I like how you totally skip over the stated fact of how many would be uninsured.
No, I made fun of your naivite.
First, note that the CBO scored 26 million or 32 million in 2026, not 60 million, and only under the assumption that the market will not provide insurance for those people.
What the CBO actually is saying is that 18 million people would choose not to get health insurance through ACA in 2018. Democrats are up in arms about it because it exposes how many people are actually being screwed by the ACA. In later years, the falling enrollment will cause insurers to withdraw from the market, which exposes the fiscal irresponsibility of the ACA and the unjust burden it imposes on healthy people. The only rational solution for pre-existing conditions is for government to pick up the tab one way or another.
People not being insured under the ACA doesn't mean they become "uninsured". There are already alternatives for medical coverage and services, and with a repeal of the coverage mandate, there would be a huge market for people like me for alternative forms of coverage.
Ummm, you might be interested to learn I've been using, not playing, with the Internet since the mid 1980s, have built one international hub and been employed by another, and have actively worked with the IETF.
How is that experience, such as it is, relevant to the question of whether it is the job of the FCC to enforce a contract dispute?
In other words, that four digit UID isn't bought. Show respect for your elders, we might have learned things over the years.
I don't like arguments from authority, which is why I generally don't talk about my background online and don't use my original Slashdot UID. In addition, a lot of the people I knew from the early ARPANET, UNIX, and Linux days unfortunately never grew up and stuck with their adolescent beliefs throughout life. Some of them lead such sad existences that they think a four digit UID on Slashdot and having used the Internet since the mid-1980's are actually achievements or signs of wisdom.
The first thing a Medical Industry executive will ask when someone makes an assertment like the above is "What is the reimbursement model?"
Yes, and that's a problem with the US medical system, where government regulation has killed pretty much all competition. Specifically, the the "medical industry executive" will ask "how much does the government let us get away with charging for this, and who in government can we bribe to increase that".
In a free market, what "medical industry executives" will ask is: "can we take away business from our competitors by making this treatment available, and how cheap does competition force us to make it"?
Is that some kind of traditional wisdom handed down from your forefathers in the USA?
No, just a statement of fact: consumer plans generally allow for throttling, if you want to avoid that, you need to buy a different kind of plan.
Because that's not what's expected in the rest of the world.
In my experience, Europe had unlimited plans with throttling years before the US. Switzerland certainly still does: "inOne mobile data XL -- Up to 30 GB per month, with subsequent speed reduction but no additional costs."
Assuming your website reflects your origins, I find it quite encouraging that an educated Swiss guy like you is joining in in Europe's long-standing tradition of cultural chauvinism, ignorance about his own continent, and anti-Americanism! Switzerland is finally becoming truly European!
They were on a professional-level service. In fact, they were on a plan for emergency services.
Bowden doesn't talk about that in his complaint letter to the FCC; he's just saying "how dare these people throttle our data when we're trying to fight a fire".
Furthermore, throttling has nothing to do with net neutrality and it isn't a regulatory issue. If Verizon failed to live up to their contractual commitment, that's an issue for a civil court. For the SCFD to pursue this issue through the FCC is absurd political posturing, nothing more.
They were on a corporate plan with a specific emergency clause that stated that in a declared emergency, Verizon promised not to throttle. Verizon broke contract.
Their complaint does not mention that, and business plans are generally not "unlimited (with throttling)". They switched to a full, no-throttle business plan only after this problem occurred.
And if Verizon did break the contract, how is this an FCC matter? Contractual violations are not regulatory issues, they are properly resolved in civil court (and throttling has nothing to do with net neutrality). For a government agency to try to use a regulatory agency to avoid going to civil court is unacceptable.
The Santa Clara Fire Department's claims are absurd.
If Verizon didn't want to live up to the expectations of their choosing to do business with a public safety agency, they can go ahead and surrender their interests.
Verizon is happy to satisfy their obligations: like any non-consumer entity that depends critically on service, the fire department should sign up for a metered business plan and pay for it.
It was the public safety agency's choice to sign up for consumer level plans, and a quite irresponsible choice one might add.
Bowden said that Verizon, whom the country fire department had paid for “unlimited data,”
Was the data limited? No, just the throughput.
hobbled the first responders’ ability to communicate “despite being informed that throttling was actively impeding County Fire’s ability to provide crisis-response and essential emergency services.”
Throttling happens on consumer plans. If you want business or professional level service, you need to pay for it. Trying to run a fire department on consumer data plans is negligent and Bowden should be held responsible.
Possession of cannabis is punishable by up to 5 years in the UK. Instead this kid, guilty of murder or not, only gets 14 months.
Good grief, you're saying not only that refusing to disclose your password should get you jail time, but it should get you more than 5 years? WTF is wrong with you?
You realize McCain was the one reputable guy that stood for what he believed in?
True. And what did he believe in? He was an authoritarian who believed in bombing people into the stone age, spying on Americans, and sending money to his cronies. That's why people (including me) overwhelmingly voted for Obama.
Had he not thumbs downed the vote, there'd be no health insurance for an estimated (CBO) 60M people, and likely more
Well, given that Trump is going to destroy all life on earth and simultaneously going to turn the US into a Russian client state, it would seem like that's not something you actually need to lose much sleep over!
No. ACA was sold as a way to reduce uninsured and healthcare costs for those people. It wasn't sold on the basis of reducing costs to insured people at all.
Look, I gave you the three objectives of the ACA according to the US government. You're entitled to your own opinions, self-serving as they may be, but not to your own facts.
There are three ways of controlling costs in a healthcare system: (1) you nationalize (like the UK or France), (2) you impose strict cost controls on a universal plan, or (3) through free markets.
You do understand that 1 & 2 are effectively the same thing, and that we had 3 which is the cause of the current problems? So 3 is a proven failure.
The US has not had a free market (3) in healthcare in about a century. What we have had was an attempt at (2) but it failed again and again, with the ACA just being the latest instance of that failure. So, (1) and (3) are the only options; good luck selling voters and the AMA on (1).
At this point I also wish the Republicans would just complete their swing to the right, expose themselves as fascist nationalistic xenophobic racist aristocrats they are and marginalizing themselves to less than 5% of the population so the rest of us move on with reality.
Well, you certainly give an excellent example of the kind of beliefs and vitriol that are so common on the left these days. And that's why people like me (classical liberal, gay immigrant) have left the Democratic party and the progressive movement, and we won't be coming back.
And, no, you don't live in the real world, you live in an economic fantasy world that inevitably will come crashing down around you; the question is only whether it's a little sooner or a little later.
In other words, the vast majority of the additional wealth that's been generated in the economy since Reagan started in office has been sucked up by the ultra-wealthy in this country.
You incorrectly reason about these groups as if they were fixed groups of people; of course they are not. The top 1% are not just different individuals, they are different professions in 2018 from those in 1979 (most of the top 1% from 1979 are probably dead by now).
In fact, the bottom 20% are largely simply young folks and unskilled workers. At age 18, for example, a $20000/year income puts you in the top 10%. Workers don't stay young and unskilled forever. And, yes, it makes perfect sense that starting salaries for young or unskilled workers haven't gone up because that demographic is probably no more productive today than it was then; increased productivity generally requires increased skills and experience.
I'm a little behind in reading slashdot, but I'm flabbergasted that this comment was modded up to 5 and has stood that way for this long. One look at this graph should be enough to tell you what's really going on: https://goo.gl/images/X13u8h [goo.gl]
How does that graph contradict what I said?
The parent poster appears to favor measures to help them suck the wealth up even more, and faster.
Actually, I would very much like young people and low income people to make more money, which is why I object to obvious economic errors like the ones you just made. It is your kind of faulty reasoning that keeps so many Americans in poverty.
Ever wonder why your wages haven't kept up with inflation? If you had health insurance, there's your answer. And no, that's not just since 2010, but all the way back to the mid 90s. This cost issue predated ACA by a long shot, and actually was the reason ACA came into being.
We completely agree on all that: the US has had a corrupt, excessively costly health care system for decades, and it's in large part responsible for holding down wages.
The ACA was sold on the idea that high US healthcare costs are due (as you put it) the uninsured and insurance company profits. It is numerically impossible by a long shot for those two factors to account for the 3-4x higher US healthcare costs compared to Europe. What the ACA did instead was to force even more people into that system, which only made the problem worse.
There are three ways of controlling costs in a healthcare system: (1) you nationalize (like the UK or France), (2) you impose strict cost controls on a universal plan, or (3) through free markets. The ACA does none of those. What it does instead is ensure that the medical cartel receives massively inflated monopoly rents. Neither Obama, nor Hillary, nor Sanders, nor any other Democrat have proposed any amendments to fix it.
I really don't care which of (1-3) we do if it brings down US costs to European levels. What I object to is the lies and massive corruption that gave us the ACA.
You really do have reading comprehension issues. I'm paying for my insurance out of pocket, so no, you're not being screwed so I can have better insurance.
The whole, explicitly stated point of ACA, is to redistribute money from some insurance payers to others. And that pretty much summarizes the political calculus of the Democrats: they wanted to pay off their corporate cronies with the ACA and government subsidies and pay off a sufficient number of Americans through redistribution to ensure electoral victory in 2016, and then they were finally going to do what they really wanted to. That obviously backfired, but the real problem is that what they really wanted to do, the "single payer system" they wanted to create was going to be just as corrupt and inefficient as the ACA.
Note that I'm not defending the Republicans. The Republicans have the virtue of giving lip service to one of the three feasible solutions (3), but they are as impotent and unwilling as Democrats to actually make it happen. Fortunately, McCain is finally gone, so maybe they'll be able to pass some real reform after November, in particular if more jerks like McCain get the boot from voters.
The IPCC is the best consensus of reputable scientists. If you're not willing to base government interventions on the best scientific consensus, what are you going to base it on?
That's basically 6.6 times richer in 80 years at constant growth compared to 7.2 times. Not a catastrophe, and CC might cost a lot to fix late in the day, so could be worse than this cost.
I'm not saying that the difference between 10x, 7.2x, or 6.6x is why we shouldn't remediate now. I'm saying that people in 80 years will be so much richer that the cost of climate change will matter very little to you. If you make $400k/year (median household income in constant dollars based on your lowest growth rate), you can easily deal with the effects of climate change on your personal life and situation, with no government assistance or programs.
A major report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that efforts to stabilize levels of greenhouse-gas emissions would require investments of about $13 trillion through 2030." This is just under $1 trillion per annum, or 0.1% of global world product (GWP). The effect on global GWP growth rates are hard to determine, but also likely to be small, possibly of the same order.
First of all, that only counts spending ("investments"), not actual cost to the economy. The cost to the economy is much larger, not just because energy gets more expensive, but because vast amounts of resources get redirected from capital investments to climate change prevention. And those estimates assume efficient spending, but governments are often spending an order of magnitude more than what the private sector would spend for the same effect.
Second, stabilizing levels of GHG is not sufficient to prevent climate change, so we are spending all this money while still having to pay for possible fixes down the road.
That's assuming that climate change doesn't constrain growth (nor anything else), which it is likely to do, so it seems a poor projection. 50 years ago world GDP (GWP) growth was roughly 5% p.a. but that has fallen pretty steadily since. If that trend continued in a linear fashion it would hit roughly zero by around 2060.
And in fact, the cause of that trend is pretty clear, based on empirical data and economic theory: every 10% increase in government expenditures as percentage of GDP decreases growth rate by 1% (the relationship holds quite well over the entire range of government spending), across OECD countries, and also for the US since 1790. That's the trend we need to reverse.
If that trend continues in a linear fashion, climate change is the least of our worries. Free, democratic societies cannot exist without significant economic growth.
P.S. I would say that whilst the cost of climate change is uncertain, it's most likely a chioce between a lot and a hell of a lot. Not much cost is unlikely to be an option, on a global scale at least.
The IPCC climate change consensus report quantifies that and doing nothing ends up about as expensive as trying to prevent climate change according to them.
It's what we do with vitamin D and some other nutrients.
The cost later of taking action if action is not taken now is much greater, so arguably the rational choice is to take action now.
According to the IPCC climate change consensus report it's not.
And you have to realize that that isn't a reduction from current incomes, that's a reduction from future incomes. Assuming pretty modest GDP growth, people in 80 years will be 10x wealthier than we are in absolute terms. So the difference we're talking about is whether the per capita GDP/median American household income in 2100 is $600000/year or $550000/year (in today's dollars!).
If developed countries can't work out a way to benefit (e.g. selling technology to reduce emissions) that's a bit poor.
We can't sell them anything right now because they are poor; they don't have any money to pay for our technologies.
But imagine how much more stuff we can sell them in the future to remediate the effects of climate change! Keynesians should love it!
Note I mentioned that realising you have an issue is part of the problem, and that goes for those in wealthy countries too. To catch all those with deficiency
You don't have to screen, you just supplement.
Even after this, if the nutrients were there then for deficiency wealth would not be an issue, so whilst lack of wealth compounds the problem, it's not the cause of it.
Making people wealthier greatly improves health. Limiting carbon emissions on the hopes that crops stay more nutritious won't do anything.
If the very mild steps from Paris are not taken, the climate change will burden GDP with several percent reduction in economic activity, that will fall mostly on those in countries that are already less wealthy.
(1) Paris is ineffective in reducing carbon emissions to have significant impact according to mainstream climate models.
(2) The cost of Paris is also several percent reduction in GDP globally.
(3) The cost of Paris is immediate and certain, while the cost of climate change is far off and uncertain.
(4) Because developed countries pay but don't benefit much, it's not going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I made fun of your naivite.
First, note that the CBO scored 26 million or 32 million in 2026, not 60 million, and only under the assumption that the market will not provide insurance for those people.
What the CBO actually is saying is that 18 million people would choose not to get health insurance through ACA in 2018. Democrats are up in arms about it because it exposes how many people are actually being screwed by the ACA. In later years, the falling enrollment will cause insurers to withdraw from the market, which exposes the fiscal irresponsibility of the ACA and the unjust burden it imposes on healthy people. The only rational solution for pre-existing conditions is for government to pick up the tab one way or another.
People not being insured under the ACA doesn't mean they become "uninsured". There are already alternatives for medical coverage and services, and with a repeal of the coverage mandate, there would be a huge market for people like me for alternative forms of coverage.
How is that experience, such as it is, relevant to the question of whether it is the job of the FCC to enforce a contract dispute?
I don't like arguments from authority, which is why I generally don't talk about my background online and don't use my original Slashdot UID. In addition, a lot of the people I knew from the early ARPANET, UNIX, and Linux days unfortunately never grew up and stuck with their adolescent beliefs throughout life. Some of them lead such sad existences that they think a four digit UID on Slashdot and having used the Internet since the mid-1980's are actually achievements or signs of wisdom.
Yes, and that's a problem with the US medical system, where government regulation has killed pretty much all competition. Specifically, the the "medical industry executive" will ask "how much does the government let us get away with charging for this, and who in government can we bribe to increase that".
In a free market, what "medical industry executives" will ask is: "can we take away business from our competitors by making this treatment available, and how cheap does competition force us to make it"?
You obviously don't understand the proper function of a regulatory agency vs a court of law.
No, just a statement of fact: consumer plans generally allow for throttling, if you want to avoid that, you need to buy a different kind of plan.
In my experience, Europe had unlimited plans with throttling years before the US. Switzerland certainly still does: "inOne mobile data XL -- Up to 30 GB per month, with subsequent speed reduction but no additional costs."
Assuming your website reflects your origins, I find it quite encouraging that an educated Swiss guy like you is joining in in Europe's long-standing tradition of cultural chauvinism, ignorance about his own continent, and anti-Americanism! Switzerland is finally becoming truly European!
Bowden doesn't talk about that in his complaint letter to the FCC; he's just saying "how dare these people throttle our data when we're trying to fight a fire".
Furthermore, throttling has nothing to do with net neutrality and it isn't a regulatory issue. If Verizon failed to live up to their contractual commitment, that's an issue for a civil court. For the SCFD to pursue this issue through the FCC is absurd political posturing, nothing more.
Their complaint does not mention that, and business plans are generally not "unlimited (with throttling)". They switched to a full, no-throttle business plan only after this problem occurred.
And if Verizon did break the contract, how is this an FCC matter? Contractual violations are not regulatory issues, they are properly resolved in civil court (and throttling has nothing to do with net neutrality). For a government agency to try to use a regulatory agency to avoid going to civil court is unacceptable.
The Santa Clara Fire Department's claims are absurd.
Verizon is happy to satisfy their obligations: like any non-consumer entity that depends critically on service, the fire department should sign up for a metered business plan and pay for it.
It was the public safety agency's choice to sign up for consumer level plans, and a quite irresponsible choice one might add.
Was the data limited? No, just the throughput.
Throttling happens on consumer plans. If you want business or professional level service, you need to pay for it. Trying to run a fire department on consumer data plans is negligent and Bowden should be held responsible.
Good grief, you're saying not only that refusing to disclose your password should get you jail time, but it should get you more than 5 years? WTF is wrong with you?
That doesn't sound like a "problem" to me.
True. And what did he believe in? He was an authoritarian who believed in bombing people into the stone age, spying on Americans, and sending money to his cronies. That's why people (including me) overwhelmingly voted for Obama.
Well, given that Trump is going to destroy all life on earth and simultaneously going to turn the US into a Russian client state, it would seem like that's not something you actually need to lose much sleep over!
I think it's safe to say that lots of other sensible people are hoping that this 80-Year-Old patent troll dies, the sooner the better. I certainly do.
(No, I'm not defending the patent office.)
Look, I gave you the three objectives of the ACA according to the US government. You're entitled to your own opinions, self-serving as they may be, but not to your own facts.
The US has not had a free market (3) in healthcare in about a century. What we have had was an attempt at (2) but it failed again and again, with the ACA just being the latest instance of that failure. So, (1) and (3) are the only options; good luck selling voters and the AMA on (1).
Well, you certainly give an excellent example of the kind of beliefs and vitriol that are so common on the left these days. And that's why people like me (classical liberal, gay immigrant) have left the Democratic party and the progressive movement, and we won't be coming back.
And, no, you don't live in the real world, you live in an economic fantasy world that inevitably will come crashing down around you; the question is only whether it's a little sooner or a little later.
You incorrectly reason about these groups as if they were fixed groups of people; of course they are not. The top 1% are not just different individuals, they are different professions in 2018 from those in 1979 (most of the top 1% from 1979 are probably dead by now).
In fact, the bottom 20% are largely simply young folks and unskilled workers. At age 18, for example, a $20000/year income puts you in the top 10%. Workers don't stay young and unskilled forever. And, yes, it makes perfect sense that starting salaries for young or unskilled workers haven't gone up because that demographic is probably no more productive today than it was then; increased productivity generally requires increased skills and experience.
How does that graph contradict what I said?
Actually, I would very much like young people and low income people to make more money, which is why I object to obvious economic errors like the ones you just made. It is your kind of faulty reasoning that keeps so many Americans in poverty.
We completely agree on all that: the US has had a corrupt, excessively costly health care system for decades, and it's in large part responsible for holding down wages.
The ACA was sold on the idea that high US healthcare costs are due (as you put it) the uninsured and insurance company profits. It is numerically impossible by a long shot for those two factors to account for the 3-4x higher US healthcare costs compared to Europe. What the ACA did instead was to force even more people into that system, which only made the problem worse.
There are three ways of controlling costs in a healthcare system: (1) you nationalize (like the UK or France), (2) you impose strict cost controls on a universal plan, or (3) through free markets. The ACA does none of those. What it does instead is ensure that the medical cartel receives massively inflated monopoly rents. Neither Obama, nor Hillary, nor Sanders, nor any other Democrat have proposed any amendments to fix it.
I really don't care which of (1-3) we do if it brings down US costs to European levels. What I object to is the lies and massive corruption that gave us the ACA.
The whole, explicitly stated point of ACA, is to redistribute money from some insurance payers to others. And that pretty much summarizes the political calculus of the Democrats: they wanted to pay off their corporate cronies with the ACA and government subsidies and pay off a sufficient number of Americans through redistribution to ensure electoral victory in 2016, and then they were finally going to do what they really wanted to. That obviously backfired, but the real problem is that what they really wanted to do, the "single payer system" they wanted to create was going to be just as corrupt and inefficient as the ACA.
Note that I'm not defending the Republicans. The Republicans have the virtue of giving lip service to one of the three feasible solutions (3), but they are as impotent and unwilling as Democrats to actually make it happen. Fortunately, McCain is finally gone, so maybe they'll be able to pass some real reform after November, in particular if more jerks like McCain get the boot from voters.
The IPCC is the best consensus of reputable scientists. If you're not willing to base government interventions on the best scientific consensus, what are you going to base it on?
I'm not saying that the difference between 10x, 7.2x, or 6.6x is why we shouldn't remediate now. I'm saying that people in 80 years will be so much richer that the cost of climate change will matter very little to you. If you make $400k/year (median household income in constant dollars based on your lowest growth rate), you can easily deal with the effects of climate change on your personal life and situation, with no government assistance or programs.
First of all, that only counts spending ("investments"), not actual cost to the economy. The cost to the economy is much larger, not just because energy gets more expensive, but because vast amounts of resources get redirected from capital investments to climate change prevention. And those estimates assume efficient spending, but governments are often spending an order of magnitude more than what the private sector would spend for the same effect.
Second, stabilizing levels of GHG is not sufficient to prevent climate change, so we are spending all this money while still having to pay for possible fixes down the road.
And in fact, the cause of that trend is pretty clear, based on empirical data and economic theory: every 10% increase in government expenditures as percentage of GDP decreases growth rate by 1% (the relationship holds quite well over the entire range of government spending), across OECD countries, and also for the US since 1790. That's the trend we need to reverse.
If that trend continues in a linear fashion, climate change is the least of our worries. Free, democratic societies cannot exist without significant economic growth.
The IPCC climate change consensus report quantifies that and doing nothing ends up about as expensive as trying to prevent climate change according to them.
It's what we do with vitamin D and some other nutrients.
According to the IPCC climate change consensus report it's not.
And you have to realize that that isn't a reduction from current incomes, that's a reduction from future incomes. Assuming pretty modest GDP growth, people in 80 years will be 10x wealthier than we are in absolute terms. So the difference we're talking about is whether the per capita GDP/median American household income in 2100 is $600000/year or $550000/year (in today's dollars!).
We can't sell them anything right now because they are poor; they don't have any money to pay for our technologies.
But imagine how much more stuff we can sell them in the future to remediate the effects of climate change! Keynesians should love it!
You don't have to screen, you just supplement.
Making people wealthier greatly improves health. Limiting carbon emissions on the hopes that crops stay more nutritious won't do anything.
(1) Paris is ineffective in reducing carbon emissions to have significant impact according to mainstream climate models.
(2) The cost of Paris is also several percent reduction in GDP globally.
(3) The cost of Paris is immediate and certain, while the cost of climate change is far off and uncertain.
(4) Because developed countries pay but don't benefit much, it's not going to happen.
Yeah, and it also tells us just what your "sense of decorum" is.
Where did I say that I want Google to modify results?
I do understand how search engines work and how much manual tuning, judgment, policy, and feature selection goes into them. Obviously, you don't.
Well, your comment just says something about yourself.