Let's hope your disease isn't one that's too expensive for you to afford to treat out of your own resources.
Why? If it's not, it's probably not economically viable to keep me alive. Who better to do the cost benefit analysis on saving somebody's life, than the person paying/the person dying?
I don't know if they're smarter... But they can't raise taxes any higher 'cause they're already way up, where politicians here see the vast difference and think they've got a ways to go before tax revolt.
Doctors have plenty of good ideas on how to lower costs. They present ideas all the time. Some of them request government involvement, but usually not in the form of paying for treatments. If anything, the gap between the patient and the payment is part of what drives the costs up here. Most things are covered, and the patient doesn't see the costs, so they're more likely to seek treatment for things they would otherwise deem too costly to worry about.
People didn't used to seek out their doctor for a cold... But then again, there used to be a class in high-school that taught girls how to take care of people who were sick with non-threatening conditions. When it was deemed sexist, they did away with it instead of making it for boys too.
It depends on your insurance plan. Some don't pay for it at all, some pay for one try, and if it doesn't work you have to pay for subsequent tries (later tires are usually cheaper than the first try though), and some pay for three or more tries. Age limits also depend on the plan, but I've never heard of a plan requiring you not to be obese.
The costs are lower, in part, because less treatments are provided.
For example, half of all the joint replacement surgeries done in the entire world are done on US patients. That's 50% of the procedures on less than 5% of the world population. Either people in the US blow out their joints way more frequently than Europeans with socialized health care (unlikely), or their system isn't providing them with that option.
So our "inferior" privatized system is providing more people with life-improving treatments, and when something goes wrong the error rate (not the treatment rate) is used to tell people our system sucks. If you don't get the procedure, the system has failed you, but it wasn't screwed up, so you're a positive statistic!
Sorry, but I'd rather pay more, and pay for myself.
Let's see the numbers on the use of fertility clinics and births by older women before you start implying causation.
People have easier access to far more exotic treatments in the US than they do in the UK. It is likely the cause of these numbers. Those extra 1.4 births per thousand might not have even been pregnancies there.
It's great if you don't mind paying more than flying to get there a lot later.... And that's before you take into account the 70+% of Amtrak trips that get delayed.
(Yeah, yeah. Not a problem with the trains in Europe... They guy is clearly talking about the US though, 'cause of the toothpaste/shampoo comment.)
If you shoot the plane down, you will foever be plagued by the families who will camp outside your ranch telling the world that nobody ever intended to fly the plan into the building in the first place. You don't get credit for saving those people.
It seems like the number of people online at any given time has shot way up lately... And lots of people have re-activated their accounts to get ready for the expansion.
This program seems like a money grab to divert some of the cash that goes to power-leveling services back to blizzard.
So, if they haven't boosted the XP from 60-70 at all (Triple XP stops at 60), and it took 26 (I find that very hard to believe, 72 seems like it would be tough to break) hours to go from 60-70, how will you hit 70 from 1 in 24 hours again?
Honestly, I'm a little tired of the "not the best" bullshit argument. It's based on the number of failed procedures, and error rates. It is not based on the likelihood that you will receive care. If you die because your illness wasn't covered, or you had to wait too long for treatment, that doesn't count against your system in the statistics.
The fact of the matter is more people get procedures (paid for by their private insurance) like artificial joint replacements, or preventative cancer treatments in the US than in all the other countries put together. There are more people in Europe with public health care than there are people in the US, and their population is older than ours on average. So how do you explain that? Easy. Their systems are crappy compared to ours.
If you use credit responsibly, and have a reasonable fallback of savings, the worst case is a temporary loss of access to credit. You aren't liable for this type of fraud if it happens to you. It's just that three month period of proving it was fraud that would suck if you depend on your credit card to live day to day.
I had my credit card info stolen as part of the TJX breach. Whoever ended up with the data maxed out my card in an internet cafe in Paris ($6200 over two days... In an internet cafe...). There was a lot of paperwork and phone calls, but the overall outcome was that I didn't have access to $6200 in credit for 90 days, and I was slightly hassled.
It is ridiculously unlikely that you are going to get your identity stolen in such a way that you will be completely, irrecoverably wiped out... And having a credit card doesn't really increase your chances of that all that much. They can do that to you even if you don't have a credit card.
You're exactly right, of course. Which is why I said that, tongue in cheek. Tell the guy he's fired if he can't figure out how to get it done faster, and see how quickly the estimate goes from 15 months to 15 hours.
Yes. That's exactly what you do. If you can't pay for services anymore, you stop offering them. The only reason you can typically only increase government services over time is because it's politically unpopular to stop providing a service, and because most voters are sufficiently distanced from the actual finances that they don't care what the financial situation is.
If California is out of money, and can't find more money, they should start cutting with administration, then social programs, move on to infrastructure, then public safety, etc.. Either that, or they should raise the taxes sufficiently to either pay for the shit the voters demanded, or drive enough people out of the state that costs come down.
They can't do that, however, since ballot initiatives are legally binding in California. Honestly, I think we should modify the US constitution to disallow states having the level of direct democracy that California has (each individual does not have sufficient time to become informed enough to properly make those kinds of decisions and carry on their day to day business as well), and remove California from the union unless they come into compliance. Enough of this "as goes California, so goes the nation" bullshit already.
The problem is that the government only sees the option to pay dozens of old programmers to manipulate the COBOL code instead of paying one hacker for a day to write a Perl script to hard wire all the salary data in the database to minimum wage.
If that politician can't think of a creative solution to a problem instead of proposing that it would take a year and a quarter to do something simple, he should step aside.
Instead, though, we're going to line up in droves to put people just like him in charge of our health care.
CDs were around for a long time before burners were available (for practical definitions of "available"). Most of the people who had CD players and changers in the late '80s and early '90s didn't even have a computer, much less a computer that was fast enough to run a CD burner, much less the means to afford said burner. CD changers for cars were in the $300-$500 range, and were more common than single-disk in-dash players. Burners were thousands of dollars + the cost of the computer to hook them up to.
What you're complaining about is a reaction to the fact that our elected officials care nothing for our opinions. That they don't care and prefer to represent lobbyists and monied interests occurred first.
You're so wrong. They care very much about what our opinions are. And we've demonstrated beyond any doubt that our interests are best represented by supporting the candidate that has taken, and thus can spend the most money.
I don't think that perspective was really missing from the discussion. We all know why we think Microsoft is full of crap. I was just pointing out why they think they're right. It's not a matter of a cackling evil madman in a darkened office somewhere. They just have a vastly different perspective on the situation than everybody else.
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Let's hope your disease isn't one that's too expensive for you to afford to treat out of your own resources.
Why? If it's not, it's probably not economically viable to keep me alive. Who better to do the cost benefit analysis on saving somebody's life, than the person paying/the person dying?
Solution: Don't live in California. They're all nuts there anyway.
Did they pass a special law for that, or is he breaking the federal minimum wage law?
I don't know if they're smarter... But they can't raise taxes any higher 'cause they're already way up, where politicians here see the vast difference and think they've got a ways to go before tax revolt.
Doctors have plenty of good ideas on how to lower costs. They present ideas all the time. Some of them request government involvement, but usually not in the form of paying for treatments. If anything, the gap between the patient and the payment is part of what drives the costs up here. Most things are covered, and the patient doesn't see the costs, so they're more likely to seek treatment for things they would otherwise deem too costly to worry about.
People didn't used to seek out their doctor for a cold... But then again, there used to be a class in high-school that taught girls how to take care of people who were sick with non-threatening conditions. When it was deemed sexist, they did away with it instead of making it for boys too.
An anecdote that I planned to add before my boss came over and I hastily hit submit...
I know a 52 year old woman who had her fertility treatments covered by her insurance plan, and succeeded after her third attempt.
It depends on your insurance plan. Some don't pay for it at all, some pay for one try, and if it doesn't work you have to pay for subsequent tries (later tires are usually cheaper than the first try though), and some pay for three or more tries. Age limits also depend on the plan, but I've never heard of a plan requiring you not to be obese.
The costs are lower, in part, because less treatments are provided.
For example, half of all the joint replacement surgeries done in the entire world are done on US patients. That's 50% of the procedures on less than 5% of the world population. Either people in the US blow out their joints way more frequently than Europeans with socialized health care (unlikely), or their system isn't providing them with that option.
So our "inferior" privatized system is providing more people with life-improving treatments, and when something goes wrong the error rate (not the treatment rate) is used to tell people our system sucks. If you don't get the procedure, the system has failed you, but it wasn't screwed up, so you're a positive statistic!
Sorry, but I'd rather pay more, and pay for myself.
Let's see the numbers on the use of fertility clinics and births by older women before you start implying causation.
People have easier access to far more exotic treatments in the US than they do in the UK. It is likely the cause of these numbers. Those extra 1.4 births per thousand might not have even been pregnancies there.
As do the fluids and placenta.
A healthy woman gains weight during pregnancy. A healthy woman doesn't get fat during pregnancy.
How is this wild, baseless, and likely incorrect speculation modded to +5 insightful?
It's great if you don't mind paying more than flying to get there a lot later.... And that's before you take into account the 70+% of Amtrak trips that get delayed.
(Yeah, yeah. Not a problem with the trains in Europe... They guy is clearly talking about the US though, 'cause of the toothpaste/shampoo comment.)
What is suspicious about a 4x10 aluminum cylinder?
I'd be more upset, if I were you, if I *was* stopped for something like that.
Actually, the choice is "save nobody".
If you shoot the plane down, you will foever be plagued by the families who will camp outside your ranch telling the world that nobody ever intended to fly the plan into the building in the first place. You don't get credit for saving those people.
It seems like the number of people online at any given time has shot way up lately... And lots of people have re-activated their accounts to get ready for the expansion.
This program seems like a money grab to divert some of the cash that goes to power-leveling services back to blizzard.
So, if they haven't boosted the XP from 60-70 at all (Triple XP stops at 60), and it took 26 (I find that very hard to believe, 72 seems like it would be tough to break) hours to go from 60-70, how will you hit 70 from 1 in 24 hours again?
Honestly, I'm a little tired of the "not the best" bullshit argument. It's based on the number of failed procedures, and error rates. It is not based on the likelihood that you will receive care. If you die because your illness wasn't covered, or you had to wait too long for treatment, that doesn't count against your system in the statistics.
The fact of the matter is more people get procedures (paid for by their private insurance) like artificial joint replacements, or preventative cancer treatments in the US than in all the other countries put together. There are more people in Europe with public health care than there are people in the US, and their population is older than ours on average. So how do you explain that? Easy. Their systems are crappy compared to ours.
Harder than you'd think.
If you use credit responsibly, and have a reasonable fallback of savings, the worst case is a temporary loss of access to credit. You aren't liable for this type of fraud if it happens to you. It's just that three month period of proving it was fraud that would suck if you depend on your credit card to live day to day.
I had my credit card info stolen as part of the TJX breach. Whoever ended up with the data maxed out my card in an internet cafe in Paris ($6200 over two days... In an internet cafe...). There was a lot of paperwork and phone calls, but the overall outcome was that I didn't have access to $6200 in credit for 90 days, and I was slightly hassled.
It is ridiculously unlikely that you are going to get your identity stolen in such a way that you will be completely, irrecoverably wiped out... And having a credit card doesn't really increase your chances of that all that much. They can do that to you even if you don't have a credit card.
You're exactly right, of course. Which is why I said that, tongue in cheek. Tell the guy he's fired if he can't figure out how to get it done faster, and see how quickly the estimate goes from 15 months to 15 hours.
Yes. That's exactly what you do. If you can't pay for services anymore, you stop offering them. The only reason you can typically only increase government services over time is because it's politically unpopular to stop providing a service, and because most voters are sufficiently distanced from the actual finances that they don't care what the financial situation is.
If California is out of money, and can't find more money, they should start cutting with administration, then social programs, move on to infrastructure, then public safety, etc.. Either that, or they should raise the taxes sufficiently to either pay for the shit the voters demanded, or drive enough people out of the state that costs come down.
They can't do that, however, since ballot initiatives are legally binding in California. Honestly, I think we should modify the US constitution to disallow states having the level of direct democracy that California has (each individual does not have sufficient time to become informed enough to properly make those kinds of decisions and carry on their day to day business as well), and remove California from the union unless they come into compliance. Enough of this "as goes California, so goes the nation" bullshit already.
The problem is that the government only sees the option to pay dozens of old programmers to manipulate the COBOL code instead of paying one hacker for a day to write a Perl script to hard wire all the salary data in the database to minimum wage.
If that politician can't think of a creative solution to a problem instead of proposing that it would take a year and a quarter to do something simple, he should step aside.
Instead, though, we're going to line up in droves to put people just like him in charge of our health care.
CDs were around for a long time before burners were available (for practical definitions of "available"). Most of the people who had CD players and changers in the late '80s and early '90s didn't even have a computer, much less a computer that was fast enough to run a CD burner, much less the means to afford said burner. CD changers for cars were in the $300-$500 range, and were more common than single-disk in-dash players. Burners were thousands of dollars + the cost of the computer to hook them up to.
What you're complaining about is a reaction to the fact that our elected officials care nothing for our opinions. That they don't care and prefer to represent lobbyists and monied interests occurred first.
You're so wrong. They care very much about what our opinions are. And we've demonstrated beyond any doubt that our interests are best represented by supporting the candidate that has taken, and thus can spend the most money.
Very slightly larger. Three times the population...
I don't think that perspective was really missing from the discussion. We all know why we think Microsoft is full of crap. I was just pointing out why they think they're right. It's not a matter of a cackling evil madman in a darkened office somewhere. They just have a vastly different perspective on the situation than everybody else.
Look at it from their perspective though. All those companies are going open source, 'cause they can't successfully compete with Microsoft.