In theory they don't have to put up with a $1,300 a month premium. That's $15,600 a year, which means that as long as they make less then $164k and change the premium is more then 9.5% of their income, which means they are supposed to buying plans on healthcare.gov. They'd even get the subsidy available to those making less then 400% of poverty-level.
I suspect that in practice your company has another, cheap-ass shitty plan option that your lesser-paid coworkers are supposed to use.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Can be != will be. It's worth noting here that filing a claim indicates that you will cost an insurance company money. If they then can find an error in your application that let's them selectively disqualify you after the fact, there would be considerable incentive to do so.
Two points: 1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address. They could dump you if you lie about which County you live in, but the whole "let's throw him off because he said he'd gotten the sniffles once and he'd gotten them twice" racket is now impossible.
In other words I humbly thank you for demonstrating why we needed ObamaCare in the first place.
Keep in mind that in theory Healthcare.gov should be simpler then those monsters. This is because a) Healthcare.gov is not intended to be so confusing that people fuck it up (many "cheap" plans intentionally confuse people, take their premiums, and then throw them off as soon as they file a claim because the application was wrong), and b) it is not supposed to get any info from you except your age and address. The only other info it should need is income info, and in theory that's coming from the IRS.
That's probably why the site was relatively easy to get working in a month even tho a bunch of idiots fucked it up. If you read the article carefully you'll note that the post-relaunch error rate number is under 1%.
I live in an areas that has a mix of wealthy religious people of numerous faiths, and low-income people. The religious institutions around here do a lot of relatively cheap stuff that is easy to tell people about like soup kitchens, thanksgiving turkeys, and financial literacy classes. Raising $10k isn't hard for a faith group, using it to buy a bunch of turkeys is even easier, and it looks really good in the Parish Newsletter. But feeding those families all year is just no within their budget. The government does the shit that cost real money.
For example, WalMart is a madhouse early in the month because that's when the Feds fund the BridgeCard. Several times people in front of me have used WIC to pay for food, which is a real process. The BridgeCard is much simpler -- on the backend it has to be more complex then a debit card because it can only be used to pay for certain non-alcoholic food items, but to the end-used it's a debit card. Many of my neighbors are on section 8. Most of the ones who aren't are on the waiting list. Nobody talks about waiting lists for rental assistance programs from faith groups. Everyone has terrible teeth because Ohio medicaid has no dental coverage. No faith group has a dental office to cover the gap.
I will never do that however, because there's no way I'm giving the US federal government any of my medical information voluntarily. Though, they likely have it all already anyway.
This isn't a traditional insurance application. Since insurers can't jack up your rates because you had a medical problem when you were 12 the website doesn't ask about your medical history. The medical info they ask for is limited to your age.
Which they already know, because that's on your Social Security records, your birth certificate, your driver's license, your income tax form, etc.
One thing I've noticed about the government is that it's the only sector where people routinely attribute lies from one bit of the sector to everyone else. In other words if the NSA lies about something people will say that the New York Health Exchange's credibility is shot, but if McDonald's does it everyone goes "at least Burger King is honest." This is remarkably silly because the NSA has nothing to do with New York state government, or healthcare; but if MickyD's thinks it can get away with a lie it's probably because BK is already doing that shit and nobody cares.
I suspect you'll ultimately get a better deal do to simple math: prior to Obamacare insurers could spend whatever they wanted on BS that isn't healthcare. In the small group and individual markets marketing/administration/etc. routinely gobbled up 30% of your health care dollar. Now they can't be quite that profligate. BS is capped at 20%. Therefore if you're sending them more money, most of that more money HAS to be spent on healthcare for somebody, and since you're getting older it's highly likely you will be that somebody soon enough.
What'll probably save you is that a plan like that sounds too good to be true, which probably means there was some "but" in the fine print which would allow them to drop your ass as soon as you got expensive.
The problem with a) Checks and Balances, b) powerful individual congressman, and c) a massively diverse country is that major overhauls of entire policy areas are virtually impossible.
For example let's say you just want to get Federal per capita health spending below Canada's, because the federal government in Canada is the only spending on healthcare which should be (in theory) a lot cheaper then the various systems our Federal government uses to insure less then half of the country. That probably requires giving people on the VA system the same insurance options as over-65s. But if you do that a lot of veterans are gonna worry that their care will get worse because VA-System enrollees are happier then medicare enrollees. Some over-65s will freak out because at that age group there is a very vocal cohort of People Who Hate Change On Principle. Which means some Congressman will bring up questions, because it is pretty much his entire job to bring up questions like that, and the rest of Congress will go along with him because a) Seniors always vote, and b) no politician wants to be the guy accused of screwing veterans. Cue Congressional Check of Presidential proposal.
If you overhauled the private insurance system it would be even worse because most Americans a) receive health insurance from their employers, and are b) convinced that it is not only above-average when compared to other employer plans, it is also better then all other possible options. When Clinton tried that shit it didn't even get past Committee.
Thus you have Obamacare, which tries to merge several disparate insurance markets (Congressional healthcare, the Individual Market, and Hi-Risk Pools) nobody was particularly attached to. It could in the future include several markets that some users (but under half) like -- Medicaid, the Small Group market -- with an option that people like but is basically already Obamacare (Federal Employees already use Exchanges similar to to healthcare.gov).
If you want a government system that runs like an engineer would want a government to run you probably need to steal the Westminster System used by the UK, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, etc. There's one guy. He's Prime Minister. He's in charge or he isn't. If he disagrees with you, tough. Your choices are a) convince Parliament to fire him and force new elections, or b) wait for new elections. This whole Obama-spends-15-months-minorly-reforming-healthcare-then-spends-40-arguing-with-Republicans-about-it just doesn't happen. There's no bribes to be extracted in the vote-to-call-the question in the Senate. There's no filibuster. There's no endless committee hearings where powerful people posture for the camera. There's no such thing as a Westminster-system pol who supports part of the PM's program and votes against the rest.
Hell, in Canada Parliament is even less of a check on the government then I've implied. You can't run for election as an MP unless your party leader signs your nomination papers, and if you're in government that's the Prime Minister.
The problem with the article isn't that the error rate it mentions wasn't a huge problem, it's that it's a huge problem Obama's apparently fixed. To quote the article on the post-relaunch website:
The site performed well this week, Bataille said. The site had no unscheduled down time and its page error rate was.77%, about the same as the past few weeks. Page load times were below one second.
There's no info in the article saying Bataille is lying, and you'd think if 10% of insurance applications were missing forms/had duplicates/etc. somebody would mention it.
One of the things I hate about America is that the pols never actually do anything terribly controversial. In 2008 US Health system had the British NHS for veterans, a typical Northern European system for Federal employees and Massachusetts residents, Canadian medicare for seniors (and yes, they're both called Medicare), and multiple purely American private health insurance systems (a small group market, a large group market, an individual market, hi-rick pools, and 50 slightly different state versions of each). Given that finance people run most of these systems, and finance people's major life-goal is revenue maximization, you had a whole lot of administrative costs (aka: finance people), virtually no cost controls, and nobody who thought about the situation for more then two seconds was surprised that a) the Federal government spent more per capita on healthcare then governments that actually cover everyone, b) many people were not covered (or had shitty coverage), and c) costs were increasing at ridiculous rates. Firing finance people and making Doctors the key decision-makers wouldn't help much because Doctors are convinced that everyone in their sector should make as much as a comparatively educated finance weenie on Wall Street, which means they don;t say know when the ridiculously overpaid specialist demands a $50k raise. To fix the mess you'd either need to remove most of the sources of finance people, or replace the finance people entirely with government bureaucrats who think that nobody should break $200k in base salary because the CEO (ie: President Obama) only make $400k and the Board of Directors (aka Congress) only make $174k.
So Obama had a fairly huge problem to solve. People who needed and wanted insurance weren't getting it, sometimes because they were poor but not always (only a fool agrees to insure someone whose breast cancer is in remission for the sticker price), many of the ones who were getting it were getting shitty insurance, and the finance weenies running the various systems were bleeding the country dry. But he can't get rid of most of the system because this is America. The VA, and Medicare are untouchable (unless they want more money). Large group policies from big employers are untouchable because the majority of the country uses them and would totally freak out if they changed even a smidgen. So Obama decided to rationalize the small group and individual markets, which guts the majority of income for finance weenies (prior to Obamacare it was possible for non-medical costs in those plans to be 40%, that means finance weenies got 40% of your premiums, now that's capped at 20%). But to do that he had to eliminate the existing markets, and to eliminate the breast-cancer-survivor problem he had to make insurance mandatory.
As a result we've got health cost increases in the relatively reasonable sub-10% range, the website has an error rate of under 1% so by this time next year almost everyone will have reasonably priced comprehensive insurance, and pretty much the only thing Obama had to give up for it was his current image.
Unfortunately for those bitching about the website the error-rate the article's talking about is entirely from the pre-relaunch period. The data they have on the post-relaunch website is a 0.77% error rate.
1) This is a long-term program, not a short-term war. Social Security/Medicare/etc. all had some disasters at roll-out. Once the disasters were fixed the program started running and have kept running pretty much unchanged. OTOH, the whole point of winning a war is that the war ends. the government program funding said war gets to go away, and everyone goes home.
2) Don't worry. There are plenty of conservative think-tanks in DC. There're probably more conservative think-tanks then liberal ones because a) conservative activists don't want to work for anything but a think tank, a campaign, or the policy staff of a right-wing elected official (OTOH liberal activists will happily take jobs in Academia and/or the government) and b) conservative donors think that non-think-tank sources of info are biased against conservatives therefore they give the Heartland Institute big money donations.
As for the "kickbacks," you're quoting something that is totally made-up. The company that designed the website gave as much to the Romney as Obama.
Part of the 25% error rate is apparently the Feds double-sending a form. That's not a good thing, but it's not like the insurer can't do it's job just because it has two identical copies of one of your forms. If the forms are different, and include important info, the double-copies could be a huge problem, but the article doesn't give us any way to tell how many of these 25% error are actually errors vs. how many are conservatives in the insurance industry bitching that their guy got whipped in November of 2012.
More importantly the data is old. There were 834 errors in forms sent prior to the big relaunch, which works out to a 25% error rate, and indicates that roughly 3,336 actually managed to get the website to tell them it worked in October/November; but pretty much the entire reason we had a relaunch was that the site sucked. The current error rate in the article is 0.77%. It's probable that number will go up, as most of that actual humans who've used the site haven't sen the copies of the forms sent to the insurance companies yet, maybe by an order of magnitude (ie: 8% error rate), but so far the relaunched website seems to be doing OK.
I didn't say anyone would (or would not) like Texas more. I said that, by the actual numbers, Texas has worse education and healthcare then California. I further pointed out that because it's very easy for a relatively well-off person to avoid the places non-relatively-well-off people live the anecdotal experience of a relatively-well-off person is totally irrelevent to these discussions. The numbers I mentioned aren't particularly controversial.
Look, there's nothing wrong with low taxes. But if you want low taxes you're gonna get reduced government services, and the major areas state governments service are health care and education. Which means you will be saying "Thank God for Mississippi" whenever health and education rankings come out. Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy Californians aren't idiots who think that 17% income tax is less then zero income tax, they're smart people who have decided they prefer to live in a state with higher educational attainment, and better general health, in exchange for paying that utterly ridonkulous 17% income tax rate.
Texans are sicker then most of the country, worse educated, and (since the state is run by Libertarian leaning Republicans) has very few pollution regulations.
It is true that in Texas, like most of America, it is trivial for a person making six figures to avoid contact with anyone who is actually measured in those statistics. Which means your personal experience isn't terribly compelling evidence. OTOH it's also true that most of the problem stats in Texas come from rural areas, and you're apparently a city boy. And in Texas cities the college-education rates, health crises (like Diabetes), etc. are much more competitive. They beat most states. But they don't beat the cities within those states.
That's the price you pay for living in a state with no income tax and very few regulations on businesses.
You must be from the west side of the state, or up north. In Detroit we got snow before January, but typically only flurries, and even if it stuck within a couple days it melted. This is because the wind blows west, and we're just East of Lake Erie. Snow from that lake blows onto Ontario/New York State. Snow from Lake Michigan has an entire state to fall on before it gets to Detroit. And there's a lot of Michigan for it to fall on. It's the biggest state East of the Mississippi if you include water area, and second only to Georgia in land area.
In the long term it's probably got better weather then most of the rest of the country, because global warming will take the edge off bitter Midwestern winters, while making fresh water lakes much more valuable. Freshwater rivers will be a mixed blessing, because high heat means high evaporation means half the time you're dying of drought, and the other half drowning (the water that evaporated will have to go somewhere). OTOH with all that rain Puget Sound isn't going to die of nd flooding is a lot more manageable when the water can just run straight into the ocean.
That's kinda the point about anybody saying a weapons-banning treaty will actually deter anyone from using drones. Land mine treaties work because the big powers don't like that small powers can make huge sections of their borders impenetrable to expensive tanks with $50 WW2 tech landmines.
But it should be noted that, to my knowledge, there are precisely zero countries in the world where a treaty is taken more seriously by domestic law then domestic law is.
But let's say you include a treaty which says it doesn't count as signed until it's enacted into domestic law. The treaty must be funded by a dedicated, relatively small tax. It includes automatic sanctions on anybody who a) amends the treaty law without permission, or b) uses drones. The sanctions are a big deal. Something along the lines of all bank transfers to or from the sanctioned country lose 1% of their value, a 5% tariff is imposed on imports, etc. The treaty is enforced by the international bureaucracy that is set up by the treaty, which has the same standing as the local judiciary in any state that has signed the agreement.
It's not likely we'd agree to it, and it wouldn't actually *stop* the US from using drones. But it would make the cost of the US using drones really high. At a minimum we'd have to bribe most of the world into joining our pro-drone campaign by calling special sessions of their Legislatures to amend their domestic legal codes. At a maximum Wall Street would be screwed. And the US Government really hates screwing Wall Street.
BTW, The legal structure of the EU is an awful lot like this. EU members are technically sovereign, which means that legally speaking the only thing that stops Sweden/France/etc. from declaring blue and red to be the same color is that the EU could force a bunch of it's neighbors to play economic hardball on the issue. So if enough countries really want something like this it can happen. The problem with this issue is no country's leaders actually wants to ban drone warfare except the Pakistanis, and even the Pakistanis may not actually mean it.
In this country people (particularly white people like me), have a very long and sordid history of declaring the most trivial infringement on their rights is the first step to dictatorship, while tolerating literal slavery directed at non-white people. Generally most of the complainers say they're for freedom for everybody, but they don't actually do anything about it.
I fail to see your point, or how it relates to freedom in general. I don't believe in "trivial" infringements.
Would you rather live in a country where every cop shot one opposition activist a month, or where every cop asked three people to show him their ids for no reason every day? If all infringements are equal then the second country is less free then the first by definition because it has many times more Constitutional violations.
But they are complaints about a program that is authorized by a warrant (even if it's a bad warrant).
If you know the warrants are bad, why even mention it? I couldn't care less about their warrants; they're not even constitutional.
Because it exists.
It's not good them doing this (even with a warrant), but it's less blatant this way.
It has resulted in real-world inconvenience to a very small number of people
As well as infringed upon the freedoms of nearly everyone. I do not see this as a mere inconvenience, nor do I think it's trivial.
So you knowing that some guy has read your email is just as bad as being late for a job interview because some cop frisked you because you were black? How would you explain that to the job interviewer? Or maybe it's a first day of work.
Keep in mind that more then once the Stop-and-frisk totals have been greater then NYC's black male population, so the scenarios I mention are quite common.
most of whom are clearly over-reacting because (like Cartman on South Park) there's no way in hell the NSA cares whether they live or die.
It seems you don't understand the power of information, or why some people believe that any infringement upon individual liberties is anything but trivial.
I understand the power of information fine.
What I don't understand is why "someone has power over me, and could (in theory if he really wanted) screw me," is by definition just as bad "that cop just actually screwed me."
It results in massive inconvenience to a very large group of people.
I have no idea what you're trying to tell me here. If you're trying to get me to think of the NSA issue as a trivial matter, it's simply not going to happen. I see it as extremely dangerous, just like searching random people to check their innocent (both stop-and-frisk, that drunk driving nonsense, and the TSA).
I'm not saying it's trivial. I actually made a point of saying "I'm not saying it's trivial." But in the real world being stopped and frisked is a whole order of magnitude worse then having your metadata on a government server. Period.
And, true to form, the very very white denizens of Slashdot freak out at least three times a week about the NSA-PRISM thing which inconvenienced them, but they only talk about stop-and-frisk when somebody else forces them to.
Just because people aren't constantly talking about what you want to talk about doesn't mean that what they are talking about is trivial, or that they don't care about it.
And if people "force" them to talk about it, then clearly there are people here talking about it.
Name one person here talking about it besides me. We've got 208 posts on the Fourth Amendment in this thread alone. All that mention stop-and-frisk are by me, or in response to me. Most of the responses are a lot like yours, and implicitly claim that the NSA is worse then stop-and-frisk because it affects more people, which is simply ridiculous.
The non-classified info on drones in Pakistan is that we use them to observe our targets before we level the house. This makes sense to me because a) it's hard to get good resolution on where a specific human is from a satellite, b) we have no assets on the ground in Pakistan, and c) we have no combat aircraft in Pakistan. If you google Drone Pilots PTSD you'll see numerous sources claiming that this is exactly what drone pilots do every day.
The relation to your post was that I was showing another reason why 'ZOMG drones!!!11!!' was stupid. If you're the kind of person who worries about the US Military being heavy-handed you're the kind of person who should absolutely love drones because they produce an order of magnitude fewer civilian casualties then the alternatives.
I believe the point of the article was that the various big buildings involved have been severely damaged. And if one of the tornadoes that accompanies any Typhoon/Hurricane hit their building in the wrong spot they could easily lose their boreholes. Regardless I didn't bring up the possibility because I thought that they'd definitely have that problem, I brought it up because they theoretically could have that problem.
Mind you I can't actually check any of this, because I refuse to deal with the Times paywall, but what proportion of slashdot posters actually read the entire article?
The government always had the power to kill people it didn't like. War, the death penalty, skirmishes technically not wars, etc. give it the legal power to kill people. Planes give the US Government the power to do this to anyone anywhere back in the days of the Doolittle Raid.
This seems somewhat confused. Government does not always have the legal authority to kill anyone it likes. Sometimes, however, it pretends it does and new technology often allows a sort of sleight of hand. Thus we end up with our illegal involvement in wars in Libya and Yemen, with the government claiming that it isn't war since no human being is inside the drones and cruise missiles piloting them.
Strict Constitutional Constructionists frequently miss a couple points:
1) The entire point of the Constitution is it's not supposed to be clear. If it was clear the various branches would spend all their time tending to the bits of the government they clearly controlled, rather then arguing with each-other. Which, to the Founders, meant they'd all be tyrannical. The fact that it's clear to you isn't proof that it's actually clear, anymore then the Pope's certainty he is the Vicar of Christ is proof that all baptists are unbiblical.
2) There major unclarity in this case is the Constitution's failure to define anything. Yes Congress has to declare war for a war to be valid, but none of those words is defined. Which means that a) the President can argue over whether it's a war, and b) he can then argue Congress declared it implicitly.
In the context of a government that supposed to be a constant battle between branches for power, the fact the Congress is choosing not to battle on this issue seems to indicate that they support the Libya/Yemen wars, and given that the point of the "declare war" clause is to ensure the President only starts wars Congress supports...
Restrictions on drones would be remarkably ineffective. [...] You could restrict the government's ability to USE drones by creating some sort of international legal mechanism to decide who is a valid drone-target.
The first statement claims that legal restrictions would be ineffective due to practical considerations. The second statement claims that legal restrictions would be effective because it forgets an important consideration of actual practice: i.e. there are a great many international laws that the U.S. habitually violate.
You're missing the distinction.
The first set of restrictions is the kind we have on everything. Some treaty between sovereign states, that includes no penalties for being found in violation.
The second would include an internationally funded bureaucracy to control drone issues. If the US tried to cheat there'd be a guy whose job was to stop the cheating, he'd have real powers over people within these United States, and the President and Congress wouldn't be able to dodge him. In short it would be a proto-world government.
I do not think rules and restrictions on drones are likely to completely control there use, anymore than I think the 4th amendment protects U.S. citizens from illegal search and seizure in practice. But without such rules give at least some protection, if only the ability to skewer in the courts those who abuse and flout the rules after the fact.
But for that to actually happen the US would have to agree to give it the right to execute Americans, and I doubt you'd be cool with that.
No, I wouldn't. But, then, I'm not cool with my own government having such a power (a government in which I ostensibly have some say). I'm hardly about to ask for an unelected international body to have such power.
Which really doesn't leave you many options.
Nobody in power, including the Courts, has taken the view that the president needs a specific Congressional resolution authorizing less then
How many years (or months) will it be before some splinter group hits a U.S. political delegation with a drone strike somewhere outside the U.S.? They will see no reason not to do this.
It'll be awhile.
To have drone tech you need aircraft tech, and most splinter groups don't have aircraft. The ones that do (aka: Hezbollah) got their aircraft from countries, and those countries do not want to give us a reason to level them.
Now if you mean a cheap RC chopper with a gun attached to an improvised hardpoint steered by camera, they could manage that. The trick would be getting a vehicle that small to stay stable when it's dealing with recoil.
Depends how close the ships get. If it's an amphibious invasion (ie: some of them actually have to land onshore) it would be trivial for a country the size of Iran to hire a couple thousand drone jockeys, and create a bunch of drones with enough of a payload to seriously inconvenience a landing craft, and then just throw drones at said landing craft 24/7. Eventually somebody's defense get saturated and the Navy has a problem. Their anti-aircraft guns run out of ammo, their electronic warfare officer faints from lack of sleep, whatever. They're screwed. The Navy would have to nail the drone base, or hack the drones command/control links or be seriously inconvenienced.
Granted that scenario assumes the USAF didn't flatten the drone base, the NSA can't hack their central servers and shut the whole drone effort down, etc., but anytime the weapons mix changes the guys who owned the fanciest weapons have a problem.
How many years did flintlocks exist before there was a revolution? They were invented in 1610, after all.
As for drones potential to expand government power, how?
The government always had the power to kill people it didn't like. War, the death penalty, skirmishes technically not wars, etc. give it the legal power to kill people. Planes give the US Government the power to do this to anyone anywhere back in the days of the Doolittle Raid.
Drones increase the government's accuracy by a significant amount, but accuracy != power.
Restrictions on drones would be remarkably ineffective. A large enough RC Aircraft, with your army's sidearm, plus a cheap wireless camera is a drone. As long as governments are allowed to have airplanes, and electronical doohickeys like wireless cameras transmitting to computers, they will have drones.
You could restrict the government's ability to USE drones by creating some sort of international legal mechanism to decide who is a valid drone-target. Then the UN Drone Squad would kill them, or arrest them, or whatever. But for that to actually happen the US would have to agree to give it the right to execute Americans, and I doubt you'd be cool with that.
I agree, but there's a wrinkle you didn't mention.
The one thing you can do with drones you can't do with an F-16 is have the damn thing film a target for hours. Since an F-16 has a human pilot, who can't sit in that tiny-little cockpit for 12 hours straight, it's missions have to be kept short. Moreover since F-16 pilots are very valuable assets the plane has to be designed so that the pilot has a very good chance of getting home. That means it has to be able to run away real fast, it needs backup systems if something goes wrong, it needs all kinds of weapons to deal with threats, etc. There's a reason new F-16s cost $40-50 million and the latest generation combat aircraft is well past $100 million. You don't want those things hanging around a warzone shooting video 24/7 for a week. They might notice, and start taking pot-shots, and eventually they'll figure out how to bring it down.
Which means if you're fighting with conventional aircraft you have real motive to blow everything to smithereens. It wastes lots of your money (ammo ain't free), but it saves even more expensive planes and pilots.
OTOH a $10 million drone is expendable. It can hang out filming some suspected enemy's house all day. Literally. They have an endurance in the 30-hour range. Your drone jockeys do 80-hour shifts drinking Dew and eating Cheeto's. If you trade off drones you can easily have a house under observation for weeks. During that time you can gather a lot of data on whose in the House, when they're in the House (does the little kid always leave to play soccer in the mid-afternoon, or does he sometimes stay home?), etc. You burn a lot of AvGas, but in the mean-time you gain a lot of info. Info that lets you do things like wait until said little kid is out of the house to level it.
Which is why the hated drone war has only produced a few thousand casualties, less then a thousand a year, whereas a non-drone campaign would produce 10,000 a year.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory they don't have to put up with a $1,300 a month premium. That's $15,600 a year, which means that as long as they make less then $164k and change the premium is more then 9.5% of their income, which means they are supposed to buying plans on healthcare.gov. They'd even get the subsidy available to those making less then 400% of poverty-level.
I suspect that in practice your company has another, cheap-ass shitty plan option that your lesser-paid coworkers are supposed to use.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Can be != will be. It's worth noting here that filing a claim indicates that you will cost an insurance company money. If they then can find an error in your application that let's them selectively disqualify you after the fact, there would be considerable incentive to do so.
Two points:
1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address. They could dump you if you lie about which County you live in, but the whole "let's throw him off because he said he'd gotten the sniffles once and he'd gotten them twice" racket is now impossible.
In other words I humbly thank you for demonstrating why we needed ObamaCare in the first place.
Keep in mind that in theory Healthcare.gov should be simpler then those monsters. This is because a) Healthcare.gov is not intended to be so confusing that people fuck it up (many "cheap" plans intentionally confuse people, take their premiums, and then throw them off as soon as they file a claim because the application was wrong), and b) it is not supposed to get any info from you except your age and address. The only other info it should need is income info, and in theory that's coming from the IRS.
That's probably why the site was relatively easy to get working in a month even tho a bunch of idiots fucked it up. If you read the article carefully you'll note that the post-relaunch error rate number is under 1%.
Really?
I live in an areas that has a mix of wealthy religious people of numerous faiths, and low-income people. The religious institutions around here do a lot of relatively cheap stuff that is easy to tell people about like soup kitchens, thanksgiving turkeys, and financial literacy classes. Raising $10k isn't hard for a faith group, using it to buy a bunch of turkeys is even easier, and it looks really good in the Parish Newsletter. But feeding those families all year is just no within their budget. The government does the shit that cost real money.
For example, WalMart is a madhouse early in the month because that's when the Feds fund the BridgeCard. Several times people in front of me have used WIC to pay for food, which is a real process. The BridgeCard is much simpler -- on the backend it has to be more complex then a debit card because it can only be used to pay for certain non-alcoholic food items, but to the end-used it's a debit card. Many of my neighbors are on section 8. Most of the ones who aren't are on the waiting list. Nobody talks about waiting lists for rental assistance programs from faith groups. Everyone has terrible teeth because Ohio medicaid has no dental coverage. No faith group has a dental office to cover the gap.
You can still get the service by calling in.
I will never do that however, because there's no way I'm giving the US federal government any of my medical information voluntarily. Though, they likely have it all already anyway.
This isn't a traditional insurance application. Since insurers can't jack up your rates because you had a medical problem when you were 12 the website doesn't ask about your medical history. The medical info they ask for is limited to your age.
Which they already know, because that's on your Social Security records, your birth certificate, your driver's license, your income tax form, etc.
You got a link to that $0.5 Billion cost?
Snopes.com just did a piece on the amount of spending on healthcare.gov, and said it was in $150 million range plus whatever they spent last month.
One thing I've noticed about the government is that it's the only sector where people routinely attribute lies from one bit of the sector to everyone else. In other words if the NSA lies about something people will say that the New York Health Exchange's credibility is shot, but if McDonald's does it everyone goes "at least Burger King is honest." This is remarkably silly because the NSA has nothing to do with New York state government, or healthcare; but if MickyD's thinks it can get away with a lie it's probably because BK is already doing that shit and nobody cares.
I suspect you'll ultimately get a better deal do to simple math: prior to Obamacare insurers could spend whatever they wanted on BS that isn't healthcare. In the small group and individual markets marketing/administration/etc. routinely gobbled up 30% of your health care dollar. Now they can't be quite that profligate. BS is capped at 20%. Therefore if you're sending them more money, most of that more money HAS to be spent on healthcare for somebody, and since you're getting older it's highly likely you will be that somebody soon enough.
What'll probably save you is that a plan like that sounds too good to be true, which probably means there was some "but" in the fine print which would allow them to drop your ass as soon as you got expensive.
The problem with a) Checks and Balances, b) powerful individual congressman, and c) a massively diverse country is that major overhauls of entire policy areas are virtually impossible.
For example let's say you just want to get Federal per capita health spending below Canada's, because the federal government in Canada is the only spending on healthcare which should be (in theory) a lot cheaper then the various systems our Federal government uses to insure less then half of the country. That probably requires giving people on the VA system the same insurance options as over-65s. But if you do that a lot of veterans are gonna worry that their care will get worse because VA-System enrollees are happier then medicare enrollees. Some over-65s will freak out because at that age group there is a very vocal cohort of People Who Hate Change On Principle. Which means some Congressman will bring up questions, because it is pretty much his entire job to bring up questions like that, and the rest of Congress will go along with him because a) Seniors always vote, and b) no politician wants to be the guy accused of screwing veterans. Cue Congressional Check of Presidential proposal.
If you overhauled the private insurance system it would be even worse because most Americans a) receive health insurance from their employers, and are b) convinced that it is not only above-average when compared to other employer plans, it is also better then all other possible options. When Clinton tried that shit it didn't even get past Committee.
Thus you have Obamacare, which tries to merge several disparate insurance markets (Congressional healthcare, the Individual Market, and Hi-Risk Pools) nobody was particularly attached to. It could in the future include several markets that some users (but under half) like -- Medicaid, the Small Group market -- with an option that people like but is basically already Obamacare (Federal Employees already use Exchanges similar to to healthcare.gov).
If you want a government system that runs like an engineer would want a government to run you probably need to steal the Westminster System used by the UK, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, etc. There's one guy. He's Prime Minister. He's in charge or he isn't. If he disagrees with you, tough. Your choices are a) convince Parliament to fire him and force new elections, or b) wait for new elections. This whole Obama-spends-15-months-minorly-reforming-healthcare-then-spends-40-arguing-with-Republicans-about-it just doesn't happen. There's no bribes to be extracted in the vote-to-call-the question in the Senate. There's no filibuster. There's no endless committee hearings where powerful people posture for the camera. There's no such thing as a Westminster-system pol who supports part of the PM's program and votes against the rest.
Hell, in Canada Parliament is even less of a check on the government then I've implied. You can't run for election as an MP unless your party leader signs your nomination papers, and if you're in government that's the Prime Minister.
The problem with the article isn't that the error rate it mentions wasn't a huge problem, it's that it's a huge problem Obama's apparently fixed. To quote the article on the post-relaunch website:
The site performed well this week, Bataille said. The site had no unscheduled down time and its page error rate was .77%, about the same as the past few weeks. Page load times were below one second.
There's no info in the article saying Bataille is lying, and you'd think if 10% of insurance applications were missing forms/had duplicates/etc. somebody would mention it.
One of the things I hate about America is that the pols never actually do anything terribly controversial. In 2008 US Health system had the British NHS for veterans, a typical Northern European system for Federal employees and Massachusetts residents, Canadian medicare for seniors (and yes, they're both called Medicare), and multiple purely American private health insurance systems (a small group market, a large group market, an individual market, hi-rick pools, and 50 slightly different state versions of each). Given that finance people run most of these systems, and finance people's major life-goal is revenue maximization, you had a whole lot of administrative costs (aka: finance people), virtually no cost controls, and nobody who thought about the situation for more then two seconds was surprised that a) the Federal government spent more per capita on healthcare then governments that actually cover everyone, b) many people were not covered (or had shitty coverage), and c) costs were increasing at ridiculous rates. Firing finance people and making Doctors the key decision-makers wouldn't help much because Doctors are convinced that everyone in their sector should make as much as a comparatively educated finance weenie on Wall Street, which means they don;t say know when the ridiculously overpaid specialist demands a $50k raise. To fix the mess you'd either need to remove most of the sources of finance people, or replace the finance people entirely with government bureaucrats who think that nobody should break $200k in base salary because the CEO (ie: President Obama) only make $400k and the Board of Directors (aka Congress) only make $174k.
So Obama had a fairly huge problem to solve. People who needed and wanted insurance weren't getting it, sometimes because they were poor but not always (only a fool agrees to insure someone whose breast cancer is in remission for the sticker price), many of the ones who were getting it were getting shitty insurance, and the finance weenies running the various systems were bleeding the country dry. But he can't get rid of most of the system because this is America. The VA, and Medicare are untouchable (unless they want more money). Large group policies from big employers are untouchable because the majority of the country uses them and would totally freak out if they changed even a smidgen. So Obama decided to rationalize the small group and individual markets, which guts the majority of income for finance weenies (prior to Obamacare it was possible for non-medical costs in those plans to be 40%, that means finance weenies got 40% of your premiums, now that's capped at 20%). But to do that he had to eliminate the existing markets, and to eliminate the breast-cancer-survivor problem he had to make insurance mandatory.
As a result we've got health cost increases in the relatively reasonable sub-10% range, the website has an error rate of under 1% so by this time next year almost everyone will have reasonably priced comprehensive insurance, and pretty much the only thing Obama had to give up for it was his current image.
That is true.
Unfortunately for those bitching about the website the error-rate the article's talking about is entirely from the pre-relaunch period. The data they have on the post-relaunch website is a 0.77% error rate.
Two points:
1) This is a long-term program, not a short-term war. Social Security/Medicare/etc. all had some disasters at roll-out. Once the disasters were fixed the program started running and have kept running pretty much unchanged. OTOH, the whole point of winning a war is that the war ends. the government program funding said war gets to go away, and everyone goes home.
2) Don't worry. There are plenty of conservative think-tanks in DC. There're probably more conservative think-tanks then liberal ones because a) conservative activists don't want to work for anything but a think tank, a campaign, or the policy staff of a right-wing elected official (OTOH liberal activists will happily take jobs in Academia and/or the government) and b) conservative donors think that non-think-tank sources of info are biased against conservatives therefore they give the Heartland Institute big money donations.
As for the "kickbacks," you're quoting something that is totally made-up. The company that designed the website gave as much to the Romney as Obama.
Part of the 25% error rate is apparently the Feds double-sending a form. That's not a good thing, but it's not like the insurer can't do it's job just because it has two identical copies of one of your forms. If the forms are different, and include important info, the double-copies could be a huge problem, but the article doesn't give us any way to tell how many of these 25% error are actually errors vs. how many are conservatives in the insurance industry bitching that their guy got whipped in November of 2012.
More importantly the data is old. There were 834 errors in forms sent prior to the big relaunch, which works out to a 25% error rate, and indicates that roughly 3,336 actually managed to get the website to tell them it worked in October/November; but pretty much the entire reason we had a relaunch was that the site sucked. The current error rate in the article is 0.77%. It's probable that number will go up, as most of that actual humans who've used the site haven't sen the copies of the forms sent to the insurance companies yet, maybe by an order of magnitude (ie: 8% error rate), but so far the relaunched website seems to be doing OK.
I didn't say anyone would (or would not) like Texas more. I said that, by the actual numbers, Texas has worse education and healthcare then California. I further pointed out that because it's very easy for a relatively well-off person to avoid the places non-relatively-well-off people live the anecdotal experience of a relatively-well-off person is totally irrelevent to these discussions. The numbers I mentioned aren't particularly controversial.
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/new-state-state-college-attainment-numbers-show-progress-toward-2020-goal
37.9% of Cali residents have college degrees, 32.2% of Texans do. California is (by definition) better educated then Texas.
http://www.kten.com/story/11532795/oklahoma-texas-among-most-unhealthy-states
Texas and Oklahoma were ranked as least healthy states in the nation, largely because Texans are fatter then average.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_life_expectancy
Despite those rankings, Texas life expectancy is about average (78.5 vs. 78.64 nationally), and beats the pants off good old Mississippi (75), but Cali is #4. Californians live to 80.
Look, there's nothing wrong with low taxes. But if you want low taxes you're gonna get reduced government services, and the major areas state governments service are health care and education. Which means you will be saying "Thank God for Mississippi" whenever health and education rankings come out. Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy Californians aren't idiots who think that 17% income tax is less then zero income tax, they're smart people who have decided they prefer to live in a state with higher educational attainment, and better general health, in exchange for paying that utterly ridonkulous 17% income tax rate.
He's going by actual statistics.
Texans are sicker then most of the country, worse educated, and (since the state is run by Libertarian leaning Republicans) has very few pollution regulations.
It is true that in Texas, like most of America, it is trivial for a person making six figures to avoid contact with anyone who is actually measured in those statistics. Which means your personal experience isn't terribly compelling evidence. OTOH it's also true that most of the problem stats in Texas come from rural areas, and you're apparently a city boy. And in Texas cities the college-education rates, health crises (like Diabetes), etc. are much more competitive. They beat most states. But they don't beat the cities within those states.
That's the price you pay for living in a state with no income tax and very few regulations on businesses.
You must be from the west side of the state, or up north. In Detroit we got snow before January, but typically only flurries, and even if it stuck within a couple days it melted. This is because the wind blows west, and we're just East of Lake Erie. Snow from that lake blows onto Ontario/New York State. Snow from Lake Michigan has an entire state to fall on before it gets to Detroit. And there's a lot of Michigan for it to fall on. It's the biggest state East of the Mississippi if you include water area, and second only to Georgia in land area.
In the long term it's probably got better weather then most of the rest of the country, because global warming will take the edge off bitter Midwestern winters, while making fresh water lakes much more valuable. Freshwater rivers will be a mixed blessing, because high heat means high evaporation means half the time you're dying of drought, and the other half drowning (the water that evaporated will have to go somewhere). OTOH with all that rain Puget Sound isn't going to die of nd flooding is a lot more manageable when the water can just run straight into the ocean.
That's kinda the point about anybody saying a weapons-banning treaty will actually deter anyone from using drones. Land mine treaties work because the big powers don't like that small powers can make huge sections of their borders impenetrable to expensive tanks with $50 WW2 tech landmines.
But it should be noted that, to my knowledge, there are precisely zero countries in the world where a treaty is taken more seriously by domestic law then domestic law is.
But let's say you include a treaty which says it doesn't count as signed until it's enacted into domestic law. The treaty must be funded by a dedicated, relatively small tax. It includes automatic sanctions on anybody who a) amends the treaty law without permission, or b) uses drones. The sanctions are a big deal. Something along the lines of all bank transfers to or from the sanctioned country lose 1% of their value, a 5% tariff is imposed on imports, etc. The treaty is enforced by the international bureaucracy that is set up by the treaty, which has the same standing as the local judiciary in any state that has signed the agreement.
It's not likely we'd agree to it, and it wouldn't actually *stop* the US from using drones. But it would make the cost of the US using drones really high. At a minimum we'd have to bribe most of the world into joining our pro-drone campaign by calling special sessions of their Legislatures to amend their domestic legal codes. At a maximum Wall Street would be screwed. And the US Government really hates screwing Wall Street.
BTW, The legal structure of the EU is an awful lot like this. EU members are technically sovereign, which means that legally speaking the only thing that stops Sweden/France/etc. from declaring blue and red to be the same color is that the EU could force a bunch of it's neighbors to play economic hardball on the issue. So if enough countries really want something like this it can happen. The problem with this issue is no country's leaders actually wants to ban drone warfare except the Pakistanis, and even the Pakistanis may not actually mean it.
In this country people (particularly white people like me), have a very long and sordid history of declaring the most trivial infringement on their rights is the first step to dictatorship, while tolerating literal slavery directed at non-white people. Generally most of the complainers say they're for freedom for everybody, but they don't actually do anything about it.
I fail to see your point, or how it relates to freedom in general. I don't believe in "trivial" infringements.
Would you rather live in a country where every cop shot one opposition activist a month, or where every cop asked three people to show him their ids for no reason every day? If all infringements are equal then the second country is less free then the first by definition because it has many times more Constitutional violations.
But they are complaints about a program that is authorized by a warrant (even if it's a bad warrant).
If you know the warrants are bad, why even mention it? I couldn't care less about their warrants; they're not even constitutional.
Because it exists.
It's not good them doing this (even with a warrant), but it's less blatant this way.
It has resulted in real-world inconvenience to a very small number of people
As well as infringed upon the freedoms of nearly everyone. I do not see this as a mere inconvenience, nor do I think it's trivial.
So you knowing that some guy has read your email is just as bad as being late for a job interview because some cop frisked you because you were black? How would you explain that to the job interviewer? Or maybe it's a first day of work.
Keep in mind that more then once the Stop-and-frisk totals have been greater then NYC's black male population, so the scenarios I mention are quite common.
most of whom are clearly over-reacting because (like Cartman on South Park) there's no way in hell the NSA cares whether they live or die.
It seems you don't understand the power of information, or why some people believe that any infringement upon individual liberties is anything but trivial.
I understand the power of information fine.
What I don't understand is why "someone has power over me, and could (in theory if he really wanted) screw me," is by definition just as bad "that cop just actually screwed me."
It results in massive inconvenience to a very large group of people.
I have no idea what you're trying to tell me here. If you're trying to get me to think of the NSA issue as a trivial matter, it's simply not going to happen. I see it as extremely dangerous, just like searching random people to check their innocent (both stop-and-frisk, that drunk driving nonsense, and the TSA).
I'm not saying it's trivial. I actually made a point of saying "I'm not saying it's trivial." But in the real world being stopped and frisked is a whole order of magnitude worse then having your metadata on a government server. Period.
And, true to form, the very very white denizens of Slashdot freak out at least three times a week about the NSA-PRISM thing which inconvenienced them, but they only talk about stop-and-frisk when somebody else forces them to.
Just because people aren't constantly talking about what you want to talk about doesn't mean that what they are talking about is trivial, or that they don't care about it.
And if people "force" them to talk about it, then clearly there are people here talking about it.
Name one person here talking about it besides me. We've got 208 posts on the Fourth Amendment in this thread alone. All that mention stop-and-frisk are by me, or in response to me. Most of the responses are a lot like yours, and implicitly claim that the NSA is worse then stop-and-frisk because it affects more people, which is simply ridiculous.
The non-classified info on drones in Pakistan is that we use them to observe our targets before we level the house. This makes sense to me because a) it's hard to get good resolution on where a specific human is from a satellite, b) we have no assets on the ground in Pakistan, and c) we have no combat aircraft in Pakistan. If you google Drone Pilots PTSD you'll see numerous sources claiming that this is exactly what drone pilots do every day.
The relation to your post was that I was showing another reason why 'ZOMG drones!!!11!!' was stupid. If you're the kind of person who worries about the US Military being heavy-handed you're the kind of person who should absolutely love drones because they produce an order of magnitude fewer civilian casualties then the alternatives.
I believe the point of the article was that the various big buildings involved have been severely damaged. And if one of the tornadoes that accompanies any Typhoon/Hurricane hit their building in the wrong spot they could easily lose their boreholes. Regardless I didn't bring up the possibility because I thought that they'd definitely have that problem, I brought it up because they theoretically could have that problem.
Mind you I can't actually check any of this, because I refuse to deal with the Times paywall, but what proportion of slashdot posters actually read the entire article?
The government always had the power to kill people it didn't like. War, the death penalty, skirmishes technically not wars, etc. give it the legal power to kill people. Planes give the US Government the power to do this to anyone anywhere back in the days of the Doolittle Raid.
This seems somewhat confused. Government does not always have the legal authority to kill anyone it likes. Sometimes, however, it pretends it does and new technology often allows a sort of sleight of hand. Thus we end up with our illegal involvement in wars in Libya and Yemen, with the government claiming that it isn't war since no human being is inside the drones and cruise missiles piloting them.
Strict Constitutional Constructionists frequently miss a couple points:
1) The entire point of the Constitution is it's not supposed to be clear. If it was clear the various branches would spend all their time tending to the bits of the government they clearly controlled, rather then arguing with each-other. Which, to the Founders, meant they'd all be tyrannical. The fact that it's clear to you isn't proof that it's actually clear, anymore then the Pope's certainty he is the Vicar of Christ is proof that all baptists are unbiblical.
2) There major unclarity in this case is the Constitution's failure to define anything. Yes Congress has to declare war for a war to be valid, but none of those words is defined. Which means that a) the President can argue over whether it's a war, and b) he can then argue Congress declared it implicitly.
In the context of a government that supposed to be a constant battle between branches for power, the fact the Congress is choosing not to battle on this issue seems to indicate that they support the Libya/Yemen wars, and given that the point of the "declare war" clause is to ensure the President only starts wars Congress supports...
The first statement claims that legal restrictions would be ineffective due to practical considerations. The second statement claims that legal restrictions would be effective because it forgets an important consideration of actual practice: i.e. there are a great many international laws that the U.S. habitually violate.
You're missing the distinction.
The first set of restrictions is the kind we have on everything. Some treaty between sovereign states, that includes no penalties for being found in violation.
The second would include an internationally funded bureaucracy to control drone issues. If the US tried to cheat there'd be a guy whose job was to stop the cheating, he'd have real powers over people within these United States, and the President and Congress wouldn't be able to dodge him. In short it would be a proto-world government.
I do not think rules and restrictions on drones are likely to completely control there use, anymore than I think the 4th amendment protects U.S. citizens from illegal search and seizure in practice. But without such rules give at least some protection, if only the ability to skewer in the courts those who abuse and flout the rules after the fact.
No, I wouldn't. But, then, I'm not cool with my own government having such a power (a government in which I ostensibly have some say). I'm hardly about to ask for an unelected international body to have such power.
Which really doesn't leave you many options.
Nobody in power, including the Courts, has taken the view that the president needs a specific Congressional resolution authorizing less then
Rain causes mudslides, and a hurricane has a lot of rain.
High winds can blow things into holes, and hurricanes tend to spawn tornadoes.
I'll admit it's unlikely, but it could happen.
How many years (or months) will it be before some splinter group hits a U.S. political delegation with a drone strike somewhere outside the U.S.? They will see no reason not to do this.
It'll be awhile.
To have drone tech you need aircraft tech, and most splinter groups don't have aircraft. The ones that do (aka: Hezbollah) got their aircraft from countries, and those countries do not want to give us a reason to level them.
Now if you mean a cheap RC chopper with a gun attached to an improvised hardpoint steered by camera, they could manage that. The trick would be getting a vehicle that small to stay stable when it's dealing with recoil.
Depends how close the ships get. If it's an amphibious invasion (ie: some of them actually have to land onshore) it would be trivial for a country the size of Iran to hire a couple thousand drone jockeys, and create a bunch of drones with enough of a payload to seriously inconvenience a landing craft, and then just throw drones at said landing craft 24/7. Eventually somebody's defense get saturated and the Navy has a problem. Their anti-aircraft guns run out of ammo, their electronic warfare officer faints from lack of sleep, whatever. They're screwed. The Navy would have to nail the drone base, or hack the drones command/control links or be seriously inconvenienced.
Granted that scenario assumes the USAF didn't flatten the drone base, the NSA can't hack their central servers and shut the whole drone effort down, etc., but anytime the weapons mix changes the guys who owned the fanciest weapons have a problem.
How many years did flintlocks exist before there was a revolution? They were invented in 1610, after all.
As for drones potential to expand government power, how?
The government always had the power to kill people it didn't like. War, the death penalty, skirmishes technically not wars, etc. give it the legal power to kill people. Planes give the US Government the power to do this to anyone anywhere back in the days of the Doolittle Raid.
Drones increase the government's accuracy by a significant amount, but accuracy != power.
Restrictions on drones would be remarkably ineffective. A large enough RC Aircraft, with your army's sidearm, plus a cheap wireless camera is a drone. As long as governments are allowed to have airplanes, and electronical doohickeys like wireless cameras transmitting to computers, they will have drones.
You could restrict the government's ability to USE drones by creating some sort of international legal mechanism to decide who is a valid drone-target. Then the UN Drone Squad would kill them, or arrest them, or whatever. But for that to actually happen the US would have to agree to give it the right to execute Americans, and I doubt you'd be cool with that.
I agree, but there's a wrinkle you didn't mention.
The one thing you can do with drones you can't do with an F-16 is have the damn thing film a target for hours. Since an F-16 has a human pilot, who can't sit in that tiny-little cockpit for 12 hours straight, it's missions have to be kept short. Moreover since F-16 pilots are very valuable assets the plane has to be designed so that the pilot has a very good chance of getting home. That means it has to be able to run away real fast, it needs backup systems if something goes wrong, it needs all kinds of weapons to deal with threats, etc. There's a reason new F-16s cost $40-50 million and the latest generation combat aircraft is well past $100 million. You don't want those things hanging around a warzone shooting video 24/7 for a week. They might notice, and start taking pot-shots, and eventually they'll figure out how to bring it down.
Which means if you're fighting with conventional aircraft you have real motive to blow everything to smithereens. It wastes lots of your money (ammo ain't free), but it saves even more expensive planes and pilots.
OTOH a $10 million drone is expendable. It can hang out filming some suspected enemy's house all day. Literally. They have an endurance in the 30-hour range. Your drone jockeys do 80-hour shifts drinking Dew and eating Cheeto's. If you trade off drones you can easily have a house under observation for weeks. During that time you can gather a lot of data on whose in the House, when they're in the House (does the little kid always leave to play soccer in the mid-afternoon, or does he sometimes stay home?), etc. You burn a lot of AvGas, but in the mean-time you gain a lot of info. Info that lets you do things like wait until said little kid is out of the house to level it.
Which is why the hated drone war has only produced a few thousand casualties, less then a thousand a year, whereas a non-drone campaign would produce 10,000 a year.