I'm pretty sure we all know why the large providers negotiate the rates that they do -- bulk, and extortion. If Banner doesn't want my [large number] patients at $50 an X-ray, we'll see if Mayo does.
Self pay rates are certainly negotiable, and available -- unfortunately, negotiating self-pay somewhere between the baby's fever and his treatment isn't always practical, and Walgreens isn't even amused if you ask for your pills on the cheap -- so here I am, buying insurance again.
An easy and simplified example is dental. In the "bad" parts of town, where they advertise services in at least two languages, you can almost always get services for whatever baseline your local government subsidy care pays for the service. There's considerable competition for dental patients, and the $525 the state will pay for a root canal - as opposed to the $1,100 they want to ask you for - will almost always get accepted if you offer it. [YMMV in the dental office with the marble waterfall in the waiting room.]
---
Aside, I was poor and young once, and eschewed insurance. Then, I got a job and a family, and opted for the best insurance I could afford, and never looked back. I lost my job a while back and moved to contract, and had a short gap this year while we waited for my wife's insurance to cover us all. It's an uneasy feeling, knowing that as someone with a job, the wrong car accident or trip down stairs, or strange lump in the wrong place could have ruined me (and my children) financially.
I just need to shut up and pay the small fortune in extortion, I guess.
Overall, I do like taxes. I drove some awesome roads this weekend, and everywhere I pissed along the way had sewage. It was pretty awesome.
While it should have been completed on time and on budget (shouldn't everything?), their primary challenges were connections with the vendors and providers - getting Experian data in correctly, that sort of thing.
Reading the provider data is trivial -- heck, there's websites that let you browse plans now. It's interfacing everything together that's challenging. [Obviously.]
There is a common myth that the high cost of health care is due to uncompensated obligatory emergency room care.
The high cost of health care - as seen for by those without insurance - is the inability of the common man to receive services at the negotiated rate of insurers. An X-ray for a major insurer is $27. Double it and add a zero if I walk into the emergency room without insurance. Pills for your condition? $4 co-pay at the in-network provider for the insured. $40 a pill if you're on your own. Don't pretend the insurer is paying $40 a pill, that's just the price the uninsured pay.
If I could pay the negotiated rates for day-to-day services, I'd have the highest deductible plan someone would sell me - saving my insurance for something actually worth insuring against - catastrophe. Unfortunately, that's not an option.
I've only taken a few certification courses in the last couple of years -- the certifications themselves weren't important to my employer, but the training was.
My most recent was for a vendor-specific identify management product, one that provided tap-and-go and reduced sign-on. While obviously the certification had countless vendor-specific pieces of information in it (their ports, their procedure to recover the console), it had concepts and ideas very similar to their primary competitors product, and to "how apps work in Windows" in general.
There will always be people who take a class, take notes on the ports and vendor-specific procedures who will always be a paper tiger, but people who actually get something out of classes can take broad concepts away from even specific classes (like vendor specific identity management products).
...why aren't the individual scores also integral and clipped at 5? Then one could not possibly claim (or even appear to claim) a number higher than 5.
Because the average of a bunch of numbers clipped at 5 will never be "5 star" unless everything is over 5.
Now, you can have a 5.2 and a 4.9 and be "5 star."
Could be worse. Could be like every school in suburban Arizona or Utah which has a Mormon/LDS temple built adjacent to it, offering Seminary as an elective.
You need something in the neighborhood of 20-24 "credits" to graduate high school these days -- that's 6 half credit classes per semester for 8 semesters/4 years. Of those 24, 16 or so might be actual book learnin'. The rest are PE and electives. Some of those electives are forced: 1-2 half credits of a foreign language, 1-2 half credits from (pick 1: shop, cooking, sewing), 1-2 half credits from music/art. And the remaining 4 are generally pretty open.
I'd rather them earn a Microsoft cert in even the dumbest of Microsoft technologies (Sharepoint?) than go next door for further indoctrination by the Mormons.
...or maybe not. Mormon make great neighbors.
[Aside: "Two" is the answer to "How many Mormons do you take fishing with you." If you take one, he'll drink all your beer.]
...but the reality is that most of those high-schoolers won't actually take a computer career, and most of those that eventually do will have another several years of college to learn other general skills before they'll (maybe) use that certified knowledge.
Good. Them most of them won't choose those electives over Jazz Band.
...and learning how to use SMS or SCCM or App-V gives you skills that translate to HP or BMC. Learning Hyper-V gives you skills that translate to Citrix and VMWare.
You can't be a certified Ford mechanic without picking up some of the skills to be ACE certified...
Alton Brown is generally down on unitaskers, but even he uses some unitaskers.
I think the rule is: either a device must have multiple uses, or if it has a single use it must be a very important use, one you will actually use frequently enough to justify the unitasker.
In Alton's 10th anniversary special, he used his fire extinguisher (which he famously mentioned was his kitchen's only unitasker) to make a fruit smoothie.
...but yeah, he's used a few unitaskers over the years.
I'll miss that show. Cooking for engineers, for sure.
Not all individual tracking is evil. If they were forced into the system, or they violated privacy laws, then reprimand appropriately and move on.
Traffic has a similar problem. With simple traffic flow measuring, you see that exit 220 was high volume and too crowded, so you expand it. If you had tracked cars end-to-end, you'd have seen that the real bottleneck was the absurdly bad exit 219, which nobody used, since 220 was, albeit slow, still better than taking exit 219.
You can likely simulate student moments from class to class, department to department, and building to building since you know their schedules (must walk from the McKinley building to the Grant building in 10 minutes on Wednesdays at 1:20pm), but figuring out when individual students from individual classes go on their breaks and schedule gaps is a challenge akin to the exit 220 issue, and if you're genuinely interested in planning your new buildings in a way that don't hamper an already busy campus, you track individual movements.
Let tinfoil types opt out.
...or just track their phone's MAC surreptitiously.:)
well they had to do this and not just write down "AI secretaries". even the patent office buffoons might have scoffed at that!
but yes, that would be quite nice actually if mundane communications would be automated like christmas cards to business people you knew 10 years ago but don't give a shit about, paying bills etc shit, reminding you of things you need to do and doing those that don't need an "executive decision"(and not paying fishing expedition bills you don't need to pay).
To a limited (but growing) extent, things like Google Now already do this.
I'm reminded of birthdays, warned in advance if my commute is delayed, and offered restaurant suggestions if I linger downtown too long after work. Friday (the app) already has the person I'm most likely to call one-touch ready for me without me having to press the 1970's intercom on my desk and say, "Janet, can you please get my wife on the phone."
It can already text my wife when I leave the office without me doing anything -- and it can type "omw home" in a way that's indistinguishable from my typing.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the scare quotes? If they're not going to be open source, then what do you suggest?
Slippery slope arguments are always true, amirite?
Nowhere in my posts do I advocate for mandated healthcare at the federal level -- only that I think the current system is pretty FUBAR.
I'm pretty sure we all know why the large providers negotiate the rates that they do -- bulk, and extortion. If Banner doesn't want my [large number] patients at $50 an X-ray, we'll see if Mayo does.
Self pay rates are certainly negotiable, and available -- unfortunately, negotiating self-pay somewhere between the baby's fever and his treatment isn't always practical, and Walgreens isn't even amused if you ask for your pills on the cheap -- so here I am, buying insurance again.
An easy and simplified example is dental. In the "bad" parts of town, where they advertise services in at least two languages, you can almost always get services for whatever baseline your local government subsidy care pays for the service. There's considerable competition for dental patients, and the $525 the state will pay for a root canal - as opposed to the $1,100 they want to ask you for - will almost always get accepted if you offer it. [YMMV in the dental office with the marble waterfall in the waiting room.]
---
Aside, I was poor and young once, and eschewed insurance. Then, I got a job and a family, and opted for the best insurance I could afford, and never looked back. I lost my job a while back and moved to contract, and had a short gap this year while we waited for my wife's insurance to cover us all. It's an uneasy feeling, knowing that as someone with a job, the wrong car accident or trip down stairs, or strange lump in the wrong place could have ruined me (and my children) financially.
I just need to shut up and pay the small fortune in extortion, I guess.
Overall, I do like taxes. I drove some awesome roads this weekend, and everywhere I pissed along the way had sewage. It was pretty awesome.
I still don't get how the website could have failed so incredibly miserably.
The problems the site faces seem to be elementary, the type of mistakes that I made when I was first doing web development.
Then you clearly don't understand the sorts of issues they were having.
http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/LMI-Meeting-Notes-October-2013.pdf
Read the war-room notes. It's primarily about interfaces to other systems.
Clearly you have no idea what's involved in the website and what the major challenges were.
Read the "war room" notes. There's way more moving parts that trying to figure out where to put the DIV tags on a "simple friggin website project."
http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/LMI-Meeting-Notes-October-2013.pdf
While it should have been completed on time and on budget (shouldn't everything?), their primary challenges were connections with the vendors and providers - getting Experian data in correctly, that sort of thing.
Reading the provider data is trivial -- heck, there's websites that let you browse plans now. It's interfacing everything together that's challenging. [Obviously.]
There is a common myth that the high cost of health care is due to uncompensated obligatory emergency room care.
The high cost of health care - as seen for by those without insurance - is the inability of the common man to receive services at the negotiated rate of insurers. An X-ray for a major insurer is $27. Double it and add a zero if I walk into the emergency room without insurance. Pills for your condition? $4 co-pay at the in-network provider for the insured. $40 a pill if you're on your own. Don't pretend the insurer is paying $40 a pill, that's just the price the uninsured pay.
If I could pay the negotiated rates for day-to-day services, I'd have the highest deductible plan someone would sell me - saving my insurance for something actually worth insuring against - catastrophe. Unfortunately, that's not an option.
Is this lab STRAIGHT OUT OF COMPTON?
Thanks, OP. I appreciate the thread.
I've only taken a few certification courses in the last couple of years -- the certifications themselves weren't important to my employer, but the training was.
My most recent was for a vendor-specific identify management product, one that provided tap-and-go and reduced sign-on. While obviously the certification had countless vendor-specific pieces of information in it (their ports, their procedure to recover the console), it had concepts and ideas very similar to their primary competitors product, and to "how apps work in Windows" in general.
There will always be people who take a class, take notes on the ports and vendor-specific procedures who will always be a paper tiger, but people who actually get something out of classes can take broad concepts away from even specific classes (like vendor specific identity management products).
Tesla Model S Achieves Best Safety Rating of Any Car Ever Tested
. No, it was rated a 5, just like many other cars.
So, uh, the best safety rating of any car ever tested*?
*tied.
...why aren't the individual scores also integral and clipped at 5? Then one could not possibly claim (or even appear to claim) a number higher than 5.
Because the average of a bunch of numbers clipped at 5 will never be "5 star" unless everything is over 5.
Now, you can have a 5.2 and a 4.9 and be "5 star."
Could be worse. Could be like every school in suburban Arizona or Utah which has a Mormon/LDS temple built adjacent to it, offering Seminary as an elective.
You need something in the neighborhood of 20-24 "credits" to graduate high school these days -- that's 6 half credit classes per semester for 8 semesters/4 years. Of those 24, 16 or so might be actual book learnin'. The rest are PE and electives. Some of those electives are forced: 1-2 half credits of a foreign language, 1-2 half credits from (pick 1: shop, cooking, sewing), 1-2 half credits from music/art. And the remaining 4 are generally pretty open.
I'd rather them earn a Microsoft cert in even the dumbest of Microsoft technologies (Sharepoint?) than go next door for further indoctrination by the Mormons.
[Aside: "Two" is the answer to "How many Mormons do you take fishing with you." If you take one, he'll drink all your beer.]
If it was Apple or Linux, it would be the greatest idea since sliced bread.
Ya think? :)
If the title were Linux Certifications For High School Credits In Australia people would be shitting themselves in glee. [More so than usual...]
*rabble* *rabble* Because it's not open-source... hate anything Microsoft... *rabble* *rabble*
I didn't get a HARUMPH! outta that guy...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN99jshaQbY
...but the reality is that most of those high-schoolers won't actually take a computer career, and most of those that eventually do will have another several years of college to learn other general skills before they'll (maybe) use that certified knowledge.
Good. Them most of them won't choose those electives over Jazz Band.
...and learning how to use SMS or SCCM or App-V gives you skills that translate to HP or BMC. Learning Hyper-V gives you skills that translate to Citrix and VMWare.
You can't be a certified Ford mechanic without picking up some of the skills to be ACE certified...
You're going to anger the vocal minority who decry any phone without a Micro-SD slot as useless.
After sitting for 5 days in a container of rice, it powered back up without issue.
Leaving your phone in rice will attract Asians, who will fix your phone for you.
No, he means e.g.
He's providing a concrete example, not a hypothetical result.
How is getting an MCSE any more or less useful than taking any other elective in Shop or Band or Home Ec'?
They still have to take the three R's to graduate. You don't get to skip your civics class to take one of these...
Almost as bad as this in the body:
Every person infected with HIV has a slightly different form the the virus. It's the ultimate chameleon because it evolves this way.
Alton Brown is generally down on unitaskers, but even he uses some unitaskers.
I think the rule is: either a device must have multiple uses, or if it has a single use it must be a very important use, one you will actually use frequently enough to justify the unitasker.
In Alton's 10th anniversary special, he used his fire extinguisher (which he famously mentioned was his kitchen's only unitasker) to make a fruit smoothie.
I'll miss that show. Cooking for engineers, for sure.
Actually, it is illegal.
It is illegal to do it in the EU and it's illegal to do it in Canada and it's illegal to do it in Washington State.
Excellent. Punish them as the law allows and move on.
Let them take volunteers who drop off their trackers when they're done with them at the end of the day next time...
Bottle openers are unitaskers, and Alton Brown would be ashamed of you.
Not all individual tracking is evil. If they were forced into the system, or they violated privacy laws, then reprimand appropriately and move on.
Traffic has a similar problem. With simple traffic flow measuring, you see that exit 220 was high volume and too crowded, so you expand it. If you had tracked cars end-to-end, you'd have seen that the real bottleneck was the absurdly bad exit 219, which nobody used, since 220 was, albeit slow, still better than taking exit 219.
You can likely simulate student moments from class to class, department to department, and building to building since you know their schedules (must walk from the McKinley building to the Grant building in 10 minutes on Wednesdays at 1:20pm), but figuring out when individual students from individual classes go on their breaks and schedule gaps is a challenge akin to the exit 220 issue, and if you're genuinely interested in planning your new buildings in a way that don't hamper an already busy campus, you track individual movements.
Let tinfoil types opt out.
well they had to do this and not just write down "AI secretaries". even the patent office buffoons might have scoffed at that!
but yes, that would be quite nice actually if mundane communications would be automated like christmas cards to business people you knew 10 years ago but don't give a shit about, paying bills etc shit, reminding you of things you need to do and doing those that don't need an "executive decision"(and not paying fishing expedition bills you don't need to pay).
To a limited (but growing) extent, things like Google Now already do this.
I'm reminded of birthdays, warned in advance if my commute is delayed, and offered restaurant suggestions if I linger downtown too long after work. Friday (the app) already has the person I'm most likely to call one-touch ready for me without me having to press the 1970's intercom on my desk and say, "Janet, can you please get my wife on the phone."
It can already text my wife when I leave the office without me doing anything -- and it can type "omw home" in a way that's indistinguishable from my typing.