Thanks for this, I was going to post pretty much the same thing. In the same vein of Dremel, my company recently open sourced a similar tool called Druid. If you wan to play with it, it's available on github at https://github.com/metamx/druid
Yeah! That's a great idea! Let's take all we've been doing so far and just do it more, and further extremize it. Everybody knows that the best way to cure a headache is banging your forehead on the wall...
(1) I've read several articles about socialized systems in Europe being severely in debt. I posted earlier on socialized medicine in my country, and I forgot to mention, the system is deeply in debt in my country (Uruguay) too.
Do you plan on paying for your doctor to go to school? Feel like chipping in to buy an MRI? If not, then you have to pay something later on when you do need a doctor and an MRI. That's part of it too... we pay for public universities (that's right, you get to be a doctor for "free", university costs U$ 0, nothing, nada). OTOH it's infrastructure is crappy like everything public, teachers do their best but it's not enough, and it takes between 8 to 11 YEARS to graduate as a doctor) I guess youre trying to say that since it doesnt work very well in a developing country, it will not work in the USA right? What about France or other developed countries?
You cant say "doesnt work here or in Romania" so keep it like it is. You realize that, sorry to say that, you have WAY worse social problems than that? What about the places where it works?
You may not have been ATTACKED, or your borders invaded, but if you think America has not been protecting your political interests for you while you stay home and grow beets or whatever, then you are much more ignorant than the average slashdotter. And that is saying something. Yeah... I guess I have to spell it out since its hard to grasp: the government of the USA is no benefactor (not that any other government is, dont get me wrong) and the idea of some kind of entitlement to police the world is self serving. It was instilled in the american public to justify clusterfucks like Iraq. You may think you did good around the world, I can say that EVERY single intervention in the last 50 years provoked more damages than what it solved. And even when the intervention was somehow justified, the countries you "helped" always paid A LOT for it.
Well it's easier to have the socialized medicine when a country doesn't have to pay to defend itself since America has does it for them to a large extent. Ehm... nobody really ever asked for that. The only time we really needed a hand, you came 4 years later because the japanese kicked your asses and you got scared.
Study history, and while you're at it, try the real one.
Former European citizenship aside, I think I spent more of my life in Asia than Europe (I've never really done the arithmetic). Is that what you are referring to? Do not confuse me with one of those people that has never been anywhere. On the other hand, one might suspect that of you... Bullshit. You are NOT European, not by a long shot.
As I said, ignorance knows no bounds. Yeah, specially yours.
I love the subject of health care. It brings out the finest kinds of ignorance. Some random facts to consider (Google for the references):
- As a financial instrument, insurance exists to distribute risk, not cost. Anybody who does not understand what the distinction is please vacate the discussion. Technically speaking, insurance is how one distributes risk and some approximation of communist government (in a literal rather than pejorative sense) is how one distributes cost. Trying to use the former to approximate the latter is inefficient and raises the costs for everyone.
- For all the inefficiency and expense of what passes for health care in the US, the US also has the best health care outcomes in the industrialized world and generally by a wide margin. If you have cancer, your survival rates in the US are much better than Europe on average and the best in the world in absolute terms. This is true by a number of other direct metrics of health outcomes and holds across the population even if you are an average person and not a wealthy person. Americans are paying more but they are getting more, and survival rates for a pretty broad swath of nasty things is 20-40% better, not buried in the noise floor. This is the good part of the US health care system that no socialized system has ever emulated. Americans compensate for being unhealthy (and car accidents, etc) in mortality rates with really good medical outcomes. If you normalize for genetics and environment, Americans live longer than anyone else. Of course, many Americans have crap genetics and have a crap diet as far as longevity is concerned.
- Before the Americans get too smug, the American health care "system" (there is no system, it is a market) is byzantine and inefficient. It should cost nowhere near what it does even for what Americans get.
- All Americans have health care, even those that cannot afford it, and the idea that there are people without access to health care is a myth that inflames the clueless and serves the purposes of political propaganda. The quality is mediocre, but what do you expect with socialized medicine. It is not hypothetical, I was one of those invisible souls raised on government health care for the destitute.
What we really have is a number of facts. The European system produces mediocre results in terms of actual health care outcomes (what we are nominally paying for), but it is relatively inexpensive. Americans pay a lot but have the best health care outcomes in the world. Americans pay far more than is strictly necessary by any reasonable metric, but I guess they can afford it. Americans are also bearing the cost of most medical technology innovation, amortized in the American medical market; when is the rest of the industrialized world going to carry their fair share of that burden?
In short, all the systems suck. That said, I would be reluctant to give up the superior health outcomes (what I pay doctors for) and medical innovation of the American medical environment. On the other hand, I wish they were more efficient at what they do. Clearly there has to be a better way, but by every metric that matters to someone getting health care, replicating the European system is not it.
Hey man, if you're Republican Reality Distortion Field runs out of power for a moment I would like you to notice how in a recent study the USA is at the bottom of the chart for avoidable deaths (it means that you have more, not less) and that the quality of care is more or less equivalent. France has actually the best healthcare system of the world, and Spain and Italy are 2nd and 3rd (sometimes Italy is 2nd, depending on the parameters considered.
As far as I can see, the health care system in the US sucks, big time. It's ridiculously expensive (the first time I've seen my paycheck I though it was a mistake...), cumbersome, bureaucratic and unfair. Give me back my Italian health care...
Ah, I forgot to
Actually, 100% of contracts are a waiver of some rights by one or both parties. This is so blatantly bullshit that I feel sad for the person that paid for your studies, if you're a law student.
If you don't mind, could you please answer me on the below paragraph?
I would like to see individual state(s) create a payroll tax, earmarked for health care. This money could be entered into some sort of debit system in the state. A special state-wide health care account. Citizens of the state could opt to purchase a card and pay an annual fee of perhaps $100 or so. This would be completely voluntary. Per card transaction, there would be something like $15 copay at the medical establishment. Once the pool is empty for a period, it is empty. We might have four periods per year. The payroll tax generated January 1st through March 31st would be available in the system perhaps April 15th. Paroll tax generated April 1st through June 30th would be available July 15th. And so on. Sounds like an awfully complicated and unequal system proposed as a solution to a problem that was already solved, many times in the past and way better, by single payer health care systems. That is the truth, now it's the turn of selfish and blind to realize it.
Unfortunately, the US Federal and State governments generally do a worse job than the private insurers in this case.
Note that health insurance is pretty heavily regulated in this country to prevent abuses This is the falsest and dumbest thing I've EVER read about health care in the USA. Heavily regulated? Where? In your fantasy maybe. Insurers do a great job? Really? WTF...
You know, a few years back I was in San Diego and went to Toorcon (excellent conference by the way - please support it) and I got in to this discussion
late at night on socialised health care.
Everything fine except that England doesn't have socialized healthcare, but a system called single payer health care, as most of other European countries. And by the way, works really, really well, at least in the country I'm from.
What's currently running out is cheap light natural sweet crude. That's all. The era of $1/gal gasoline is over. Welcome to the era of $2-4/gal gasoline. ]
If you take out of the equation the USA, that era never started for anyone else.
The reality is that they are not. At all. What's needed is to get back to the basics; I know I'll get berated for this, but somehow the world's scientists and engineers up through the early 90s were educated enough without computers, IS, and such in their primary education. This here Intarweb came from guys who learned on slide-rules and pencil-and-paper... Boeing designed some pretty fine planes before the first engineers who touched a computer prior to college came into the market. And so on... The reality is that you completely missed the point of the article, they're talking about school management, records and all that stuff. That rant was completely useless.
Again, you are missing the point. Herbal remedies have not been scientifically tested. We don't know which of these remedies are good, which are bad for you, etc. Side effects don't need labeled, in short, we don't know which remedies are worth truly exploring. Classifying them as drugs just means that the same testing and quality assurance guarantees that exist for pharmaceuticals exist for herbal medicines. You want equality, but you're not going to get it by keeping herbs untested and unproven. YOU are missing the point. There's plenty of very rigorous scientific studies proving the effectiveness of plants for disease treatment, is taught in pharmacology courses all around the world (maybe not in the states, but surely in Europe).
If you go to Germany, or to Italy, there are giant old fashioned pharmacies full of big jars, and people that works in it are full fledged pharmacist with a specialization in herbal pharmacy. I'm not talking about the bullshit all-curing remedies you find in the american vitamin shops, I'm talking about real medicine prescribed by normal doctors.
The reason herbal drugs aren't classified as true "drugs" is because nobody's done double-blind studies to prove their efficacy. If they did, then you'd KNOW these herbal treatments were crap, instead of just suspecting it. Wait a minute, herbal treatments are well known and used by traditional medicine, maybe they're just not popular in the us, but very popular in the rest of the world. If you think about it, there's nothing strange about it. The strongest poisons are produced by plants and animals, every plant has some kind of medical effect that can be exploited in the form of infusion, application or oil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbalism
Don't confuse true herbalism with the new age crap or homeopathic treatments, those are really worth nothing.
Surely the belief that there is no god is still a belief?
Some atheists believe there is no God. Many more simply don't believe there is a God. The absence of a belief does not imply the belief of the opposite. Wrong. The latter is Agnosticism.
I, and I am guessing the earlier poster, are what you'd call "two-fingered touch typists". I don't have to look at the keyboard, and I can type in the dark, with my eyes closed, or while reading something else. Somehow, I've learned to fairly decently preposition fingers, although I don't use all the fingers.
IT's called pinky-homing (I made up the name), it's the same technique used by guitarists!
that's not unheard of, my wife was in the same situation. Why USA parents are, in general, tremendous asshole to their kids? In my former country such conduct would be unthinkable (and illegal, by the way).
I'm from Southern Arizona (Tucson) and, like SoCal, it is everywhere. That is, Mexican restaurants, markets, etc. are all over the place and you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't sell chorizo.
Exactly as the vast majority of americans never had a real pizza (even if they think they did) or thinks that "peperoni" is a sausage, spanish chorizo is a completely different stuff. It's amazing how ethnic food in the states doesn't even remotely look as the real thing!
I don't understand the mechanism that allows identity theft in the USA. There's no such thing in any european country of my knowledge, and frankly I don't understand why the idea of a national ID with a picture on it to certify who you really are is so scary to you and the english.
How is it possible for someone to impersonate someone else in the USA by simply using their SSN?
Those of you who follow my posts know that The things you said are complete non-sense. The vast majority of people is not informed about the savings that can be realized with EEL and led illumination. They're not gonna use more light just because it's cheaper, as demonstrated in every other part of the world where similar measures where taken.
I never completely understand why people argue "God says it". Even if people want to believe that god wrote the books of the bible, the christian bible was put together by humans. This is the exact stance of the Catholic Church. I'm an atheist and italian, live in the usa and always amazed how different are religions over here: you're much more integralistic and purists than anything I've seen in the old world, therefore it's easier for poorly educated people (remember, a catholic priest must study over 12 years to become one) to become moral guides and dictate the political agendas of people that hardly have any kind of education.
we don't have a legal drinking age, but some places are *in theory* restricted to young people. I started with wine when I was 12, coming from the biggest wine making region of the country it's absolutely normal. The difference with anglo-saxon countries is cultural, we drink to taste, you drink to get ridiculously drunk and do something stupid (I lived in Madrid for a long time, I've seen it all...) because you're too "controlled" to do it when you're ain't. This applies specially to english people, americans are a mixed bag, Irish they just don't count because for them sky is the limit. I would like to see a drinking competition between an Irish and a guy from Friuli: that would be an amazing titan's clash.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for this, I was going to post pretty much the same thing. In the same vein of Dremel, my company recently open sourced a similar tool called Druid. If you wan to play with it, it's available on github at https://github.com/metamx/druid
Who Killed HealthCare?: America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem - and the Consumer-Driven Cure (Hardcover) Regina Herzlinger
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Killed-HealthCare-Americas-Consumer-Driven/dp/0071487808/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200766820&sr=1-1
Yeah! That's a great idea! Let's take all we've been doing so far and just do it more, and further extremize it. Everybody knows that the best way to cure a headache is banging your forehead on the wall...
Bullshit. You are NOT European, not by a long shot. As I said, ignorance knows no bounds. Yeah, specially yours.
I love the subject of health care. It brings out the finest kinds of ignorance. Some random facts to consider (Google for the references):
- As a financial instrument, insurance exists to distribute risk, not cost. Anybody who does not understand what the distinction is please vacate the discussion. Technically speaking, insurance is how one distributes risk and some approximation of communist government (in a literal rather than pejorative sense) is how one distributes cost. Trying to use the former to approximate the latter is inefficient and raises the costs for everyone.
- For all the inefficiency and expense of what passes for health care in the US, the US also has the best health care outcomes in the industrialized world and generally by a wide margin. If you have cancer, your survival rates in the US are much better than Europe on average and the best in the world in absolute terms. This is true by a number of other direct metrics of health outcomes and holds across the population even if you are an average person and not a wealthy person. Americans are paying more but they are getting more, and survival rates for a pretty broad swath of nasty things is 20-40% better, not buried in the noise floor. This is the good part of the US health care system that no socialized system has ever emulated. Americans compensate for being unhealthy (and car accidents, etc) in mortality rates with really good medical outcomes. If you normalize for genetics and environment, Americans live longer than anyone else. Of course, many Americans have crap genetics and have a crap diet as far as longevity is concerned.
- Before the Americans get too smug, the American health care "system" (there is no system, it is a market) is byzantine and inefficient. It should cost nowhere near what it does even for what Americans get.
- All Americans have health care, even those that cannot afford it, and the idea that there are people without access to health care is a myth that inflames the clueless and serves the purposes of political propaganda. The quality is mediocre, but what do you expect with socialized medicine. It is not hypothetical, I was one of those invisible souls raised on government health care for the destitute.
What we really have is a number of facts. The European system produces mediocre results in terms of actual health care outcomes (what we are nominally paying for), but it is relatively inexpensive. Americans pay a lot but have the best health care outcomes in the world. Americans pay far more than is strictly necessary by any reasonable metric, but I guess they can afford it. Americans are also bearing the cost of most medical technology innovation, amortized in the American medical market; when is the rest of the industrialized world going to carry their fair share of that burden?
In short, all the systems suck. That said, I would be reluctant to give up the superior health outcomes (what I pay doctors for) and medical innovation of the American medical environment. On the other hand, I wish they were more efficient at what they do. Clearly there has to be a better way, but by every metric that matters to someone getting health care, replicating the European system is not it.
Hey man, if you're Republican Reality Distortion Field runs out of power for a moment I would like you to notice how in a recent study the USA is at the bottom of the chart for avoidable deaths (it means that you have more, not less) and that the quality of care is more or less equivalent. France has actually the best healthcare system of the world, and Spain and Italy are 2nd and 3rd (sometimes Italy is 2nd, depending on the parameters considered. As far as I can see, the health care system in the US sucks, big time. It's ridiculously expensive (the first time I've seen my paycheck I though it was a mistake...), cumbersome, bureaucratic and unfair. Give me back my Italian health care... Ah, I forgot to
I would like to see individual state(s) create a payroll tax, earmarked for health care. This money could be entered into some sort of debit system in the state. A special state-wide health care account. Citizens of the state could opt to purchase a card and pay an annual fee of perhaps $100 or so. This would be completely voluntary. Per card transaction, there would be something like $15 copay at the medical establishment. Once the pool is empty for a period, it is empty. We might have four periods per year. The payroll tax generated January 1st through March 31st would be available in the system perhaps April 15th. Paroll tax generated April 1st through June 30th would be available July 15th. And so on. Sounds like an awfully complicated and unequal system proposed as a solution to a problem that was already solved, many times in the past and way better, by single payer health care systems. That is the truth, now it's the turn of selfish and blind to realize it.
Note that health insurance is pretty heavily regulated in this country to prevent abuses This is the falsest and dumbest thing I've EVER read about health care in the USA. Heavily regulated? Where? In your fantasy maybe. Insurers do a great job? Really? WTF...
You know, a few years back I was in San Diego and went to Toorcon (excellent conference by the way - please support it) and I got in to this discussion late at night on socialised health care.
Everything fine except that England doesn't have socialized healthcare, but a system called single payer health care, as most of other European countries. And by the way, works really, really well, at least in the country I'm from.] If you take out of the equation the USA, that era never started for anyone else.
I heared that in Italy you can get a T1 for cheap, but I'm sure it comes with no guarantee.
http://www.fastweb.it/portale/The reason herbal drugs aren't classified as true "drugs" is because nobody's done double-blind studies to prove their efficacy. If they did, then you'd KNOW these herbal treatments were crap, instead of just suspecting it. Wait a minute, herbal treatments are well known and used by traditional medicine, maybe they're just not popular in the us, but very popular in the rest of the world. If you think about it, there's nothing strange about it. The strongest poisons are produced by plants and animals, every plant has some kind of medical effect that can be exploited in the form of infusion, application or oil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbalism Don't confuse true herbalism with the new age crap or homeopathic treatments, those are really worth nothing.
Some atheists believe there is no God. Many more simply don't believe there is a God. The absence of a belief does not imply the belief of the opposite. Wrong. The latter is Agnosticism.
IT's called pinky-homing (I made up the name), it's the same technique used by guitarists!
that's not unheard of, my wife was in the same situation. Why USA parents are, in general, tremendous asshole to their kids? In my former country such conduct would be unthinkable (and illegal, by the way).
I'm from Southern Arizona (Tucson) and, like SoCal, it is everywhere. That is, Mexican restaurants, markets, etc. are all over the place and you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't sell chorizo.
Exactly as the vast majority of americans never had a real pizza (even if they think they did) or thinks that "peperoni" is a sausage, spanish chorizo is a completely different stuff. It's amazing how ethnic food in the states doesn't even remotely look as the real thing!I don't understand the mechanism that allows identity theft in the USA. There's no such thing in any european country of my knowledge, and frankly I don't understand why the idea of a national ID with a picture on it to certify who you really are is so scary to you and the english. How is it possible for someone to impersonate someone else in the USA by simply using their SSN?
we don't have a legal drinking age, but some places are *in theory* restricted to young people. I started with wine when I was 12, coming from the biggest wine making region of the country it's absolutely normal. The difference with anglo-saxon countries is cultural, we drink to taste, you drink to get ridiculously drunk and do something stupid (I lived in Madrid for a long time, I've seen it all...) because you're too "controlled" to do it when you're ain't. This applies specially to english people, americans are a mixed bag, Irish they just don't count because for them sky is the limit. I would like to see a drinking competition between an Irish and a guy from Friuli: that would be an amazing titan's clash.