In theory there should be Biking Insurance as well, but since there is only so much damage you can do with a bike (in theory) it is not deemed a big enough risk on society to need the biker to be insured. One hospital visit can easily be $100k. If you can do $100k in damage on your bike, I would be impressed. And it would probably be the last time you do anything.
I am fine with people self-insuring to be exempt from insurance. I would just required that you put enough money into an escrow account to cover your medical bills for a catastrophic medical event, such as a heart attack, stroke, or car accident. I think $250k would be enough to insure that the hospital has enough time to stabilize you until you regain consciousness, or to give enough time to contact your relatives (in case your are in a coma). Then, you can inform the hospital of how much money you have (or how much your relatives can pull together), and when you bill reaches that they stop "serving" you. That would require that we repeal the law that doesn't allow a hospital to just let you die (if you can't pay), but we could probably get congress on that one.
I am assuming that you do have $250k saved up for such an emergency. Because if you don't, then you are just a leech who is making me liable for your medical costs.
By not having a car, you are not a liability for other motorists. So, you do not need Auto liability insurance. So, for health insurance, all we need to do is make it so you are not a liability on society. All we have to do is change the law to make it so hospitals are no longer required to treat anyone who comes into the emergency room until they are stable. Then, the dumb/irresponsible people who decide not to buy insurance can be left to die on the street. Sounds kind of like Darwinism to me. But it would be better to have less idiots.
It is Congress's fault in the first place that health insurance needs to be mandated. There is a law that hospitals have to treat you until you are stable, regardless of whether you can pay. Get rid of that law (so that hospitals can let people die on the street) and you would not be a potential liability to someone else (the hospital). Just like by buying a car you are a potential liability to everyone else on the road, so you have to get auto insurance, with that law in place you are a liability to hospitals so you have to buy health insurance. Get rid of the law, and there is no need to force you to buy insurance.
Then get your congressperson to repeal the law that requires hospitals to treat everyone that comes into the emergency room until they are stabilized. You have to have auto insurance because of your potential to have an accident that will cost someone else money (if you don't have a car, you can't have a car accident). So, make it so that you don't have the potential to cost the hospital money (they don't treat you and you die on the street) and it will not be necessary for you to buy insurance.
The reason you are required to have liability insurance is so that the risks from you driving are not socialized. If you hit someone, their losses will be covered by you (through your insurance company) since you caused them. Right now, healthcare costs for the uninsured are socialized, because a hospital has to serve you until you are stabilized by law. They do not have to make you better, but they cannot let you die. And if you cannot pay, then they jack up rates on the people who are insured (the rest of us) to cover the cost. If they require everyone to have health insurance, then the costs are not socialized, so it prevents people from acting like bankers (take risks knowing that the government is going to bail you out if you lose the gamble).
Obama (and most Democrats) wanted a public option. Republicans (all of them) opposed it. So the Democrats compromised. I also believe that a public option would have been better. But at least the Democrats tried to fix some of the problems. If you are looking to blame someone for the lack of a public option, you need to look no further than the Republican Party.
How much more demand will there actually be? We will probably have more primary care demand, but that is relatively cheap. People who could not afford insurance would put off the primary care until they were REALLY sick, and had to go to the hospital (which is expensive). So there should now, in theory, be less demand for emergency care. It is more just shifting demand from high-cost services to low-cost services.
Over 70% of Americans were for a "public option", but Republicans did not allow that to happen. Does that make them "undemocratic". Or is it possible that it is a bad idea to govern by polls?
It is not job of SCOTUS to weed out bad legislation. Talk to your congresscritter if you want the country to be on a sustainable path (not saying "I" agree it is unsustainable, though - just running with your premise). SCOTUS is supposed to decide if a law is constitutional or not. Anything else is "legislating from the bench", which Republicans are supposedly opposed to.
I did not want a public "option". I wanted a single payer system that gave everyone catastrophic health care similar to current high-deductible plans. If the level of service was not high enough from that single payer system, then you could buy supplemental insurance to lower your deductible or give you access to better facilities (you could go to a more expensive doctor, with the single payer system paying their base amount and the supplemental insurance paying the rest). Then, you would have the cost controls from the consumer side (with a high deductible people would try to keep medical costs down so that they have less money out of pocket) but you would give options of higher quality and reduced wait times to people who could pay more.
A grocery store's business model is not predicated on selling you food, and then trying their hardest not to give it to you. Insurance companies make money off of denying claims (denying you service). You are comparing apples to oranges.
They pay zero federal income taxes. They probably still have a higher effective tax rate than Mitt Romney (effective payroll tax rate is still 13.3% if you include the employer side, and then you can add federal excise taxes like liquor, cigarettes, tires, ect on to that - compared to the ~14% that Romney paid). And, yes, Romney probably pays excise taxes, but cigarettes and gas taxes are probably a tiny proportion of his income compared to a family surviving on an income near the poverty line.
If you get into a car accident (or have a heart attack or any other emergency medical condition), then you will probably still be stuck with the hospital bill. After you are well enough to sign up for the insurance, you should not have a problem (because they will cover you pre-existing condition), but I do not believe an insurance company is required to cover pre-existing bills as well.
If you want to take that risk, that is up to you. But, say your insurance costs $3000 per year. If you subtract the penalty of $2000 that you mentioned (you will have to pay at least that amount whichever way you go), then by paying $1000 more you get preventative care as well as not having the risk of going bankrupt if you need catastrophic medical care. Seems like a deal to me.
Why will enforcement be so difficult? From what I understand, you would just claim on your tax returns that you have insurance, or pay the penalty with your taxes. Should be a lot less difficult than determining if someone has a mortgage. And, the IRS should easily be able to check this by having insurance companies give them a list of who has insurance. Am I missing something, or were you just spreading FUD?
Churches are already tax-exempt, so I have to pay for services that they use that they don't have to pay for. So, in essence, I am already paying for churches that I don't go to. Also, some places have passed laws requiring you to have a gun.
I have health insurance. It is not a tax on me. It is a tax on the irresponsible Americans who decide to leech off of the system instead of getting health insurance. If you get sick (or in an accident) and do not have health insurance then I have to pay for it (the hospital will still treat you, and the costs will be passed on to me as higher premiums when you cannot pay and file for bankruptcy). So yes, it is a tax on dumb/irresponsible people.
When put that way, this starts to sound like a really good idea. Maybe we can find a way to expand it to other areas.
I think it is funny every time I see someone talk about "choosing" to be a homosexual. I grew up in a very accepting family (I have gay relatives, my parents have gay friends) and never "chose" to be straight. I thought about it many times (I was not very good with girls while in high school, like most people here), but did not once find myself attracted to a man. I am completely straight. Since gay people obviously exist, I have come to the conclusion that sexuality is on a spectrum with straight people on one end, gay people on the other, and the rest (majority) in between. So, my only conclusion from that is that anyone who says it is a choice must be gay themselves. They are just luckier than the "true" gays in that they also like women so they were able to make the "right" choice. And so they feel like they have the right to judge people who don't have that choice.
It is all rather ironic. The ones that hate gay people the most are the ones that are most like them (do you remember Michele Bachmann's husband with his "gay clinic" - holy crap that guy was flaming).
You get out of it what you put into it (or, actually, what the parents put into it). My old troop still does at least 1 camping trip per month with some high adventure (caving, rock climbing, white water rafting, ect), a couple destination (usually to a military base to see a museum or ship or just tour the base), a few car-camping (usually to hike places that don't allow camping, or to go on cycling or sailing, or the adult leaders would set up workshops to test the scouts' skills), and the rest being backpacking. And they always sleep in a tent outside (except for one destination where we got to sleep in a submarine - docked of course).
But, this requires actively involved adult leaders to assist and motivate the scouts when they plan these trips. If the adults aren't motivated, the more exciting trips end up being too difficult for a scout to plan on their own, so they end up going into the woods and starting a fire for a couple of days once every couple of months.
Basically, you could just change you user agent to be the one that the company wants (I know I can do that on my android phone), and not get the fee. But, if your web client does that then it will probably also be standards compliant, so would not be a problem.
Are you advancing the civilization by being more efficient at your job thanks to a tool you don't understand?
Yes.
Civilization is the sum of its parts. If a genius scientist is bad at technical writing, it is not a failure of civilization. He will instead just find a person who is good at technical writing to help him write his papers. If an astronomer uses Blockly to help him make his telescope scan the sky more efficiently, and discovers dark energy, the fact that he does not know javascript is not really important. If someone is trying to advance civilization in the field of computer science, and doesn't understand how programs work, then you are right. They probably will not get very far. But, if they can use programming to make their other work more efficient (there are fields out there other than computer science), then they can still advance civilization.
Easier programming languages will not restrict understanding. People will use it for what it is good for, and if they want to go beyond that then they will have to delve deeper into understanding the concepts. If they never need to push beyond the limits of the language, then they probably did not need to have deeper understanding. But, having a tool that is easier to use (that abstracts away the more difficult concepts) expands the user base. Yes, it will allow a lot more people to get by understanding less. But, you do not need a 4 year degree from MIT just to program web pages. And that person would have 4 more years promoting equality among sex and races through websites programmed with Blockly.
I disagree. My whole point is that it is perfectly fine for most people to not understand the underlying concept. This is the whole reason for Object Oriented Programming. If you are using a well made tool (class), then you do not need to understand how it converts your input into an output. As long as you know that the output is correct (hence the "well made" part), then you can worry about learning about and solving the problems that you are good at. Not to say that people do not need to know any underlying concepts. To make a class that is "well made" (efficient with practically no bugs) you absolutely must have in-depth understanding of ALL of the related concepts. But, if that class works to solve your problem, then it is a waste of time to try to understand the concepts when you already have a solution.
Personally, I always like to understand how things work because it makes me a more valuable asset (just because a tool works for the current problem does not mean that it will be useful for the next problem). But if we have languages that have a low barrier to entry (the more concepts you have to learn, the more you have to invest time into learning a language) then you will have more people being able to program computers. Our civilization benefits from people being more efficient, and being able to command a computer is one of the easiest ways to increase your efficiency. And while the average person programming will understand less concepts, it is because more people are able to program. The absolute number of people understanding "concepts" will be the same (or actually probably increase since more people are exposed to programming so people who might never have been exposed to it end up pursing it much further).
That is actually how civilization advances. People specialize. I drive to work every day. I use a car (a tool) that was created by people who have spent most of their career becoming better, through education and experience, at making that tool (the car) better. It makes me A LOT more efficient at my job because I can drive 20min each way instead of walking for 3 hours each way. I, on the other hand, make other tools (computer programs) that they can use in their everyday life to be more efficient. An example of this analogy is g-code. The car specialist can quickly mill out a part to test on a CNC machine without having to do it by hand and without worrying about how the processor interprets the code, or how the mechanical linkages of the mill work, or the energy characteristics of the milling motors. Because he is using a tool, not trying to understand the underlying process.
I think that is the point. It takes a lot of motivation to say "I am going to learn assembly" and then to go buy a book and start coding in assembly. It takes a lot less motivation to learn javascript (or probably Blockly). It is a lot quicker and easier to get a program to DO SOMETHING in javascript than in assembly. So, it is easier for someone (like a kid) to pick up quickly and see if they enjoy it. Once they realize they enjoy it (usually after making their first program), they can delve into it deeper. Most people would probably give up on assembly before they even got "Hello World" printed out. And I assume that it is easier to get started in Blockly than in javascript. The advantage there, is that Blockly is built on javascript, so when someone wants to delve in deeper (or wants their program to do something that Blockly doesn't do) they can augment their already made program with javascript. More tools (languages) are better. It means that people can use the tool that works best for them, instead of having to use the one tool that some group of people decided is "the best way of doing it".
Slashdot Mirror
In theory there should be Biking Insurance as well, but since there is only so much damage you can do with a bike (in theory) it is not deemed a big enough risk on society to need the biker to be insured. One hospital visit can easily be $100k. If you can do $100k in damage on your bike, I would be impressed. And it would probably be the last time you do anything.
I am fine with people self-insuring to be exempt from insurance. I would just required that you put enough money into an escrow account to cover your medical bills for a catastrophic medical event, such as a heart attack, stroke, or car accident. I think $250k would be enough to insure that the hospital has enough time to stabilize you until you regain consciousness, or to give enough time to contact your relatives (in case your are in a coma). Then, you can inform the hospital of how much money you have (or how much your relatives can pull together), and when you bill reaches that they stop "serving" you. That would require that we repeal the law that doesn't allow a hospital to just let you die (if you can't pay), but we could probably get congress on that one.
I am assuming that you do have $250k saved up for such an emergency. Because if you don't, then you are just a leech who is making me liable for your medical costs.
By not having a car, you are not a liability for other motorists. So, you do not need Auto liability insurance. So, for health insurance, all we need to do is make it so you are not a liability on society. All we have to do is change the law to make it so hospitals are no longer required to treat anyone who comes into the emergency room until they are stable. Then, the dumb/irresponsible people who decide not to buy insurance can be left to die on the street. Sounds kind of like Darwinism to me. But it would be better to have less idiots.
It is Congress's fault in the first place that health insurance needs to be mandated. There is a law that hospitals have to treat you until you are stable, regardless of whether you can pay. Get rid of that law (so that hospitals can let people die on the street) and you would not be a potential liability to someone else (the hospital). Just like by buying a car you are a potential liability to everyone else on the road, so you have to get auto insurance, with that law in place you are a liability to hospitals so you have to buy health insurance. Get rid of the law, and there is no need to force you to buy insurance.
Then get your congressperson to repeal the law that requires hospitals to treat everyone that comes into the emergency room until they are stabilized. You have to have auto insurance because of your potential to have an accident that will cost someone else money (if you don't have a car, you can't have a car accident). So, make it so that you don't have the potential to cost the hospital money (they don't treat you and you die on the street) and it will not be necessary for you to buy insurance.
The reason you are required to have liability insurance is so that the risks from you driving are not socialized. If you hit someone, their losses will be covered by you (through your insurance company) since you caused them. Right now, healthcare costs for the uninsured are socialized, because a hospital has to serve you until you are stabilized by law. They do not have to make you better, but they cannot let you die. And if you cannot pay, then they jack up rates on the people who are insured (the rest of us) to cover the cost. If they require everyone to have health insurance, then the costs are not socialized, so it prevents people from acting like bankers (take risks knowing that the government is going to bail you out if you lose the gamble).
Obama (and most Democrats) wanted a public option. Republicans (all of them) opposed it. So the Democrats compromised. I also believe that a public option would have been better. But at least the Democrats tried to fix some of the problems. If you are looking to blame someone for the lack of a public option, you need to look no further than the Republican Party.
How much more demand will there actually be? We will probably have more primary care demand, but that is relatively cheap. People who could not afford insurance would put off the primary care until they were REALLY sick, and had to go to the hospital (which is expensive). So there should now, in theory, be less demand for emergency care. It is more just shifting demand from high-cost services to low-cost services.
Over 70% of Americans were for a "public option", but Republicans did not allow that to happen. Does that make them "undemocratic". Or is it possible that it is a bad idea to govern by polls?
It is not job of SCOTUS to weed out bad legislation. Talk to your congresscritter if you want the country to be on a sustainable path (not saying "I" agree it is unsustainable, though - just running with your premise). SCOTUS is supposed to decide if a law is constitutional or not. Anything else is "legislating from the bench", which Republicans are supposedly opposed to.
I did not want a public "option". I wanted a single payer system that gave everyone catastrophic health care similar to current high-deductible plans. If the level of service was not high enough from that single payer system, then you could buy supplemental insurance to lower your deductible or give you access to better facilities (you could go to a more expensive doctor, with the single payer system paying their base amount and the supplemental insurance paying the rest). Then, you would have the cost controls from the consumer side (with a high deductible people would try to keep medical costs down so that they have less money out of pocket) but you would give options of higher quality and reduced wait times to people who could pay more.
A grocery store's business model is not predicated on selling you food, and then trying their hardest not to give it to you. Insurance companies make money off of denying claims (denying you service). You are comparing apples to oranges.
They pay zero federal income taxes. They probably still have a higher effective tax rate than Mitt Romney (effective payroll tax rate is still 13.3% if you include the employer side, and then you can add federal excise taxes like liquor, cigarettes, tires, ect on to that - compared to the ~14% that Romney paid). And, yes, Romney probably pays excise taxes, but cigarettes and gas taxes are probably a tiny proportion of his income compared to a family surviving on an income near the poverty line.
If you get into a car accident (or have a heart attack or any other emergency medical condition), then you will probably still be stuck with the hospital bill. After you are well enough to sign up for the insurance, you should not have a problem (because they will cover you pre-existing condition), but I do not believe an insurance company is required to cover pre-existing bills as well.
If you want to take that risk, that is up to you. But, say your insurance costs $3000 per year. If you subtract the penalty of $2000 that you mentioned (you will have to pay at least that amount whichever way you go), then by paying $1000 more you get preventative care as well as not having the risk of going bankrupt if you need catastrophic medical care. Seems like a deal to me.
Why will enforcement be so difficult? From what I understand, you would just claim on your tax returns that you have insurance, or pay the penalty with your taxes. Should be a lot less difficult than determining if someone has a mortgage. And, the IRS should easily be able to check this by having insurance companies give them a list of who has insurance. Am I missing something, or were you just spreading FUD?
Churches are already tax-exempt, so I have to pay for services that they use that they don't have to pay for. So, in essence, I am already paying for churches that I don't go to. Also, some places have passed laws requiring you to have a gun.
I have health insurance. It is not a tax on me. It is a tax on the irresponsible Americans who decide to leech off of the system instead of getting health insurance. If you get sick (or in an accident) and do not have health insurance then I have to pay for it (the hospital will still treat you, and the costs will be passed on to me as higher premiums when you cannot pay and file for bankruptcy). So yes, it is a tax on dumb/irresponsible people.
When put that way, this starts to sound like a really good idea. Maybe we can find a way to expand it to other areas.
I think it is funny every time I see someone talk about "choosing" to be a homosexual. I grew up in a very accepting family (I have gay relatives, my parents have gay friends) and never "chose" to be straight. I thought about it many times (I was not very good with girls while in high school, like most people here), but did not once find myself attracted to a man. I am completely straight. Since gay people obviously exist, I have come to the conclusion that sexuality is on a spectrum with straight people on one end, gay people on the other, and the rest (majority) in between. So, my only conclusion from that is that anyone who says it is a choice must be gay themselves. They are just luckier than the "true" gays in that they also like women so they were able to make the "right" choice. And so they feel like they have the right to judge people who don't have that choice.
It is all rather ironic. The ones that hate gay people the most are the ones that are most like them (do you remember Michele Bachmann's husband with his "gay clinic" - holy crap that guy was flaming).
Because you can and you're a dumb kid who has no understanding of your own mortality. At least, that is how I was when I was that age.
You get out of it what you put into it (or, actually, what the parents put into it). My old troop still does at least 1 camping trip per month with some high adventure (caving, rock climbing, white water rafting, ect), a couple destination (usually to a military base to see a museum or ship or just tour the base), a few car-camping (usually to hike places that don't allow camping, or to go on cycling or sailing, or the adult leaders would set up workshops to test the scouts' skills), and the rest being backpacking. And they always sleep in a tent outside (except for one destination where we got to sleep in a submarine - docked of course).
But, this requires actively involved adult leaders to assist and motivate the scouts when they plan these trips. If the adults aren't motivated, the more exciting trips end up being too difficult for a scout to plan on their own, so they end up going into the woods and starting a fire for a couple of days once every couple of months.
Basically, you could just change you user agent to be the one that the company wants (I know I can do that on my android phone), and not get the fee. But, if your web client does that then it will probably also be standards compliant, so would not be a problem.
Are you advancing the civilization by being more efficient at your job thanks to a tool you don't understand?
Yes.
Civilization is the sum of its parts. If a genius scientist is bad at technical writing, it is not a failure of civilization. He will instead just find a person who is good at technical writing to help him write his papers. If an astronomer uses Blockly to help him make his telescope scan the sky more efficiently, and discovers dark energy, the fact that he does not know javascript is not really important. If someone is trying to advance civilization in the field of computer science, and doesn't understand how programs work, then you are right. They probably will not get very far. But, if they can use programming to make their other work more efficient (there are fields out there other than computer science), then they can still advance civilization.
Easier programming languages will not restrict understanding. People will use it for what it is good for, and if they want to go beyond that then they will have to delve deeper into understanding the concepts. If they never need to push beyond the limits of the language, then they probably did not need to have deeper understanding. But, having a tool that is easier to use (that abstracts away the more difficult concepts) expands the user base. Yes, it will allow a lot more people to get by understanding less. But, you do not need a 4 year degree from MIT just to program web pages. And that person would have 4 more years promoting equality among sex and races through websites programmed with Blockly.
I disagree. My whole point is that it is perfectly fine for most people to not understand the underlying concept. This is the whole reason for Object Oriented Programming. If you are using a well made tool (class), then you do not need to understand how it converts your input into an output. As long as you know that the output is correct (hence the "well made" part), then you can worry about learning about and solving the problems that you are good at. Not to say that people do not need to know any underlying concepts. To make a class that is "well made" (efficient with practically no bugs) you absolutely must have in-depth understanding of ALL of the related concepts. But, if that class works to solve your problem, then it is a waste of time to try to understand the concepts when you already have a solution.
Personally, I always like to understand how things work because it makes me a more valuable asset (just because a tool works for the current problem does not mean that it will be useful for the next problem). But if we have languages that have a low barrier to entry (the more concepts you have to learn, the more you have to invest time into learning a language) then you will have more people being able to program computers. Our civilization benefits from people being more efficient, and being able to command a computer is one of the easiest ways to increase your efficiency. And while the average person programming will understand less concepts, it is because more people are able to program. The absolute number of people understanding "concepts" will be the same (or actually probably increase since more people are exposed to programming so people who might never have been exposed to it end up pursing it much further).
That is actually how civilization advances. People specialize. I drive to work every day. I use a car (a tool) that was created by people who have spent most of their career becoming better, through education and experience, at making that tool (the car) better. It makes me A LOT more efficient at my job because I can drive 20min each way instead of walking for 3 hours each way. I, on the other hand, make other tools (computer programs) that they can use in their everyday life to be more efficient. An example of this analogy is g-code. The car specialist can quickly mill out a part to test on a CNC machine without having to do it by hand and without worrying about how the processor interprets the code, or how the mechanical linkages of the mill work, or the energy characteristics of the milling motors. Because he is using a tool, not trying to understand the underlying process.
I think that is the point. It takes a lot of motivation to say "I am going to learn assembly" and then to go buy a book and start coding in assembly. It takes a lot less motivation to learn javascript (or probably Blockly). It is a lot quicker and easier to get a program to DO SOMETHING in javascript than in assembly. So, it is easier for someone (like a kid) to pick up quickly and see if they enjoy it. Once they realize they enjoy it (usually after making their first program), they can delve into it deeper. Most people would probably give up on assembly before they even got "Hello World" printed out. And I assume that it is easier to get started in Blockly than in javascript. The advantage there, is that Blockly is built on javascript, so when someone wants to delve in deeper (or wants their program to do something that Blockly doesn't do) they can augment their already made program with javascript. More tools (languages) are better. It means that people can use the tool that works best for them, instead of having to use the one tool that some group of people decided is "the best way of doing it".