It's not that strange, it's illegal here in Connecticut also. http://www.ct.gov/dosr/cwp/view.asp?Q=291440&A=2031
It competes with the state lottery, and Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods casinos, diverting money out of the state. I sure that Massachusetts faces a similar situation--I've never been to the Sulfolk Downs but I imagine they have slots?
Not necessarily, take insulin as an example. It was the first real genetically engineered biopharmaceutical, created, if I remember well, by inserting a plasmid for the human gene encoding insulin into E.coli. While we still use regular human insulin, analog insulins have replaced it due to more desirable kinetics. These insulins, slightly modified, are novel pharmaceuticals and are patented. So while the human gene encoding insulin and the insulin peptide itself are not patented, medications currently produced using this information are, and improved analog insulins are still being developed. There is still ongoing research in non-injectable insulin as well. Finally, patents are usually applied for early on during the pharmaceutical development process, which is why drugs typically only have 5-7 years of exclusivity once they are marketed. The really hard part (and the point of failure for most promising compounds) of drug R&D is the "D" part--taking an investigational compound that has biological activity from the initial development process to something that is safe, efficacious, and practical to administer. A gene doesn't need to be patented for a company to have exclusivity and would only retard competition.
It's a phase-I trial, it only confirms safety already established in animal models and kinetics. Phase-II and phase-III trials, much larger in scale, assess efficacy and optimum dosing. That will tell us if this can be more effective than traditional chemotherapy (possible) and monoclonal chemotherapy (much more difficult to predict).
I agree, there was a high cost to inaction as well. But reforming social welfare programs is hard and potentially political suicide because it usually entails making unpopular decisions. I don't disagree with a stepwise process, and I hope that's what we have here, but I'm not too optimistic about Washington significantly reigning in cost. I think if the Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act passes the Senate, it could have a synergistic effect with this current bill for private insurance, but we're also shifting significant costs to Medicare, currently underfunded, as well as Medicaid which many states are unable to meet their portion of this year.
I wrote about this before, but the biggest problem with this bill is that it doesn't meet the original aims of fixing healthcare. During the election, the proposal was to reduce the cost of healthcare, thereby extending coverage to uninsured Americans. Many of the cost-saving measures originally proposed were dropped and now we have a bill that only extends coverage, but doesn't fundamentally reduce the costs in a meaningful way. Democratic and Republican ideologies prevented this from becoming a true overhaul of our healthcare. It's depressing that something this important became cannon-fodder for midterm elections. My fear is that we missed our only opportunity to get this right and will have to bear the consequences of what's been passed today. I think back to the architect of the Social Security Act, who's name I can't recall and I don't have time to google, stated from it's inception that it was not durable long-term solution, yet almost 75 years later we still haven't done anything to prevent it's insolvency.
We saw something like this on a smaller scale when the Bush administration expanded Medicare to part D, but underestimated the costs of the program (and publicly accused heathcare providers for "stealing" from the government). I'm afraid that the assumptions that the Democrats are making about how this will be paid for in the future are grossly off the mark, and our generation and that of our children (for those readers in their forties) will be paying the penalty.
You will probably see coverage become limited--tighter medication formularies, more restricted access to specialists, and possibly higher deductibles. Remember, companies like Cigna and Aetna are publically traded on the NYSE, they are in the business of making money and are responsible to their shareholders to maximize profit.
Correct, but they aren't exempt anymore from covering high liability clients or imposing costly penalties for a past history of cancer, diabetes, chronic lung disease and so forth. So their costs will also increase, and I'm not sure which of the two, cost or revenue, is greater in the short and longterm.
Preexisting conditions include chronic diseases and congenital conditions. It doesn't include an acute process that requires immediate intervention. Routine procedures like a c-section, cholecystectomy, appendectomy, pneumonia, and trauma (MVA) usually affect younger adults. You'll be paying upwards of $20k per event and you won't be able to enroll in a plan and submit the bills retroactively. You can't plan your health care like your retirement. You plan for the worst and be thankful for your good luck.
Using the analogy of mandatory auto insurance, you, as an operator, are protecting yourself from financial ruin whether you are responsible for an accident or not. If you haven't been in a serious accident before involving an uninsured motorist, you wouldn't fully appreciate how balanced this system is. Compulsory medical coverage also protects you from financial hardship should you have an acute medical condition, and protects the hospital from writing off expenses you can't pay, or the state from extending Medicaid to you temporarily. There are some inexpensive plans with high out-of-pocket deductibles and catastrophic coverage that protects you if something devastating happens to you.
The insurance industry lost some leverage overall but dodged a fatal bullet by the public option being dropped from the final draft. So yes, the Democrats capitulated to the health insurance industry on this.
The purpose of health care reform originally stated during the presidential campaign was to reduce the cost of health care, thereby extending health care to more than 38 million uninsured Americans. Being a healthcare provider, I skimmed an early draft of HR 3200 and was struck by how little politicians understand how our health care system works, the problems within, and how to elucidate possible solutions. And there are solutions, like repealing the anti-trust exemption for health insurance providers (in the works), streamlining Medicare benefits, regulating the prices of pharmaceuticals, developing methods to evaluate and approve generic biopharmaceuticals, and so forth. There just aren't any meaningful reductions in the cost of health care in this proposal. We're looking at a situation similar to the extension of Medicare to part D, championed by the Bush administration and a noble idea, but has cost much more than initially anticipated. And honestly, the largest barrier we face is ourselves, by the inordinate amount of dollars we spend on preventable disease in this country. Low cost, affordable health care would be easily attainable if Americans just took better care of themselves.
Can you give a citation please. I've skimmed the Delaware docket and and I can't find anything that mentions cross-licensing. It does state that Nokia was seeking both license fees and interest for past violations. I wondering where it's documented that the fees were excessive or Nokia demanded non-monetary compensation.
Nokia offered to license the patents to Apple on a per-patent fee or one fee for the whole portfolio; the amounts of those fees have not been disclosed. Apple rejected this offer. I can't find any information about cross-licensing in the Delaware complaint. Without more information, we can't be certain if Nokia is being unreasonable or not, but Apple can't just refuse to license Nokia's IP because they don't like the terms.
The billing in hospitals is very complicated but is based on J codes, which are developed by CMS, the branch of the Fed that deals with Medicare and Medicaid. I don't understand it well myself but the idea is that you're not paying the actual cost of a treatment, but the suggested cost of treating a patient based on a billable unit. If a hospital or MD's office uses the wrong code, the treatment will be under-reimbursed or not reimbursed altogether. A medical secretary or someone working in a hospital billing department could explain this better, but you should understand that hospitals don't always get reimbursed above their costs, and often the write off heavy losses because we treat patients without regard to ability to pay.
This is not true. A large percentage of hospitals are non-profit and rely on philanthropy to balance their budget. Furthermore, you underestimate the amount of care provided that is under-reimbursed. It's not a coincidence that hospitals are leaving their independence to join healthcare networks, allowing them to combine resources and remain afloat. When looking at the US healthcare crisis, the outlook for hospitals is actually pretty bleak.
To add to this, the goal of cancer treatment isn't only remission. We treat patients to make them more comfortable as well. Excision of the primary tumor and using chemo and radiation to shrink inoperable sites prolong life to an extent, and we have good data on this, and reduce their symptoms but also have the tertiary benefit of improving the quality of life remaining. I don't think many critics understand how excruciatingly and inescapably painful cancer can be.
A comment on cost: the older and more well-established chemo agents are actually surprisingly cheap. But, there is a significant cost associated with administering the drug parenterally and disposal of all waste. Many of the newer treatments are monoclonal in nature, which don't have market competition to drive the costs down. Until the FDA develops a method to evaluate and approve generic biologicals, our most expensive drugs will make universal affordable heathcare unobtainable.
I'm not sure that developers are challenging Microsoft's claims, as much as they are appealing for the patents to be fully disclosed, so any legitimate violations can be coded around.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Microsoft approached Red Hat not long after the deal with Novell and was told to go screw. I think Shuttleworth also made some statements about making no deals with Microsoft. Amazon's settlement doesn't necessarily lend credibility to their claims, and if there really is some substance to these patent threats, why has Microsoft sued TomTom but not Red Hat. Why can Red Hat give the finger to Microsoft and walk away untouched. Is Red Hat's patent portfolio a threat? I wish we knew in detail about what is said in these meetings.
If I can add...in college I always ate a really salty snack with a large glass of water before going to bed and I never had a headache in the morning. Dehydration is only part of being hung over and nothing seems to work for the GI side effects of what is essentially alcohol toxicity.
Installing Konqueror on top of Windowmaker is a poor analogy since Windows doesn't offer the choice of alternative window managers or full desktop environments, but it's not fundamentally different from installing an application that requires a version of directx, python, or.net. I don't see how dependencies are a cause of (or synonym for) fragmentation, and on Linux the package manager transparently manages dependencies anyway. I don't really follow the relevance of this in relation to Android.
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Maybe, provided they're not locked away in the "Disney vault".
It's not that strange, it's illegal here in Connecticut also. http://www.ct.gov/dosr/cwp/view.asp?Q=291440&A=2031 It competes with the state lottery, and Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods casinos, diverting money out of the state. I sure that Massachusetts faces a similar situation--I've never been to the Sulfolk Downs but I imagine they have slots?
Not necessarily, take insulin as an example. It was the first real genetically engineered biopharmaceutical, created, if I remember well, by inserting a plasmid for the human gene encoding insulin into E.coli. While we still use regular human insulin, analog insulins have replaced it due to more desirable kinetics. These insulins, slightly modified, are novel pharmaceuticals and are patented. So while the human gene encoding insulin and the insulin peptide itself are not patented, medications currently produced using this information are, and improved analog insulins are still being developed. There is still ongoing research in non-injectable insulin as well. Finally, patents are usually applied for early on during the pharmaceutical development process, which is why drugs typically only have 5-7 years of exclusivity once they are marketed. The really hard part (and the point of failure for most promising compounds) of drug R&D is the "D" part--taking an investigational compound that has biological activity from the initial development process to something that is safe, efficacious, and practical to administer. A gene doesn't need to be patented for a company to have exclusivity and would only retard competition.
Who else will buy our debt then?
It's a phase-I trial, it only confirms safety already established in animal models and kinetics. Phase-II and phase-III trials, much larger in scale, assess efficacy and optimum dosing. That will tell us if this can be more effective than traditional chemotherapy (possible) and monoclonal chemotherapy (much more difficult to predict).
It's true that we don't know the whole scope of the issue and, while my background is in medicine and not economic theory, there are other, more reputable sources that argue otherwise. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/business/03view.html?ex=1359694800&en=e2a7992c36d4a0ad&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3122 I agree that Medicare is a much more pressing issue at the present. The analogy is that
I agree, there was a high cost to inaction as well. But reforming social welfare programs is hard and potentially political suicide because it usually entails making unpopular decisions. I don't disagree with a stepwise process, and I hope that's what we have here, but I'm not too optimistic about Washington significantly reigning in cost. I think if the Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act passes the Senate, it could have a synergistic effect with this current bill for private insurance, but we're also shifting significant costs to Medicare, currently underfunded, as well as Medicaid which many states are unable to meet their portion of this year.
I wrote about this before, but the biggest problem with this bill is that it doesn't meet the original aims of fixing healthcare. During the election, the proposal was to reduce the cost of healthcare, thereby extending coverage to uninsured Americans. Many of the cost-saving measures originally proposed were dropped and now we have a bill that only extends coverage, but doesn't fundamentally reduce the costs in a meaningful way. Democratic and Republican ideologies prevented this from becoming a true overhaul of our healthcare. It's depressing that something this important became cannon-fodder for midterm elections. My fear is that we missed our only opportunity to get this right and will have to bear the consequences of what's been passed today. I think back to the architect of the Social Security Act, who's name I can't recall and I don't have time to google, stated from it's inception that it was not durable long-term solution, yet almost 75 years later we still haven't done anything to prevent it's insolvency. We saw something like this on a smaller scale when the Bush administration expanded Medicare to part D, but underestimated the costs of the program (and publicly accused heathcare providers for "stealing" from the government). I'm afraid that the assumptions that the Democrats are making about how this will be paid for in the future are grossly off the mark, and our generation and that of our children (for those readers in their forties) will be paying the penalty.
You will probably see coverage become limited--tighter medication formularies, more restricted access to specialists, and possibly higher deductibles. Remember, companies like Cigna and Aetna are publically traded on the NYSE, they are in the business of making money and are responsible to their shareholders to maximize profit.
Correct, but they aren't exempt anymore from covering high liability clients or imposing costly penalties for a past history of cancer, diabetes, chronic lung disease and so forth. So their costs will also increase, and I'm not sure which of the two, cost or revenue, is greater in the short and longterm.
Preexisting conditions include chronic diseases and congenital conditions. It doesn't include an acute process that requires immediate intervention. Routine procedures like a c-section, cholecystectomy, appendectomy, pneumonia, and trauma (MVA) usually affect younger adults. You'll be paying upwards of $20k per event and you won't be able to enroll in a plan and submit the bills retroactively. You can't plan your health care like your retirement. You plan for the worst and be thankful for your good luck.
Using the analogy of mandatory auto insurance, you, as an operator, are protecting yourself from financial ruin whether you are responsible for an accident or not. If you haven't been in a serious accident before involving an uninsured motorist, you wouldn't fully appreciate how balanced this system is. Compulsory medical coverage also protects you from financial hardship should you have an acute medical condition, and protects the hospital from writing off expenses you can't pay, or the state from extending Medicaid to you temporarily. There are some inexpensive plans with high out-of-pocket deductibles and catastrophic coverage that protects you if something devastating happens to you.
The insurance industry lost some leverage overall but dodged a fatal bullet by the public option being dropped from the final draft. So yes, the Democrats capitulated to the health insurance industry on this.
The purpose of health care reform originally stated during the presidential campaign was to reduce the cost of health care, thereby extending health care to more than 38 million uninsured Americans. Being a healthcare provider, I skimmed an early draft of HR 3200 and was struck by how little politicians understand how our health care system works, the problems within, and how to elucidate possible solutions. And there are solutions, like repealing the anti-trust exemption for health insurance providers (in the works), streamlining Medicare benefits, regulating the prices of pharmaceuticals, developing methods to evaluate and approve generic biopharmaceuticals, and so forth. There just aren't any meaningful reductions in the cost of health care in this proposal. We're looking at a situation similar to the extension of Medicare to part D, championed by the Bush administration and a noble idea, but has cost much more than initially anticipated. And honestly, the largest barrier we face is ourselves, by the inordinate amount of dollars we spend on preventable disease in this country. Low cost, affordable health care would be easily attainable if Americans just took better care of themselves.
Can you give a citation please. I've skimmed the Delaware docket and and I can't find anything that mentions cross-licensing. It does state that Nokia was seeking both license fees and interest for past violations. I wondering where it's documented that the fees were excessive or Nokia demanded non-monetary compensation.
Nokia offered to license the patents to Apple on a per-patent fee or one fee for the whole portfolio; the amounts of those fees have not been disclosed. Apple rejected this offer. I can't find any information about cross-licensing in the Delaware complaint. Without more information, we can't be certain if Nokia is being unreasonable or not, but Apple can't just refuse to license Nokia's IP because they don't like the terms.
The billing in hospitals is very complicated but is based on J codes, which are developed by CMS, the branch of the Fed that deals with Medicare and Medicaid. I don't understand it well myself but the idea is that you're not paying the actual cost of a treatment, but the suggested cost of treating a patient based on a billable unit. If a hospital or MD's office uses the wrong code, the treatment will be under-reimbursed or not reimbursed altogether. A medical secretary or someone working in a hospital billing department could explain this better, but you should understand that hospitals don't always get reimbursed above their costs, and often the write off heavy losses because we treat patients without regard to ability to pay.
This is not true. A large percentage of hospitals are non-profit and rely on philanthropy to balance their budget. Furthermore, you underestimate the amount of care provided that is under-reimbursed. It's not a coincidence that hospitals are leaving their independence to join healthcare networks, allowing them to combine resources and remain afloat. When looking at the US healthcare crisis, the outlook for hospitals is actually pretty bleak.
To add to this, the goal of cancer treatment isn't only remission. We treat patients to make them more comfortable as well. Excision of the primary tumor and using chemo and radiation to shrink inoperable sites prolong life to an extent, and we have good data on this, and reduce their symptoms but also have the tertiary benefit of improving the quality of life remaining. I don't think many critics understand how excruciatingly and inescapably painful cancer can be. A comment on cost: the older and more well-established chemo agents are actually surprisingly cheap. But, there is a significant cost associated with administering the drug parenterally and disposal of all waste. Many of the newer treatments are monoclonal in nature, which don't have market competition to drive the costs down. Until the FDA develops a method to evaluate and approve generic biologicals, our most expensive drugs will make universal affordable heathcare unobtainable.
I'm not sure that developers are challenging Microsoft's claims, as much as they are appealing for the patents to be fully disclosed, so any legitimate violations can be coded around.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Microsoft approached Red Hat not long after the deal with Novell and was told to go screw. I think Shuttleworth also made some statements about making no deals with Microsoft. Amazon's settlement doesn't necessarily lend credibility to their claims, and if there really is some substance to these patent threats, why has Microsoft sued TomTom but not Red Hat. Why can Red Hat give the finger to Microsoft and walk away untouched. Is Red Hat's patent portfolio a threat? I wish we knew in detail about what is said in these meetings.
More like: In Noth Kowea compwuta opawates you!
Modded insightful without a source?
If I can add...in college I always ate a really salty snack with a large glass of water before going to bed and I never had a headache in the morning. Dehydration is only part of being hung over and nothing seems to work for the GI side effects of what is essentially alcohol toxicity.
Installing Konqueror on top of Windowmaker is a poor analogy since Windows doesn't offer the choice of alternative window managers or full desktop environments, but it's not fundamentally different from installing an application that requires a version of directx, python, or .net. I don't see how dependencies are a cause of (or synonym for) fragmentation, and on Linux the package manager transparently manages dependencies anyway. I don't really follow the relevance of this in relation to Android.