Interference wasn't the right word. One of the ACs responding to my post got what I was trying to say, mentioning the background noise.
The same AC mentioned the neutrino detector at the South Pole and its directionality capabilities. That makes for something closer to what I was imagining, something that would allow detection of unpublicized nuclear reactors. I can imagine, though, that this might get annoying for the major submarine powers if the resolution were reasonably high, as their nuclear fleet might become trackable.
It's sci-fi right now, but perhaps a captured comet in orbit around the Earth might be able to provide a similar environment to the Amanda facility. Maybe in a couple hundred years...
The neutrino interaction is indeed very weak, so they are difficult to detect. A major problem is that the other sources (cosmic rays, ambient radiation) can give false positives.
Would this prevent the use of such detectors in satellites? I realize that this first design requires that it be essentially next to the reactor, and that its time resolution is far too short for common orbits. But would there be too much interference in space for this to ever be of practical use?
I don't know. However, I have seen news reports for years where pranksters and hoaxers were hit with search costs when officials uncover their lies. Looking around, I found this article which, though a few years old, deals with some practices. It suggests that while there are capabilities to charge costs, many (most?) agencies don't, especially for very low-cost searches. Some examples (current at the time of the article):
The Coast Guard "goes after search and rescue costs when it receives 'hoax calls' that result in a full-scale response"
Oregon is allowed to charge up to $500 per person found "when 'reasonable care' was not used and when "applicable laws were violated."
"The U.S. Forest Service can only charge for damage done to government property, and not for any costs associated with rescue."
At least some ski areas charge $1000 per hour for people who get lost in ungroomed snow.
So it seems to be handled mostly on a case-by-case basis.
nslookup has been deprecated since around 2001, as near as I can tell, and yet it shows no signs of dropping out of use. Its usage still commonly shows up in a very wide variety of training materials for all manner of operating systems. Sure, dig is slowly replacing it, but by the time it's completely gone, it will be because DNSSec has finally come into serious use and nslookup no longer functions sufficiently.
The old terms aren't going away, no matter how much a small group of geeks demands it to be so. They're too ingrained in the population, and that population doesn't like terminology to change once they're used to it. They then pass it on to the next group that they teach (be that children or colleagues), and they become comfortable with it, and the cycle continues.
Attempts to force the change through pedantry are only going to lead to frustration of and ridicule by the general computer-using populace.
That's not necessarily true. Boats that are reported missing can be the subject of enormous searches by the Coast Guard, involving multiple planes, helicopters, and ships. These are very expensive and time-consuming when the missing craft is not found quickly (which they usually are). The search may have gone on longer than is average, but he wasn't lost in average terrain, either.
Aside from that, I believe they found a couple of long-missing wrecks during the search, so it wasn't a complete failure.
It's true that wireless has lower speeds than wired, and is generally a little more fussy, but the cost and security arguments are not necessarily true. How many people encrypt their traffic on a per-user basis over the network? We don't. Even our IPSec VPNs are gateway-to-gateway. How many people have even the most rudimentary NAC on their wired networks? Not many; even without DHCP, it's not hard to plug into a network and figure out the IP range and default gateway.
As to cost, the deployment of the two APs for that room cost just a little over a thousand dollars with cabling included; it would have been between four thousand and six thousand to cable the room. Another, much larger room was cabled for fifty thousand dollars, but the six APs that we put in (determined afterward to be overkill) cost under ten thousand.
It all depends on what you value most. If you require the highest reliability, then wired works. But there are certainly cases -- and they're less uncommon than you may think -- where wireless is a better way of setting up the network.
Wireless works fine in most cases. I oversee three wireless networks as part of my job using nearly 60 APs from two different vendors (not including the five different wireless NICs in use), and the only real issue that we had was due to an application that didn't like NATs, forcing us to allocate more IP space to the wireless network. In one case, there's an entire room of about a dozen people that could have been hooked to a wired network, but they instead use the wireless network exclusively because it gives them mobility that they otherwise would not have. Most of them don't have a network jack at their desks, for that matter. None of them use desktops to my knowledge, but the connections are secured using PEAP and WPA2, validating both hardware and user before they're granted access.
What's wrong with wireless on a desktop? I've done several installations for people who wanted a primary computer hooked up to the router, but had their kids' systems (and I think TiVo, in one case) hooked up via wireless because they didn't want the hassle of running cables to other rooms. It's not a good case for transferring large files all the time, but it works perfectly fine for them for the Internet browsing, e-mail, and gaming that they were doing.
I've turned down jobs with pay increases (marginal, but increases nonetheless) simply because I saw Notes on the desktop used for e-mail. My past experiences were painful enough that I don't need that extra stress on top of the job's inherent stress.
They have motive and opportunity. Method is murky, but it's rare that someone is capable of hiding a body well when it's not planned in advance.
I'm not saying that this is the logic. I've not attended the hearings, and I've not seen any transcripts or indictments. This is guesswork from the media reports, and there may be some major point that we're all missing.
Your 'fix' altered the actual text of the law, which I quoted faithfully except for the noted formatting changes, so your fix was completely erroneous.
It's important to delineate the differences in homicides. First-degree murder is generally that committed either with premeditation to kill someone or killing someone by or in concert with a violent felony. Second-degree murder is everything else that includes malice aforethought. Manslaughter generally covers negligence and crimes of passion. Punishments are 25-life/life/death for first-degree murder or 15-life for second-degree murder (20-life if carried out by firearm and 25-life/life if the victim was a peace officer), and manslaughter carries terms ranging from two years to 15-life, depending on the circumstances.
Finally, there is justifiable homicide, covered under California Penal Code Sections 196 (justifiable homicide by law enforcement) and 197 (justifiable homicide by anyone else), supported by Sections 198, 198.5, and 199, which define the circumstances and protections of those falling under Sections 196 and 197.
He was found guilty in 2002 and sentenced to three years in prison, though I'm not entirely sure it was the same case, as the story broke in 2000. The FBI did have a warrant for the password interception, and it allowed them to enter as many times as necessary to install, monitor, and remove the surveillance mechanisms.
My use of TEMPEST in this case was incorrect, but the point still stands. It can be intercepted, and PGP makes use of a method to attempt to counter that.
Without the exact charges (and I've spent some time looking for the indictment or other official documentation as to the charges, but I can't find it online), it's hard to say where it falls in the scope of first degree murder. However, it's likely that it fell under the realm of "any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing." They believe that he planned to kill her and made preparations to dispose of her body so that it wouldn't be found, so that seems the most likely match.
That's not far from the truth. Each monitor has a unique signal that can be tuned in using TEMPEST gear, to which s0litaire indirectly referred in another reply to you. PGP has (had?) a viewer that was intended to defeat TEMPEST viewing. I don't know the details of it, but I recall it was a gray-on-gray scheme, and it had something to do with the relatively low resolution and color depth available on TEMPEST viewers.
However, the FBI (and by loan or extension, the NSA) has some very good black bag people, and they are much more likely to add in a hardware keylogger or currently-undetectable rootkit nowadays. That's how the FBI got crucial evidence against Nicodemo Scarfo, Jr., son of former mob boss Little Nicky Scarfo, adding a hardware keylogger to grab his PGP password to allow them to decrypt his messages in concert with his private key, also copied at the time.
knowing use of ammunition designed primarily to penetrate metal or armor,
poison,
lying in wait,
torture, or
by any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing, or
which is committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate,
arson,
rape,
carjacking,
robbery,
burglary,
mayhem,
kidnapping,
train wrecking, or
any act punishable under Section 206 [torture], 286 [sodomy], 288 [forced sexual contact], 288a [lewd and lascivious acts on a child under the age of 14], or 289 [rape], or
any murder which is perpetrated by means of discharging a firearm from a motor vehicle, intentionally at another person outside of the vehicle with the intent to inflict death,
is murder of the first degree.
I introduced the lists to make it more readable, and put clarifications for the referenced sections in brackets to avoid the need to look them up.
Iron is a gas at appropriate temperatures (above around 3100K). It's just not especially pleasant to breathe at that point -- which one can't, of course, because one's lungs would be instantly seared, followed quickly by one's death.
You're correct. It's a very viable rocket, and is one of the cornerstones of the ESA's space program for at least the next decade. But my post was referring to the question of lifters matching or exceeding the payload of the space shuttle.
The shuttle lifts off from a latitude of 28.4 degrees north, whereas Baikonur is at 46 degrees north latitude. The shuttle is closer to the ISS's orbit, whereas anything launching from Baikonur requires a greater fuel:mass ratio to reach the proper orbit.
Latitude was one of the bigger limitations of the Soviet space program; had they been able to launch from lower latitudes, it would have made their program much easier. Instead, they had to build bigger rockets to get the same payloads into orbit. In fact, now that I think of it, I wonder if there was a plan to put a launch facility in Afghanistan once it was pacified. Kandahar sits around 31.5 degrees north latitude. That would have eased their access considerably.
You're misreading it. The shuttle has the highest launch capacity of any currently operational heavy lifter. There are others (Angara A5, Ares V, Falcon 9 Heavy, Long March 5) on the books, but a NASA payload is unlikely to ever launch on a Long March rocket. The remaining lifters on the list (Energia, N1, and the Saturn line) are retired; the two Soviet lifters had a dismal record of one success in six launches.
The closest operational heavy lift system is the Delta IV Heavy coming in at only 1450kg less mass to LEO than the shuttle's max payload, and which has one successful and one partially successful launch on its record. However, the Delta line is a good one, and none of the eight Delta IV launch vehicles (including three Medium and three Medium+ launches) have been lost.
*shrug* It's not hard to find evidence of people being screwed by their insurance companies. Some of it is in the film. If you have an ideological bias against the film, feel free not to watch it, but the burden of proof is off my shoulders. It's not an ideological problem with the film. It's an issue with the filmmaker. Michael Moore tends to badly twist things in his films, and even many of those who are in favor of gun control or nationalized health care shy away from his work.
Sure... and many of those people do exactly what I said: they wait for their problems to become emergencies, and then they go to the emergency room.... It can also mean that they skip the routine medical stuff and wait until it's a big enough problem that someone else will pay for it. Neither of the quotes you provide suggest that it will be mandatory to have health insurance. Both refer to the option of having federal coverage.
In addition, Medicare Parts A (hospital insurance) and B (medical insurance) do have premiums. Most people don't pay Part A because they paid into it for ten years or more, but premiums for those who paid in for less than ten years are $233 or $423 per month, depending on how long they paid in before. Part B is $135 annually for those making less than $82K per year singly or $164K per year joint, and then it goes to $96.40 per month and moves up from there.
Absent tax increases to involuntarily cover those who choose not to sign up, there will still be those who choose to keep cash in pocket.
Being "covered" doesn't necessarily mean much - see Sicko for a few examples. I don't mind counter-evidence being provided, but please use something other than a Micheal Moore film to do so.
On top of this, the overhead for a nationalized system is not necessarily better than in a corporation. Its budget has ballooned from £65.4 billion to £105.6 in five years, a 12.3% annualized increase. It's doubled in the past ten years. Either it was grossly underfunded before -- a possibility -- or it's administered in a grossly inefficiently fashion now.
Try comparing that against the US. Then compare health expenses vs. outcomes in all the other countries with national health care. "Outcomes" is a little vague. But I did compare overall health care expenditures in the US. Similar to the UK, it's doubled in ten years, but the annualized percentage increases for the last five years have been only 8.2%, a third lower than in the UK. I used figures from the US Census Bureau with 2007 as the ending year.
Hell, even here in the US, Medicare has lower overhead than private insurers. Not always. See Medicare Part D. The overpayment due to refusal to negotiate lower drug prices when purchased under Part D is substantial, perhaps more than $20 billion per year. These are the kinds of things that bring about concerns of program costs to those of us wary of a nationalized system.
Today, if you want an MRI and your local hospital has a waiting list, you can go to some other hospital. Maybe your insurer won't cover it, but you can still pay out of pocket, or you can find a better insurer who will cover it.
That wouldn't change. MRIs aren't inexpensive, at least for those who are not wealthy by my definition.
Aside from that, your recommendation to find another insurer is no different from today's market.
"...No government bureaucrat will second-guess decisions about your care." Medicare already does this on some occasions, and I'm not talking about experimental or frivolous care. It doesn't provide complete freedom of care, and so far as I understand, medical providers are not required to accept Medicare patients, and some do not due to what they see as regulated fees for services that are too low. Most hospitals accept it because it's guaranteed payment, but not all doctors do.
It's also not always all-inclusive. In a recent experience with my grandfather, his triple-bypass surgery would still have left him with tens of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs had Medicare been the only thing available. His private insurance is what made it possible for the $200K operation to take place at all.
In other words, it doesn't matter to you that millions of people are unable to afford routine preventive health care, and are forced to wait until their problems become emergencies (because the ER can't turn them away for non-payment), driving up costs for the rest of us.
There are some who cannot afford health insurance, and there does need to be a solution for them. However, do not forget that a sizable percentage of those that don't have health coverage choose to forgo that expense, figuring that they don't need it. A third of those without it live in households of $50K or more annual income. It's possible that certain situations lead to some of those genuinely unable to afford coverage, but that's still millions that could afford it and choose not to.
In addition, there are millions eligible for government-sponsored health care intended for low-income people but who simply never sign up for one reason or another, be that lack of knowledge, laziness, or even pride at not being supported by the state.
No, apparently all that matters to you is how well the system works for the wealthiest individuals, and to hell with everyone else.
My parents were far from the wealthiest individuals when I was growing up. Dad worked in SoCal aerospace which paid well -- when he was working. It was very cyclical, and he was often driving trucks for $6 an hour in the late 1980s. A few years ago, he was hurt badly enough to go on permanent disability, leaving only my mom's income as significant. Mom worked at a hospital as a ward secretary, eventually moving into working for health insurance companies. She now works for a homeowners association management company. Despite what they've been through and what she saw from the inside of the health care system -- and it often wasn't pretty -- they still don't want a nationalized health care system.
There are about 300 million people in the US. A rough average of uncovered residents is about 45 million. That means that 255 million are covered. I'm fairly certain that 85% of the country includes a lot more than just those that are wealthy.
In America people do not wait months for basic services.
Actually, they often do. Private health insurance (especially HMO) doesn't guarantee that you'll be treated any more quickly than people in Canada or the UK.
Until recently, when I flipped to a PPO for flexibility (and ironically lower paycheck cost to me), I was on HMOs for most of my life. My brother and both parents needed arthroscopic surgery, which they were able to get within a couple of months of diagnosis (my brother actually got it within a few weeks, and before my mom started working in the health insurance field). In Canada, the median wait time for such surgeries is a significant fraction of a year, even in more heavily populated provinces. Neurosurgery patients can wait for six months from seeing a GP to getting their actual surgery. Life-threatening situations are treated much more quickly, of course, but those kinds of waits go beyond a nuisance for someone whose life is being affected by a given condition. I would find it simply outrageous to have to wait such times.
I have also read and heard anecdotally -- and this may be a misunderstanding -- that Britain's NHS has denied surgery to certain aged or extremely sick patients on the basis that they may not survive despite the treatment, or that others have a higher chance of survival and so the surgical slot is assigned to someone else. If I've been paying into the system for, say, thirty years, I'm going to have some serious concerns if coverage is denied on that basis. Yes, these things happen stateside, too, but the idea that they're unique to for-profit insurance companies in the US may be flat wrong.
On top of this, the overhead for a nationalized system is not necessarily better than in a corporation. Its budget has ballooned from £65.4 bi
The BTUs for switchgrass that I mentioned are for prepared lands, so I don't know how marginal land will fare in terms of output. If the output drops by half, that's twice as much land needed to make up for it.
I also did a look-up that I should have done yesterday. Texas, the largest of the lower 48 states by land area, has an area of about 269,000 square miles; the calculated area in my post would require an equivalent to all of Texas and Oklahoma be planted with switchgrass to supply current needs. All of the contiguous land area of the United States totals 3,120,000 square miles. Using switchgrass for everything would require nearly 11% of the contiguous United States to be planted, and that's on top of the land already used for agriculture. This is not a trivial thing.
I've read that switchgrass is about 75 MMBTU per acre per year. Ethanol is around 75,000 BTU per gallon, so one acre of switchgrass could produce about 1000 gallons of ethanol each year. Based on that, we'd need 588,000 acre-years per day, or about 215 million acres (336,000 square miles) devoted to switchgrass.
In 2007, there was something like 90 million acres of corn planted, so this is about 2.4 times the total corn acreage.
If you could figure out a way of pulling off conversion cost-effectively, it might work to some degree, though I'd hate to think what a few big grass fires could do to production. This also presumes that my estimates are correct; I suspect they may understate the issue somewhat.
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Interference wasn't the right word. One of the ACs responding to my post got what I was trying to say, mentioning the background noise.
The same AC mentioned the neutrino detector at the South Pole and its directionality capabilities. That makes for something closer to what I was imagining, something that would allow detection of unpublicized nuclear reactors. I can imagine, though, that this might get annoying for the major submarine powers if the resolution were reasonably high, as their nuclear fleet might become trackable.
It's sci-fi right now, but perhaps a captured comet in orbit around the Earth might be able to provide a similar environment to the Amanda facility. Maybe in a couple hundred years...
Thanks for the explanation.
Would this prevent the use of such detectors in satellites? I realize that this first design requires that it be essentially next to the reactor, and that its time resolution is far too short for common orbits. But would there be too much interference in space for this to ever be of practical use?
So it seems to be handled mostly on a case-by-case basis.
nslookup has been deprecated since around 2001, as near as I can tell, and yet it shows no signs of dropping out of use. Its usage still commonly shows up in a very wide variety of training materials for all manner of operating systems. Sure, dig is slowly replacing it, but by the time it's completely gone, it will be because DNSSec has finally come into serious use and nslookup no longer functions sufficiently.
The old terms aren't going away, no matter how much a small group of geeks demands it to be so. They're too ingrained in the population, and that population doesn't like terminology to change once they're used to it. They then pass it on to the next group that they teach (be that children or colleagues), and they become comfortable with it, and the cycle continues.
Attempts to force the change through pedantry are only going to lead to frustration of and ridicule by the general computer-using populace.
That's not necessarily true. Boats that are reported missing can be the subject of enormous searches by the Coast Guard, involving multiple planes, helicopters, and ships. These are very expensive and time-consuming when the missing craft is not found quickly (which they usually are). The search may have gone on longer than is average, but he wasn't lost in average terrain, either.
Aside from that, I believe they found a couple of long-missing wrecks during the search, so it wasn't a complete failure.
It's true that wireless has lower speeds than wired, and is generally a little more fussy, but the cost and security arguments are not necessarily true. How many people encrypt their traffic on a per-user basis over the network? We don't. Even our IPSec VPNs are gateway-to-gateway. How many people have even the most rudimentary NAC on their wired networks? Not many; even without DHCP, it's not hard to plug into a network and figure out the IP range and default gateway.
As to cost, the deployment of the two APs for that room cost just a little over a thousand dollars with cabling included; it would have been between four thousand and six thousand to cable the room. Another, much larger room was cabled for fifty thousand dollars, but the six APs that we put in (determined afterward to be overkill) cost under ten thousand.
It all depends on what you value most. If you require the highest reliability, then wired works. But there are certainly cases -- and they're less uncommon than you may think -- where wireless is a better way of setting up the network.
Wireless works fine in most cases. I oversee three wireless networks as part of my job using nearly 60 APs from two different vendors (not including the five different wireless NICs in use), and the only real issue that we had was due to an application that didn't like NATs, forcing us to allocate more IP space to the wireless network. In one case, there's an entire room of about a dozen people that could have been hooked to a wired network, but they instead use the wireless network exclusively because it gives them mobility that they otherwise would not have. Most of them don't have a network jack at their desks, for that matter. None of them use desktops to my knowledge, but the connections are secured using PEAP and WPA2, validating both hardware and user before they're granted access.
What's wrong with wireless on a desktop? I've done several installations for people who wanted a primary computer hooked up to the router, but had their kids' systems (and I think TiVo, in one case) hooked up via wireless because they didn't want the hassle of running cables to other rooms. It's not a good case for transferring large files all the time, but it works perfectly fine for them for the Internet browsing, e-mail, and gaming that they were doing.
I've turned down jobs with pay increases (marginal, but increases nonetheless) simply because I saw Notes on the desktop used for e-mail. My past experiences were painful enough that I don't need that extra stress on top of the job's inherent stress.
They have motive and opportunity. Method is murky, but it's rare that someone is capable of hiding a body well when it's not planned in advance.
I'm not saying that this is the logic. I've not attended the hearings, and I've not seen any transcripts or indictments. This is guesswork from the media reports, and there may be some major point that we're all missing.
Your 'fix' altered the actual text of the law, which I quoted faithfully except for the noted formatting changes, so your fix was completely erroneous.
It's important to delineate the differences in homicides. First-degree murder is generally that committed either with premeditation to kill someone or killing someone by or in concert with a violent felony. Second-degree murder is everything else that includes malice aforethought. Manslaughter generally covers negligence and crimes of passion. Punishments are 25-life/life/death for first-degree murder or 15-life for second-degree murder (20-life if carried out by firearm and 25-life/life if the victim was a peace officer), and manslaughter carries terms ranging from two years to 15-life, depending on the circumstances.
Finally, there is justifiable homicide, covered under California Penal Code Sections 196 (justifiable homicide by law enforcement) and 197 (justifiable homicide by anyone else), supported by Sections 198, 198.5, and 199, which define the circumstances and protections of those falling under Sections 196 and 197.
He was found guilty in 2002 and sentenced to three years in prison, though I'm not entirely sure it was the same case, as the story broke in 2000. The FBI did have a warrant for the password interception, and it allowed them to enter as many times as necessary to install, monitor, and remove the surveillance mechanisms.
My use of TEMPEST in this case was incorrect, but the point still stands. It can be intercepted, and PGP makes use of a method to attempt to counter that.
Without the exact charges (and I've spent some time looking for the indictment or other official documentation as to the charges, but I can't find it online), it's hard to say where it falls in the scope of first degree murder. However, it's likely that it fell under the realm of "any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing." They believe that he planned to kill her and made preparations to dispose of her body so that it wouldn't be found, so that seems the most likely match.
That's not far from the truth. Each monitor has a unique signal that can be tuned in using TEMPEST gear, to which s0litaire indirectly referred in another reply to you. PGP has (had?) a viewer that was intended to defeat TEMPEST viewing. I don't know the details of it, but I recall it was a gray-on-gray scheme, and it had something to do with the relatively low resolution and color depth available on TEMPEST viewers.
However, the FBI (and by loan or extension, the NSA) has some very good black bag people, and they are much more likely to add in a hardware keylogger or currently-undetectable rootkit nowadays. That's how the FBI got crucial evidence against Nicodemo Scarfo, Jr., son of former mob boss Little Nicky Scarfo, adding a hardware keylogger to grab his PGP password to allow them to decrypt his messages in concert with his private key, also copied at the time.
I introduced the lists to make it more readable, and put clarifications for the referenced sections in brackets to avoid the need to look them up.
Iron is a gas at appropriate temperatures (above around 3100K). It's just not especially pleasant to breathe at that point -- which one can't, of course, because one's lungs would be instantly seared, followed quickly by one's death.
You're correct. It's a very viable rocket, and is one of the cornerstones of the ESA's space program for at least the next decade. But my post was referring to the question of lifters matching or exceeding the payload of the space shuttle.
The shuttle lifts off from a latitude of 28.4 degrees north, whereas Baikonur is at 46 degrees north latitude. The shuttle is closer to the ISS's orbit, whereas anything launching from Baikonur requires a greater fuel:mass ratio to reach the proper orbit.
Latitude was one of the bigger limitations of the Soviet space program; had they been able to launch from lower latitudes, it would have made their program much easier. Instead, they had to build bigger rockets to get the same payloads into orbit. In fact, now that I think of it, I wonder if there was a plan to put a launch facility in Afghanistan once it was pacified. Kandahar sits around 31.5 degrees north latitude. That would have eased their access considerably.
You're misreading it. The shuttle has the highest launch capacity of any currently operational heavy lifter. There are others (Angara A5, Ares V, Falcon 9 Heavy, Long March 5) on the books, but a NASA payload is unlikely to ever launch on a Long March rocket. The remaining lifters on the list (Energia, N1, and the Saturn line) are retired; the two Soviet lifters had a dismal record of one success in six launches.
The closest operational heavy lift system is the Delta IV Heavy coming in at only 1450kg less mass to LEO than the shuttle's max payload, and which has one successful and one partially successful launch on its record. However, the Delta line is a good one, and none of the eight Delta IV launch vehicles (including three Medium and three Medium+ launches) have been lost.
In addition, Medicare Parts A (hospital insurance) and B (medical insurance) do have premiums. Most people don't pay Part A because they paid into it for ten years or more, but premiums for those who paid in for less than ten years are $233 or $423 per month, depending on how long they paid in before. Part B is $135 annually for those making less than $82K per year singly or $164K per year joint, and then it goes to $96.40 per month and moves up from there.
Absent tax increases to involuntarily cover those who choose not to sign up, there will still be those who choose to keep cash in pocket. Being "covered" doesn't necessarily mean much - see Sicko for a few examples. I don't mind counter-evidence being provided, but please use something other than a Micheal Moore film to do so. On top of this, the overhead for a nationalized system is not necessarily better than in a corporation. Its budget has ballooned from £65.4 billion to £105.6 in five years, a 12.3% annualized increase. It's doubled in the past ten years. Either it was grossly underfunded before -- a possibility -- or it's administered in a grossly inefficiently fashion now. Try comparing that against the US. Then compare health expenses vs. outcomes in all the other countries with national health care. "Outcomes" is a little vague. But I did compare overall health care expenditures in the US. Similar to the UK, it's doubled in ten years, but the annualized percentage increases for the last five years have been only 8.2%, a third lower than in the UK. I used figures from the US Census Bureau with 2007 as the ending year. Hell, even here in the US, Medicare has lower overhead than private insurers. Not always. See Medicare Part D. The overpayment due to refusal to negotiate lower drug prices when purchased under Part D is substantial, perhaps more than $20 billion per year. These are the kinds of things that bring about concerns of program costs to those of us wary of a nationalized system. Today, if you want an MRI and your local hospital has a waiting list, you can go to some other hospital. Maybe your insurer won't cover it, but you can still pay out of pocket, or you can find a better insurer who will cover it.
That wouldn't change. MRIs aren't inexpensive, at least for those who are not wealthy by my definition.
Aside from that, your recommendation to find another insurer is no different from today's market. "...No government bureaucrat will second-guess decisions about your care." Medicare already does this on some occasions, and I'm not talking about experimental or frivolous care. It doesn't provide complete freedom of care, and so far as I understand, medical providers are not required to accept Medicare patients, and some do not due to what they see as regulated fees for services that are too low. Most hospitals accept it because it's guaranteed payment, but not all doctors do.
It's also not always all-inclusive. In a recent experience with my grandfather, his triple-bypass surgery would still have left him with tens of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs had Medicare been the only thing available. His private insurance is what made it possible for the $200K operation to take place at all.
In other words, it doesn't matter to you that millions of people are unable to afford routine preventive health care, and are forced to wait until their problems become emergencies (because the ER can't turn them away for non-payment), driving up costs for the rest of us.
There are some who cannot afford health insurance, and there does need to be a solution for them. However, do not forget that a sizable percentage of those that don't have health coverage choose to forgo that expense, figuring that they don't need it. A third of those without it live in households of $50K or more annual income. It's possible that certain situations lead to some of those genuinely unable to afford coverage, but that's still millions that could afford it and choose not to.
In addition, there are millions eligible for government-sponsored health care intended for low-income people but who simply never sign up for one reason or another, be that lack of knowledge, laziness, or even pride at not being supported by the state.
No, apparently all that matters to you is how well the system works for the wealthiest individuals, and to hell with everyone else.
My parents were far from the wealthiest individuals when I was growing up. Dad worked in SoCal aerospace which paid well -- when he was working. It was very cyclical, and he was often driving trucks for $6 an hour in the late 1980s. A few years ago, he was hurt badly enough to go on permanent disability, leaving only my mom's income as significant. Mom worked at a hospital as a ward secretary, eventually moving into working for health insurance companies. She now works for a homeowners association management company. Despite what they've been through and what she saw from the inside of the health care system -- and it often wasn't pretty -- they still don't want a nationalized health care system.
There are about 300 million people in the US. A rough average of uncovered residents is about 45 million. That means that 255 million are covered. I'm fairly certain that 85% of the country includes a lot more than just those that are wealthy.
In America people do not wait months for basic services.
Actually, they often do. Private health insurance (especially HMO) doesn't guarantee that you'll be treated any more quickly than people in Canada or the UK.
Until recently, when I flipped to a PPO for flexibility (and ironically lower paycheck cost to me), I was on HMOs for most of my life. My brother and both parents needed arthroscopic surgery, which they were able to get within a couple of months of diagnosis (my brother actually got it within a few weeks, and before my mom started working in the health insurance field). In Canada, the median wait time for such surgeries is a significant fraction of a year, even in more heavily populated provinces. Neurosurgery patients can wait for six months from seeing a GP to getting their actual surgery. Life-threatening situations are treated much more quickly, of course, but those kinds of waits go beyond a nuisance for someone whose life is being affected by a given condition. I would find it simply outrageous to have to wait such times.
I have also read and heard anecdotally -- and this may be a misunderstanding -- that Britain's NHS has denied surgery to certain aged or extremely sick patients on the basis that they may not survive despite the treatment, or that others have a higher chance of survival and so the surgical slot is assigned to someone else. If I've been paying into the system for, say, thirty years, I'm going to have some serious concerns if coverage is denied on that basis. Yes, these things happen stateside, too, but the idea that they're unique to for-profit insurance companies in the US may be flat wrong.
On top of this, the overhead for a nationalized system is not necessarily better than in a corporation. Its budget has ballooned from £65.4 bi
The BTUs for switchgrass that I mentioned are for prepared lands, so I don't know how marginal land will fare in terms of output. If the output drops by half, that's twice as much land needed to make up for it.
I also did a look-up that I should have done yesterday. Texas, the largest of the lower 48 states by land area, has an area of about 269,000 square miles; the calculated area in my post would require an equivalent to all of Texas and Oklahoma be planted with switchgrass to supply current needs. All of the contiguous land area of the United States totals 3,120,000 square miles. Using switchgrass for everything would require nearly 11% of the contiguous United States to be planted, and that's on top of the land already used for agriculture. This is not a trivial thing.
I've read that switchgrass is about 75 MMBTU per acre per year. Ethanol is around 75,000 BTU per gallon, so one acre of switchgrass could produce about 1000 gallons of ethanol each year. Based on that, we'd need 588,000 acre-years per day, or about 215 million acres (336,000 square miles) devoted to switchgrass.
In 2007, there was something like 90 million acres of corn planted, so this is about 2.4 times the total corn acreage.
If you could figure out a way of pulling off conversion cost-effectively, it might work to some degree, though I'd hate to think what a few big grass fires could do to production. This also presumes that my estimates are correct; I suspect they may understate the issue somewhat.