work and a paint job. If every patient did this then they have to be competitive, this would drive costs down and you would likely end up paying less than the 300 dollars they originally quoted as their rock bottom price.
Multimillion dollar surgeries are the exception not the rule. I do not have a problem with catastrophic insurance covering hugely expensive things like that. The problem is when it starts covering things like prescription drugs, doctor visits, or even the cheaper surgeries that cost less than ten thousand dollars. You used the example of "TVs, radios, cars, and stuff that people can afford to buy". Cars would be phenomenally expensive if we didnt have market forces keeping prices down. There is no reason that 99% of health care shouldnt be cheaper than a car.
Free market health care very much does spark innovation. We all love to hate the drug companies for charging lots of money. But the fact that they know how much money there is to be made is the reason that they pour billions every year into research. Do you think viagra would have been invented if Pfizer hadnt been acutely aware of how many people would pay money for it?
Just because the United Nations uses those statistics doesnt mean they arent politically motivated. The UN isnt a perfect ivory tower, if anything most of the people involved in any way with it are very politically motivated. Simply including one US professor at an expensive university does not mean it isnt biased. There are a great many professors out there who are happy to pain the US as an evil capitalist country that cannibalizes its poor. I have no doubt that I could rearrange the weights on the variables in such a way as to put the US at the top of the list, it doesnt mean the US is best, just that whoever controls the weights controls the outcome. Citing a list that shows "the US is X% worse than Finland!" doesnt lend a great deal of credibility to anything.
I dont have a problem with catastrophic insurance for hugely expensive things. (I dont know how much that surgery would cost, I doubt its on the order of hundreds of thousands though) The problem is that we have removed free markets from so much of healthcare in the name of providing access and it has crippled the ability to get affordable health care or insurance. Things like prescription drugs, imaging, etc. should not be covered. These would be affordable in a true free market society.
The problem is that he cant afford it precisely because the free markets havent been able to do their job here. As one example that you listed, Imaging should not be a hugely expensive thing. But because of artificially high barriers of entry for people who provide such services and health insurance removing consumers incentive to price shop it is very pricey.
You can weight the different factors to make the countries appear in any order you want on that list. Kind of like how when USNews started ranking schools they hired guys who went to princeton to do it. Guess who consistently wins, Princeton. Same kind of thing, he who controls the weights controls the order of the list.
To clarify my position I am not against the idea of health insurance for the very high end catastrophic needs. I am against it for things that dont cost fourty thousand dollars. If the average consumer bore those costs themselves, they would be far far better off for it.
The AMA, while it does some good things has done a lot to drive costs up as well. They make the barriers of entry artificially high in a lot of areas where it does not need to be. This restricts the supply of potential health care providers and as a result will actually decrease the quality even though their goal with extremely high barriers of entry was supposedly to increase quality.
You are clueless. Do you really think that anyone who is against socialized medicine feels that way because they dont like poor people and they think they are better than them? The vast majority of us who want a free market for health insurance do so because we know that in the long run, everyone including the poor will be much better off. Free markets a) promote innovation and better health care and b) drive costs down. People who are against socialized medicine understand this and we have better arguments than saying that everyone who isnt on our side hates poor people.
This is a good thing. We need more free market forces at work in medicine. The entire civilized world seems to have fallen into this belief that its normal for health care to cost vast sums of money even for relatively simple and routine things. We wouldnt have this problem of people not being able to pay for most health care related services to begin with if it werent for the fact that we have removed the efficiencies that should exist in a market based economy. If we simply did away with all of the things that cause prices to be artificially inflated like insurance (whether government or private) people would be far better off in the long run.
Thats true, you do generally have to pick it up yourself. The cost comes in the form of lost productivity from all the time you spend trying to figure out how to do new stuff or why something doesnt work the way you think it should.
> yes about that, do you have any examples where the license cost justifies staying with MS?
Like I was saying in my original post any salesman can make it sound one that one is better than the other. If you go to MS's website you can find case studies where it was cheaper. If you go to Sun's website you can find case studies where their stuff is cheaper. Both have som basis in fact and both are going to be slanted slightly to favor their respective authors. If you really want examples just look at those two web sites.
> if you're going to count support and training into the equation you can't just ignore liscense fees now can you?
License fees are tiny next to the cost of operating an IT department and any productivity gains/losses. A handful of guys working in IT will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Even if you have a lopsided ratio and a few IT guys are supporting hundreds of people that is still a one time cost of a few tens of thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands a year.
> As for training, you're reasoning seems to be that if it isn't exactly the same as MS it will cost boatloads more and that's a load of ****.
It is generally true. Most job applicants out there are familiar with MS software and have used it extensively in the past. Ergo, the software learning curve for a new employee is generally lower.
That is true, no doubt. But it still isnt very cut and dry. What happens 4+ years from now when everyone and their cat knows Office 2007 (not an unlikely scenario) and every new employee needs to be retrained on OO.org? Then it becomes more expensive.
Also, using the new file formats (which was the original discussion here) doesnt necessarily entail using the new software. You could continue using Office 2003 and use the newer file formats at the same time.
Total cost of perating should have been total cost of ownership in the above post there. I wish slashdot allowed edits. : /
> "OpenOffice is more expensive" (free? wtf?),
License fees dont begin to cover the real cost of software. You need to have an IT department to support it, you have to train users on it, etc. A $100 dollar license fee seems negligable pretty fast when contrasted with the IT budget for a company and any productivity gains/losses that result from using different software.
This is often referred to as TCO (Total Cost of Operating) and salesmen love it cause they can always put up graphs that indicate that their product is clearly the best from that perspective. A lot of people roll their eyes when they hear this term because they dont think much of the aforementioned salesmen's BS. But it really is foolish to factor licensing fees into your decision about what software to use from a cost perspective unless those fees are truly exorbitant.
By having a button that says "I am old enough let me in". Its worked perfectly for porn sites!
This isnt about providing real security. Its about myspace getting some publicity and paying lip service to doing the right thing. Its more symbolic than anything. Sure, people will still get around it, but myspace will be able to say "hey, we are doing our best to stop them".
Thats nonsense, a personal computer is a computer designed for individuals. Boot sectors have nothing to do with it. (for what its worth wikipedia agrees with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer)
:)
I suspect you have just been watching too many mac commercials and gotten the idea that there is a difference somehow related to pcs wearing ties and macs wearing trendy metrosexual clothing.