In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), [British historian Robert] Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, at least 15 million people were killed "by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors".[64] Rudolph Rummel in 2006 said that the earlier higher victim total estimates are correct, although he includes those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well.[65][66] Conversely, J. Arch Getty, Stephen G. Wheatcroft and others insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by "revisionist" scholars.[67][68] [British historian] Simon Sebag Montefiore in 2003 suggested that Stalin was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people.
enabling 318 million parameters on a single accelerator core. Without GPipe, Huang says, a single core can only train up to 82 million model parameters
Is that what's really going on in the human brain -- hundreds of millions of "model parameters" are getting trained up?
I doubt it. With this approach, AI researchers are following a road to something completely different from human intelligence. And I'll bet that something will be far more limited than human intelligence.
The country is run by a bunch of old rich people who see their own health as being fine and therefore don't understand the problem.
Everyone, with the exception of the rare misanthrope, wants to make the social safety net more robust and reduce the number of people who are exposed to potentially bankrupting medical bills. But there is a whole spectrum of ways to attempt to do that, and some of those ways do more harm than good. Government is not the only way to make the social safety net more robust. Arguably, it is not a way at all, because absolute poverty would have been eliminated decades ago if unnecessarily burdensome governments hadn't made economic growth much less exponential than it otherwise would have been.
In 1900, approximately 0% of Americans had health insurance. By the time Obama was elected, the figure had grown to about 83%. Going from 0% to 83% is a huge improvement in the robustness of the social safety net, and it did not happen because of any freedom-sapping mandates. It happened organically: economic growth gave most people the means to buy health insurance (or, it made their labor valuable enough that their employer willingly provided health insurance to the employee's entire family).
That progressive upward trend, borne by economic growth alone, would have continued if it hadn't been tampered with. For those who are unable to obtain insurance, there is private charity (which already funds a surprisingly large fraction of the U.S. social safety net, and always grows faster than GDP, for reasons I won't get into now), and Medicaid. That is why there are exactly zero headlines in the U.S. that read, "Joe Smith died of cancer because he couldn't afford chemo."
Any honest person who doesn't have a totalitarianism fetish, and gives thought to the matter, would agree that if you can make the social safety net more robust, and at the same time increase the fraction that is funded by voluntary charitable contributions, and decrease the fraction that is funded by the coercive takings of the Internal Revenue Service, that's a good thing.
But the unthinking nanny-state types (funded by old rich people like George Soros, and led by an objectively uber-arrogant technocrat) didn't see the steady progress (going from 0 to 83% insured); they only saw 17% uninsured, and wrung their hands in anguish until they came up with what they thought would be a quick fix: Obamacare. It's neither sustainable nor organic -- which is ironic because the left repeats those two buzzwords ad nauseam when it comes to environmental practices.
Capitalism breaks down when paying for healthcare because you can't do any of that.
Wrong; there are insurance companies competing for my business on the basis of better coverage and/or lower premiums (i.e., how efficient their internal operations are, and how effectively they negotiate lower prices with healthcare providers). I periodically reevaluate whether I want to stay with my current insurance company, or switch to a different one. I do so well before I actually need treatment for some condition.
(Surely you've noticed how competition benefits consumers. E.g., in locations where more than one gas station is competing for your business, the price of gas is significantly lower than in locations that have only one gas station.)
Now, if we go from this competitive environment to a single-payer monopoly run by government bureaucrats, free markets will truly break down.
Wrong; everyone has equal access. Since 1986, federal law explicitly forbids the denial of care to indigent or uninsured patients based on a lack of ability to pay.
Now, to many politicians, "accessible healthcare" is an inaccurate euphemism for "healthcare coercively paid for by someone else." That's probably what you mean.
laser vision correction surgery, which was available in the Soviet Union and then in Europe long before it became available in the US. Yet the average American thinks it's an American invention
Um... that's because it is an American invention. You can't get away with this kind of propaganda in the age of easy-to-use search engines, arth1.
I really searched hard for a non-American who had a significant role in developing this technology, but came up with nothing.
The keratotomy procedure developed in the Soviet Union used knives, not lasers.
- Dr. Theodore Maiman (U.S. citizen) invented the first laser in California. - Dr. Samuel Blum (U.S. citizen) invented the ultraviolet excimer laser, necessary for LASIK, in New York. - Drs. Rangaswamy Srinivasan and Stephen Trokel (U.S. citizens) developed the photorefractive (laser) keratectomy procedure in New York. - Dr. Gholam A. Peyman (U.S. citizen) invented LASIK and Mesik. (And fortunately, he tested and refined the procedure extensively on animals -- rabbit and monkey eyes -- before it was used on humans.) He did the relevant work in Illinois and Arizona.
While it's true that routine LASIK treatments were first administered outside the U.S. due to overly-conservative FDA regulations, that is an argument for reducing government involvement in healthcare.
This brings us to another fact that should be pointed out: ever since European countries went to single-payer systems, the vast majority of new treatments and new drugs have been invented in the U.S. This is not because Americans are smarter; it's just that medical R&D is inherently an expensive activity, so only a system that allows for healthy profits has the means to do lots of medical R&D.
If the rest of the world shakes their heads disdainfully because a larger percentage of U.S. GDP goes into healthcare, I can live with that, knowing that our system is a powerhouse of innovation, thanklessly churning out new technologies that benefit the rest of the world.
The real solution would be to make healthcare a profitable endeavor in the rest of the world, so the U.S. doesn't carry the vast majority of the R&D burden, and so smart scientists -- most of whom do not reside in the U.S. -- can get some meaningful private-sector funding.
by the time the notion of Single-Payer got some momentum, Medical Insurance as a benefit of your job was so embedded in the economy that getting rid of it was next to impossible.
Single payer, and your insurance being tied to your employer, are both terrible ideas.
You seem to think that we must have one or the other. Not so; with a little education about why they are both terrible ideas, we could be rid of both of them.
In Sweden, a visit to a doctor, district nurse, psychologist or physiotherapist always cost $10-$20 (free for children below 18 years old and the elderly).
You are confusing "cost" with the much more specific phrase, "cost to the patient."
I guarantee that in first-world countries where the cost to the patient is $20, taxpayer subsidies cover the rest of the overall cost, which is much much higher. And "free" is misdirection for "wholly paid for by someone else."
There's a reason insightful people use the acronym TANSTAAFL (from Robert Heinlein's astute phrase, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch").
Yes, having an accurate understanding of the amount of resources actually required to effect a desired outcome -- as opposed to a fantasy attitude of "it's free!" -- matters a great deal.
The only reason to hold the current state of the NHS up as an example of anything is as an example of deliberate mismanagement by the government.
Take for example waiting times - waiting times are an issue, so what does the government do about it? Decree that GP surgeries have to open in the evening and weekends to allow patients better access to their GPs. Does it matter that GP surgeries struggle to provide their current level of care? Not one bit.
You've just made an excellent case for getting government out of healthcare. Free markets, by definition, are immune from arbitrary government decrees, and from any type of government mismanagement (deliberate or otherwise).
Furthermore, free markets tend to be self-correcting. If there's a surplus of healthcare (or any other service), prices decrease and people leave the field; conversely, if there's a shortage of healthcare, prices go up and create a powerful incentive for more people to enter the field.
This is all self-evidently true, despite it being fashionable to bash Adam Smith these days.
Second, according to Politifact, the Mercatus report contained a less-likely scenario -- in which "Medicare for all" reduced expenses by $2 trillion -- and a more-likely scenario in which it increased expenses by $3.25 trillion. Politifact criticized Bernie Sanders for cherry-picking the less-likely scenario.
By falling for Sanders' cherry-picking, you have shot your own credibility.
Also, the cherry-picked scenario assumes that health providers would be paid at Medicare's payment rates (~40% percent lower than those paid by private insurance). Of course lower national health spending would follow from such an assumption. But could that actually happen without other negative consequences, such as mass retirements of doctors unwilling to accept lower fees? Public health experts say no.
And finally, neither scenario took into account the effect of transitioning from a competitive environment to a government monopoly. Currently, insurance companies are forced to compete for your business on the basis of lower premiums and/or better coverage. (Surely you have noticed that in locations where more than one gas station is competing for your business, the price of gas is significantly lower than in locations that have only one gas station.)
The benefits of competition are certain, but difficult to quantify, and the folks behind the Mercatus report didn't even attempt to quantify them.
America the king of Insurance companies can't even get insurance companies right without over complicating the system.
If you're against overcomplicating the system, you must by definition be against the Obamacare law which included 1800 pages of new regulations (which is why Nancy Pelosi said we would have to pass the law to find out what is in it).
Obama's campaign promise was that his plan would make healthcare costs decrease by $2500 per year for the average family. At the time, I warned people that history has never provided an example where imposing more regulations on an industry -- let alone 1800 pages of additional regulations -- caused costs to go down.
Ah, yes... free markets are wasteful. That's why a crazy number of ghost cities get built in countries with free markets, while that never happens under the thoughtful guidance of China's Central Planning Commissions.
You're absolutely correct that routine, low-cost medical procedures -- analogous to refueling a car -- shouldn't be covered by insurance.
But don't stop halfway with the analogies.
Imagine someone walking up to an insurance agent and saying "I wrapped my Mercedes around a telephone pole last night. I wasn't covered at the time, but now I want you to sell me a policy that will replace it. Oh, and you must charge me the same low premium paid by people who had the foresight to buy insurance before they needed it."
Would any sane insurance company sell such a policy? No.
Or the customer who says, "My house burned to the ground this morning. I wasn't covered at the time, but now I want you to sell me a policy that will replace it."
Would it be fair to spread this guy's loss to the homeowners who faithfully paid their premiums for years without filing a claim? Of course not. Covering such pre-existing conditions is not insurance, it's charity.*
But somehow, reason and fairness go out the window if the thing that's insured is health, not cars or buildings.
* There's nothing wrong with charity, as long as we document it honestly and transparently, and not try to disguise and obfuscate it as something else. Like insurance.
Healthcare is not a universal certainty. When my kid was brought into this world it popped out, cried a bit and we had it home no fuss...
Well, of course. Instead of saying "healthcare is a certainty," it would have been more accurate to say "routine low-cost procedures, such as having an annual physical, are a certainty." Don't throw out the entirety of a good post, just because one part had a less-than-ideal choice of words.
I live in a first world country which has socialised healthcare so the concept of using insurance to fix this problem just seems so dumb.
If socializing is a great solution, why not apply it to other things covered by insurance, such as auto collisions and structure fires? Answer: because insurance companies compete with each other on the basis of better coverage and/or lower premiums. (Surely you have noticed that gasoline prices are significantly lower in locations where there is more than one gas station competing for your business.) If I don't like the fact that Insurer A is slow to add newer, more effective cancer drugs to its formulary, I can switch to Insurer B.
But where insurers are replaced with a single government entity run by government bureaucrats, there is no longer any competition, no way to seek a better alternative if you're dissatisfied, and no economic mechanism to pressure the entity to apply innovations.
Canadians cross the border in large numbers to pay out-of-pocket for medical treatments that they either can't get in a timely manner, or can't get at all:
In the United States, suffering for a year or more before receiving a joint replacement is unheard of. In Canada, it's normal.
Back when MRI was a relatively new technology, there were more MRI machines in the city of Philadelphia (population 1.5 million) than in the entire nation of Canada (population 37 million). Not because Philadelphia is a particularly wealthy city (it is not); and not because of government largess, but in spite of it. Free markets really are more innovative and more responsive to customer needs.
If the U.S. system becomes as dismally socialized as Canada's, it won't be long until both Americans and Canadians start booking trips like these in large numbers. And if those countries become dismally socialized, we're all just screwed. Progress in medical technology will slow to a crawl, because all the customers for new technologies will be gone.
"Hyper-smart" people will be hyper-able to take advantage of those who don't have AI augmentation.
To prevent or offset this, you will see a "progressive" movement to regulate the implants. They will only be permitted if they also change the personality of the implantee -- making the implantee "hyper-compassionate" (as defined by a regulatory body).
Also look for promotion of the idea that if the "hyper-smart" are not hyper-taxed, they simply aren't paying their fair share.
In China when they buy a new apartment and furnish it, there's a period of six months or so when they leave it vacant. They have to let all the materials outgas before they can live there.
Maybe that's what they would like to do, but this pings my BS meter.
Paying six months of rent or mortgage on a place you're not living in is a financial hardship in any country.
Bernie Sanders promoted Scandinavian Social Democracy also. That's madness.
Norway has higher before-tax per-capita GDP than the U.S., but only because it -- like Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait and UAE -- exports massive amounts of fossil fuels. (I haven't seen any rankings of after-tax per-capita GDP, but Norway would have a much poorer showing in such a ranking. You can ignore Ireland's high ranking in this list, which is purely an artifact of being a tax haven for multinational corporations.)
The other Scandinavian countries have significantly lower before-tax per-capita GDP than the U.S -- despite the advantage of their socio-ethnic homogeneity, and despite our disadvantage of still being a net oil and gas importer (despite what you may have heard).
Therefore there's absolutely no reason the U.S. should want to emulate the Scandinavian Social Democracy model.
While your point is true, it really goes without saying. I could also elaborate, "so the price of a gallon of milk now consumes a smaller fraction of the average family's budget, but that's irrelevant if the milk doesn't taste as good as it used to, or has become less nutritious."
But that's not necessary, because said elaboration is obvious.
When your ad approval office is outsourced to folks that barely speak English, how are those employees supposed to know that "Cookies for Political Transparency, paid for by Chuck Schumer" is a fake ad?
How much do cable boxes actually cost? Why do their monthly fees keep going up when the cost of similar technology, such as TVs and computers, goes down over time? Not surprisingly, my attempts to answer these questions were met with stonewalling from industry players. Spectrum... clammed up real fast when I asked how much they pay for the boxes they lease to subscribers.
Also think about this: the cost of computing devices (and clothing, and food) has been consuming a smaller and smaller fraction of the average family's income as the years go by.
But the one expenditure that bucks this trend is the cost of government. It has consumed a larger and larger fraction of the average family's income.
Since government uses technology to provide services, one would think falling IT costs would in turn reduce the cost of government.
Advocates of big government clam up real fast when I ask about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Some interesting stuff from Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), [British historian Robert] Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, at least 15 million people were killed "by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors".[64] Rudolph Rummel in 2006 said that the earlier higher victim total estimates are correct, although he includes those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well.[65][66] Conversely, J. Arch Getty, Stephen G. Wheatcroft and others insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by "revisionist" scholars.[67][68] [British historian] Simon Sebag Montefiore in 2003 suggested that Stalin was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people.
enabling 318 million parameters on a single accelerator core. Without GPipe, Huang says, a single core can only train up to 82 million model parameters
Is that what's really going on in the human brain -- hundreds of millions of "model parameters" are getting trained up?
I doubt it. With this approach, AI researchers are following a road to something completely different from human intelligence. And I'll bet that something will be far more limited than human intelligence.
healthcare is a Provincial thing.
That would explain why wait times are unthinkably long in New Brunswick, but merely atrocious in Ontario -- as documented by Canada's Fraser Institute.
The country is run by a bunch of old rich people who see their own health as being fine and therefore don't understand the problem.
Everyone, with the exception of the rare misanthrope, wants to make the social safety net more robust and reduce the number of people who are exposed to potentially bankrupting medical bills. But there is a whole spectrum of ways to attempt to do that, and some of those ways do more harm than good. Government is not the only way to make the social safety net more robust. Arguably, it is not a way at all, because absolute poverty would have been eliminated decades ago if unnecessarily burdensome governments hadn't made economic growth much less exponential than it otherwise would have been.
In 1900, approximately 0% of Americans had health insurance. By the time Obama was elected, the figure had grown to about 83%. Going from 0% to 83% is a huge improvement in the robustness of the social safety net, and it did not happen because of any freedom-sapping mandates. It happened organically: economic growth gave most people the means to buy health insurance (or, it made their labor valuable enough that their employer willingly provided health insurance to the employee's entire family).
That progressive upward trend, borne by economic growth alone, would have continued if it hadn't been tampered with. For those who are unable to obtain insurance, there is private charity (which already funds a surprisingly large fraction of the U.S. social safety net, and always grows faster than GDP, for reasons I won't get into now), and Medicaid. That is why there are exactly zero headlines in the U.S. that read, "Joe Smith died of cancer because he couldn't afford chemo."
Any honest person who doesn't have a totalitarianism fetish, and gives thought to the matter, would agree that if you can make the social safety net more robust, and at the same time increase the fraction that is funded by voluntary charitable contributions, and decrease the fraction that is funded by the coercive takings of the Internal Revenue Service, that's a good thing.
But the unthinking nanny-state types (funded by old rich people like George Soros, and led by an objectively uber-arrogant technocrat) didn't see the steady progress (going from 0 to 83% insured); they only saw 17% uninsured, and wrung their hands in anguish until they came up with what they thought would be a quick fix: Obamacare. It's neither sustainable nor organic -- which is ironic because the left repeats those two buzzwords ad nauseam when it comes to environmental practices.
Also -- unless the "clever" Judge O'Conner gets overruled by a higher court -- it is unconstitutional.
Capitalism breaks down when paying for healthcare because you can't do any of that.
Wrong; there are insurance companies competing for my business on the basis of better coverage and/or lower premiums (i.e., how efficient their internal operations are, and how effectively they negotiate lower prices with healthcare providers). I periodically reevaluate whether I want to stay with my current insurance company, or switch to a different one. I do so well before I actually need treatment for some condition.
(Surely you've noticed how competition benefits consumers. E.g., in locations where more than one gas station is competing for your business, the price of gas is significantly lower than in locations that have only one gas station.)
Now, if we go from this competitive environment to a single-payer monopoly run by government bureaucrats, free markets will truly break down.
unequally accessible
Wrong; everyone has equal access. Since 1986, federal law explicitly forbids the denial of care to indigent or uninsured patients based on a lack of ability to pay.
Now, to many politicians, "accessible healthcare" is an inaccurate euphemism for "healthcare coercively paid for by someone else." That's probably what you mean.
Nice anecdote, but the plural of anecdote is not data. Here's some data from Canada's Fraser Institute.
laser vision correction surgery, which was available in the Soviet Union and then in Europe long before it became available in the US. Yet the average American thinks it's an American invention
Um... that's because it is an American invention. You can't get away with this kind of propaganda in the age of easy-to-use search engines, arth1.
I really searched hard for a non-American who had a significant role in developing this technology, but came up with nothing.
The keratotomy procedure developed in the Soviet Union used knives, not lasers.
- Dr. Theodore Maiman (U.S. citizen) invented the first laser in California.
- Dr. Samuel Blum (U.S. citizen) invented the ultraviolet excimer laser, necessary for LASIK, in New York.
- Drs. Rangaswamy Srinivasan and Stephen Trokel (U.S. citizens) developed the photorefractive (laser) keratectomy procedure in New York.
- Dr. Gholam A. Peyman (U.S. citizen) invented LASIK and Mesik. (And fortunately, he tested and refined the procedure extensively on animals -- rabbit and monkey eyes -- before it was used on humans.) He did the relevant work in Illinois and Arizona.
While it's true that routine LASIK treatments were first administered outside the U.S. due to overly-conservative FDA regulations, that is an argument for reducing government involvement in healthcare.
This brings us to another fact that should be pointed out: ever since European countries went to single-payer systems, the vast majority of new treatments and new drugs have been invented in the U.S. This is not because Americans are smarter; it's just that medical R&D is inherently an expensive activity, so only a system that allows for healthy profits has the means to do lots of medical R&D.
If the rest of the world shakes their heads disdainfully because a larger percentage of U.S. GDP goes into healthcare, I can live with that, knowing that our system is a powerhouse of innovation, thanklessly churning out new technologies that benefit the rest of the world.
The real solution would be to make healthcare a profitable endeavor in the rest of the world, so the U.S. doesn't carry the vast majority of the R&D burden, and so smart scientists -- most of whom do not reside in the U.S. -- can get some meaningful private-sector funding.
by the time the notion of Single-Payer got some momentum, Medical Insurance as a benefit of your job was so embedded in the economy that getting rid of it was next to impossible.
Single payer, and your insurance being tied to your employer, are both terrible ideas.
You seem to think that we must have one or the other. Not so; with a little education about why they are both terrible ideas, we could be rid of both of them.
In Sweden, a visit to a doctor, district nurse, psychologist or physiotherapist always cost $10-$20 (free for children below 18 years old and the elderly).
You are confusing "cost" with the much more specific phrase, "cost to the patient."
I guarantee that in first-world countries where the cost to the patient is $20, taxpayer subsidies cover the rest of the overall cost, which is much much higher. And "free" is misdirection for "wholly paid for by someone else."
There's a reason insightful people use the acronym TANSTAAFL (from Robert Heinlein's astute phrase, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch").
Yes, having an accurate understanding of the amount of resources actually required to effect a desired outcome -- as opposed to a fantasy attitude of "it's free!" -- matters a great deal.
The only reason to hold the current state of the NHS up as an example of anything is as an example of deliberate mismanagement by the government.
Take for example waiting times - waiting times are an issue, so what does the government do about it? Decree that GP surgeries have to open in the evening and weekends to allow patients better access to their GPs. Does it matter that GP surgeries struggle to provide their current level of care? Not one bit.
You've just made an excellent case for getting government out of healthcare. Free markets, by definition, are immune from arbitrary government decrees, and from any type of government mismanagement (deliberate or otherwise).
Furthermore, free markets tend to be self-correcting. If there's a surplus of healthcare (or any other service), prices decrease and people leave the field; conversely, if there's a shortage of healthcare, prices go up and create a powerful incentive for more people to enter the field.
This is all self-evidently true, despite it being fashionable to bash Adam Smith these days.
First, your $3 trillion figure is wrong.
Second, according to Politifact, the Mercatus report contained a less-likely scenario -- in which "Medicare for all" reduced expenses by $2 trillion -- and a more-likely scenario in which it increased expenses by $3.25 trillion. Politifact criticized Bernie Sanders for cherry-picking the less-likely scenario.
By falling for Sanders' cherry-picking, you have shot your own credibility.
Also, the cherry-picked scenario assumes that health providers would be paid at Medicare's payment rates (~40% percent lower than those paid by private insurance). Of course lower national health spending would follow from such an assumption. But could that actually happen without other negative consequences, such as mass retirements of doctors unwilling to accept lower fees? Public health experts say no.
And finally, neither scenario took into account the effect of transitioning from a competitive environment to a government monopoly. Currently, insurance companies are forced to compete for your business on the basis of lower premiums and/or better coverage. (Surely you have noticed that in locations where more than one gas station is competing for your business, the price of gas is significantly lower than in locations that have only one gas station.)
The benefits of competition are certain, but difficult to quantify, and the folks behind the Mercatus report didn't even attempt to quantify them.
America the king of Insurance companies can't even get insurance companies right without over complicating the system.
If you're against overcomplicating the system, you must by definition be against the Obamacare law which included 1800 pages of new regulations (which is why Nancy Pelosi said we would have to pass the law to find out what is in it).
Obama's campaign promise was that his plan would make healthcare costs decrease by $2500 per year for the average family. At the time, I warned people that history has never provided an example where imposing more regulations on an industry -- let alone 1800 pages of additional regulations -- caused costs to go down.
Of course I was right. In 2013, California jurisdictions experienced unprecedented premium increases of between 64-146% -- and that was merely in anticipation of Obamacare's main provisions going into effect on January 1, 2014. Since then, there have been annual double-digit increases that compounded the 2013 increases.
Ah, yes... free markets are wasteful. That's why a crazy number of ghost cities get built in countries with free markets, while that never happens under the thoughtful guidance of China's Central Planning Commissions.
You're absolutely correct that routine, low-cost medical procedures -- analogous to refueling a car -- shouldn't be covered by insurance.
But don't stop halfway with the analogies.
Imagine someone walking up to an insurance agent and saying "I wrapped my Mercedes around a telephone pole last night. I wasn't covered at the time, but now I want you to sell me a policy that will replace it. Oh, and you must charge me the same low premium paid by people who had the foresight to buy insurance before they needed it."
Would any sane insurance company sell such a policy? No.
Or the customer who says, "My house burned to the ground this morning. I wasn't covered at the time, but now I want you to sell me a policy that will replace it."
Would it be fair to spread this guy's loss to the homeowners who faithfully paid their premiums for years without filing a claim? Of course not. Covering such pre-existing conditions is not insurance, it's charity.*
But somehow, reason and fairness go out the window if the thing that's insured is health, not cars or buildings.
* There's nothing wrong with charity, as long as we document it honestly and transparently, and not try to disguise and obfuscate it as something else. Like insurance.
Healthcare is not a universal certainty. When my kid was brought into this world it popped out, cried a bit and we had it home no fuss...
Well, of course. Instead of saying "healthcare is a certainty," it would have been more accurate to say "routine low-cost procedures, such as having an annual physical, are a certainty." Don't throw out the entirety of a good post, just because one part had a less-than-ideal choice of words.
I live in a first world country which has socialised healthcare so the concept of using insurance to fix this problem just seems so dumb.
If socializing is a great solution, why not apply it to other things covered by insurance, such as auto collisions and structure fires? Answer: because insurance companies compete with each other on the basis of better coverage and/or lower premiums. (Surely you have noticed that gasoline prices are significantly lower in locations where there is more than one gas station competing for your business.) If I don't like the fact that Insurer A is slow to add newer, more effective cancer drugs to its formulary, I can switch to Insurer B.
But where insurers are replaced with a single government entity run by government bureaucrats, there is no longer any competition, no way to seek a better alternative if you're dissatisfied, and no economic mechanism to pressure the entity to apply innovations.
Canadians cross the border in large numbers to pay out-of-pocket for medical treatments that they either can't get in a timely manner, or can't get at all:
In the United States, suffering for a year or more before receiving a joint replacement is unheard of. In Canada, it's normal.
Back when MRI was a relatively new technology, there were more MRI machines in the city of Philadelphia (population 1.5 million) than in the entire nation of Canada (population 37 million). Not because Philadelphia is a particularly wealthy city (it is not); and not because of government largess, but in spite of it. Free markets really are more innovative and more responsive to customer needs.
If the U.S. system becomes as dismally socialized as Canada's, it won't be long until both Americans and Canadians start booking trips like these in large numbers. And if those countries become dismally socialized, we're all just screwed. Progress in medical technology will slow to a crawl, because all the customers for new technologies will be gone.
You linked to the complete DEIS document, which is a 158 MB zip file.
I'm not ashamed to say: too long, didn't read.
"Hyper-smart" people will be hyper-able to take advantage of those who don't have AI augmentation.
To prevent or offset this, you will see a "progressive" movement to regulate the implants. They will only be permitted if they also change the personality of the implantee -- making the implantee "hyper-compassionate" (as defined by a regulatory body).
Also look for promotion of the idea that if the "hyper-smart" are not hyper-taxed, they simply aren't paying their fair share.
If you start with 10 x 1 x 1,
* One way to double the volume is to go to 20 x 1 x 1.
* Doubling the dimensions gives you 20 x 2 x 2 (as well as eight times the volume).
Doubling the "size" is ambiguous, so I wouldn't be too hard on the O.P.
In China when they buy a new apartment and furnish it, there's a period of six months or so when they leave it vacant. They have to let all the materials outgas before they can live there.
Maybe that's what they would like to do, but this pings my BS meter.
Paying six months of rent or mortgage on a place you're not living in is a financial hardship in any country.
the size of a small town
Black holes continue to be described as singularities with zero volume.
Perhaps you mean that the volume enclosed by the event horizon is the size of a small town?
Bernie Sanders promoted Scandinavian Social Democracy also. That's madness.
Norway has higher before-tax per-capita GDP than the U.S., but only because it -- like Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait and UAE -- exports massive amounts of fossil fuels. (I haven't seen any rankings of after-tax per-capita GDP, but Norway would have a much poorer showing in such a ranking. You can ignore Ireland's high ranking in this list, which is purely an artifact of being a tax haven for multinational corporations.)
The other Scandinavian countries have significantly lower before-tax per-capita GDP than the U.S -- despite the advantage of their socio-ethnic homogeneity, and despite our disadvantage of still being a net oil and gas importer (despite what you may have heard).
Therefore there's absolutely no reason the U.S. should want to emulate the Scandinavian Social Democracy model.
While your point is true, it really goes without saying. I could also elaborate, "so the price of a gallon of milk now consumes a smaller fraction of the average family's budget, but that's irrelevant if the milk doesn't taste as good as it used to, or has become less nutritious."
But that's not necessary, because said elaboration is obvious.
When your ad approval office is outsourced to folks that barely speak English, how are those employees supposed to know that "Cookies for Political Transparency, paid for by Chuck Schumer" is a fake ad?
How much do cable boxes actually cost? Why do their monthly fees keep going up when the cost of similar technology, such as TVs and computers, goes down over time? Not surprisingly, my attempts to answer these questions were met with stonewalling from industry players. Spectrum... clammed up real fast when I asked how much they pay for the boxes they lease to subscribers.
Also think about this: the cost of computing devices (and clothing, and food) has been consuming a smaller and smaller fraction of the average family's income as the years go by.
But the one expenditure that bucks this trend is the cost of government. It has consumed a larger and larger fraction of the average family's income.
Since government uses technology to provide services, one would think falling IT costs would in turn reduce the cost of government.
Advocates of big government clam up real fast when I ask about this.