I'd say the incidence of the government paying for previously un-collectable emergency bills is a fairly small percentage of the overall un-collectable bills. Acute emergencies are a lot more frequent than chronic emergencies, if I don't miss my guess. Of course, that's based on personal experience, which may or may not be representative of larger patterns. I know several low-income people who have had hospitals charge off emergency visits, with no public assistance involved (by virtue of not being eligible). I only know one who is on Medicaid.
I find it odd that they would accept an application for assistance where the person is not eligible but for a serious, acute condition. Not disputing that's the case in Minnesota, but it definitely is inconsistent with the agencies I've personally dealt with.
There is no such thing as a free market where insurance is concerned. It's either mandatory by law, or the market is fractured by regulations preventing competition nationally. The former would be auto insurance; the latter health insurance.
Your car insurance is nowhere near what health insurance costs, and for good reason. Most people in poverty choose the cheapest available option. For that, a driver with a decent record and modest vehicle will pay maybe $50-$100 a month. Your policy will cap out at something like $100,000 (I don't recall what the lower limits required by law are, so forgive if that's way off). For bodily injury, it's maybe $2M. Health insurance costs far exceed auto insurance costs, but the premiums last I was looking into a policy were around 3x a basic auto insurance policy for an individual. When you look at the cost of an operation and hospital stay, that's a damn good deal, even as screwed up as the insurance industry is. For something catastrophic, the payout is usually many more multiples of the premium than what you get from a totaled car.
Yeah, there are things that need to be fixed; those things are mostly regulations that enrich corporations and reduce access. That's not a free market. Blaming the "free market" is a red herring. Such a thing doesn't really exist in the USA.
It also may be due to risk aversion, which is one of the most common themes in business.
Women are more risky to employ than men in the current legal climate. The fact that they bear children provides them with legal protections unavailable to most men. This can come at a substantial cost to the business employing them.
Of course, saying something that is factually true doesn't stop people from calling you sexist. I believe women are just as capable as men, but it is not possible to argue that they are an equal business risk under current laws.
The closest you could get to equalizing that difference is to provide legally-guaranteed universal paternal leave that is identical to what expectant, working mothers get.
I'd be curious to hear more about this. The hospitals in my area eat the cost of providing emergency care. It's part of their overhead, which is passed on to paying patients.
That would require the elimination of social programs that require recipients to live below the poverty line and/or having more children than they can pay for.
This is not a post for/against eliminating social programs, simply an observation.
They don't use Medicaid unless they have forged papers in the name of someone who actually exists (or did) as a US citizen. Application to Medicaid requires proof of US citizenship.
What they will do is use emergency rooms, which actually costs hospitals money since they are legally obligated to treat but will never collect the bill from someone who cannot pay. In turn, that costs everyone else money, since the hospitals raise rates to cover the cost of people who use emergency rooms with no intention of paying for the care they receive.
No. If he'd kept his mouth shut about his intentions, and asked for enough money to classify it as grand larceny, he'd have easily gotten what he wanted.
Having no ethics is also one more example of lack of intelligence. If one is not smart enough to understand the 'cause and effect relationships' in ignoring a software license, then staying in business can be very hard without throwing millions at the lawyers to keep afloat.
If this were true, sociopaths would not exist. It is possible to have ethics without (much) intelligence, and to be highly intelligent with no ethics.
This particular cause and effect relationship is by no means uncomplicated. There are any number of potential outcomes to their behavior. Fewer now that it has advanced to this point, but they could easily have believed it would never be an issue. I'm sure there are many companies out there who incorporate GPL code and never bother to comply with the license.
Yup. It doesn't matter whether it's an individual VC or a company. They're in it for the money, and will get it any way they can. Many an entrepreneur has lost their shirt not as a result of a poor business plan or poor execution, but by not fully understanding the VC contract they sign.
There were terms of surrender that should have been acceptable. The second bomb was used to turn a conditional surrender into an unconditional one. The use of civilian lives to coerce that outcome was unacceptable.
Then again, the winning side gets to write the strongest historical case. Then again, war crimes have always been excused in the United States, because we haven't lost a war for territory.
As I've said before, when it comes to analyzing major decisions in a war, there's nothing wrong with doing that. They should be analyzed and debated to death, so that people can learn from mistakes made.
You don't think a football team goes over footage of previous games to discuss where things went wrong and how to improve in the future?
In the pace of a protracted war, 3 days is not a lot of time.
"A prompt and utter destruction" means squat. Every nation at war uses hyperbole. Regardless, they had proof they could do it after the dropping of the first bomb. 3 days to get everyone in line necessary to stop a war is a joke.
That assumes a ground invasion was actually necessary. Given the declaration of war and the surprise attacks by the USSR in China, the necessity is hardly a forgone conclusion. The Japanese were relying on Soviet diplomatic intervention on their behalf.
QBing from the bench is necessary and proper to help avoid later mistakes. Questioning the necessity of drastic action is something to be encouraged, not avoided. Intent matters, and given the history of US involvement in wars (excepting the first), good intentions cannot be taken for granted under any circumstances. They should always be subject to thorough investigation and the closest scrutiny possible.
I'm not saying that the death toll of one is necessarily better than the other. I simply said the deliberate targeting of a civilian population is terrorism. The sites were chosen in order to conduct an experiment, as much as to end the war. The facts published by the US government state this clearly and unequivocably. My statement regarding the second bombing still stands; they weren't even given the opportunity to surrender following the first. Even assuming the use of nuclear devices saved lives in the balance, it was inexcusable to use them back-to-back if the intent was to force surrender. They could have simply communicated that more nuclear bombs would follow. Given that's exactly the implication given to the Japanese after the second, there is no reason it couldn't have been done after the first.
The name is transliterated from a non-Latin script. It can be spelled multiple ways. All, and none, of them are correct. Which stance you take depends on the level of semantic idiocy you wish to engage in.
I expect you're one of those that argue dropping bombs are Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist acts over a military one.
Even if you excuse the first bombing, the second has none. You don't save the lives of soldiers by deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of civilians if you wish to keep the moral high ground, and especially not twice in a row without even giving them the opportunity to surrender after the first.
That was my first thought. The US has absolutely no possible way to claim jurisdiction, unless the site he ran was hosted on US-based servers. From what I can tell, the host was in China prior to being seized by ICE.
Not that jurisdiction means much in the US anymore.
I quite agree, it would have been perfectly fine. It is also perfectly fine as-is, being a relatively recent form of colloquial agreement as noted by the Anonymous Coward a bit earlier.
I use relatively few of them; this one I happen to like, and use it where I feel it is contextually appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. I hadn't heard of any states that did that sort of thing before.
I'd say the incidence of the government paying for previously un-collectable emergency bills is a fairly small percentage of the overall un-collectable bills. Acute emergencies are a lot more frequent than chronic emergencies, if I don't miss my guess. Of course, that's based on personal experience, which may or may not be representative of larger patterns. I know several low-income people who have had hospitals charge off emergency visits, with no public assistance involved (by virtue of not being eligible). I only know one who is on Medicaid.
I find it odd that they would accept an application for assistance where the person is not eligible but for a serious, acute condition. Not disputing that's the case in Minnesota, but it definitely is inconsistent with the agencies I've personally dealt with.
There is no such thing as a free market where insurance is concerned. It's either mandatory by law, or the market is fractured by regulations preventing competition nationally. The former would be auto insurance; the latter health insurance.
Your car insurance is nowhere near what health insurance costs, and for good reason. Most people in poverty choose the cheapest available option. For that, a driver with a decent record and modest vehicle will pay maybe $50-$100 a month. Your policy will cap out at something like $100,000 (I don't recall what the lower limits required by law are, so forgive if that's way off). For bodily injury, it's maybe $2M. Health insurance costs far exceed auto insurance costs, but the premiums last I was looking into a policy were around 3x a basic auto insurance policy for an individual. When you look at the cost of an operation and hospital stay, that's a damn good deal, even as screwed up as the insurance industry is. For something catastrophic, the payout is usually many more multiples of the premium than what you get from a totaled car.
Yeah, there are things that need to be fixed; those things are mostly regulations that enrich corporations and reduce access. That's not a free market. Blaming the "free market" is a red herring. Such a thing doesn't really exist in the USA.
It also may be due to risk aversion, which is one of the most common themes in business.
Women are more risky to employ than men in the current legal climate. The fact that they bear children provides them with legal protections unavailable to most men. This can come at a substantial cost to the business employing them.
Of course, saying something that is factually true doesn't stop people from calling you sexist. I believe women are just as capable as men, but it is not possible to argue that they are an equal business risk under current laws.
The closest you could get to equalizing that difference is to provide legally-guaranteed universal paternal leave that is identical to what expectant, working mothers get.
government-funded emergency room care
I'd be curious to hear more about this. The hospitals in my area eat the cost of providing emergency care. It's part of their overhead, which is passed on to paying patients.
That would require the elimination of social programs that require recipients to live below the poverty line and/or having more children than they can pay for.
This is not a post for/against eliminating social programs, simply an observation.
They don't use Medicaid unless they have forged papers in the name of someone who actually exists (or did) as a US citizen. Application to Medicaid requires proof of US citizenship.
What they will do is use emergency rooms, which actually costs hospitals money since they are legally obligated to treat but will never collect the bill from someone who cannot pay. In turn, that costs everyone else money, since the hospitals raise rates to cover the cost of people who use emergency rooms with no intention of paying for the care they receive.
No. If he'd kept his mouth shut about his intentions, and asked for enough money to classify it as grand larceny, he'd have easily gotten what he wanted.
Captive audience for PC users. It made their service worse, an I stopped using it on a PC unless I had no other choice.
I will rejoice when Silverlight dies the death it deserves.
Having no ethics is also one more example of lack of intelligence. If one is not smart enough to understand the 'cause and effect relationships' in ignoring a software license, then staying in business can be very hard without throwing millions at the lawyers to keep afloat.
If this were true, sociopaths would not exist. It is possible to have ethics without (much) intelligence, and to be highly intelligent with no ethics.
This particular cause and effect relationship is by no means uncomplicated. There are any number of potential outcomes to their behavior. Fewer now that it has advanced to this point, but they could easily have believed it would never be an issue. I'm sure there are many companies out there who incorporate GPL code and never bother to comply with the license.
Yup. It doesn't matter whether it's an individual VC or a company. They're in it for the money, and will get it any way they can. Many an entrepreneur has lost their shirt not as a result of a poor business plan or poor execution, but by not fully understanding the VC contract they sign.
There were terms of surrender that should have been acceptable. The second bomb was used to turn a conditional surrender into an unconditional one. The use of civilian lives to coerce that outcome was unacceptable.
Then again, the winning side gets to write the strongest historical case. Then again, war crimes have always been excused in the United States, because we haven't lost a war for territory.
That's Monday morning quarterbacking.
As I've said before, when it comes to analyzing major decisions in a war, there's nothing wrong with doing that. They should be analyzed and debated to death, so that people can learn from mistakes made.
You don't think a football team goes over footage of previous games to discuss where things went wrong and how to improve in the future?
In the pace of a protracted war, 3 days is not a lot of time.
"A prompt and utter destruction" means squat. Every nation at war uses hyperbole. Regardless, they had proof they could do it after the dropping of the first bomb. 3 days to get everyone in line necessary to stop a war is a joke.
That was my first though upon reading the summary. I doubt there's much overlap in their customer base.
I'd pay $5 more to Newegg. $5 isn't worth me driving to the north part of the city to patronize a crappy store like Best Buy.
It surprised me to hear Newegg is an arch-rival. There are Newegg customers who would actually ever step foot into a Best Buy?
That assumes a ground invasion was actually necessary. Given the declaration of war and the surprise attacks by the USSR in China, the necessity is hardly a forgone conclusion. The Japanese were relying on Soviet diplomatic intervention on their behalf.
QBing from the bench is necessary and proper to help avoid later mistakes. Questioning the necessity of drastic action is something to be encouraged, not avoided.
Intent matters, and given the history of US involvement in wars (excepting the first), good intentions cannot be taken for granted under any circumstances. They should always be subject to thorough investigation and the closest scrutiny possible.
I'm not saying that the death toll of one is necessarily better than the other. I simply said the deliberate targeting of a civilian population is terrorism. The sites were chosen in order to conduct an experiment, as much as to end the war. The facts published by the US government state this clearly and unequivocably. My statement regarding the second bombing still stands; they weren't even given the opportunity to surrender following the first. Even assuming the use of nuclear devices saved lives in the balance, it was inexcusable to use them back-to-back if the intent was to force surrender. They could have simply communicated that more nuclear bombs would follow. Given that's exactly the implication given to the Japanese after the second, there is no reason it couldn't have been done after the first.
The name is transliterated from a non-Latin script. It can be spelled multiple ways. All, and none, of them are correct. Which stance you take depends on the level of semantic idiocy you wish to engage in.
I expect you're one of those that argue dropping bombs are Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist acts over a military one.
Even if you excuse the first bombing, the second has none. You don't save the lives of soldiers by deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of civilians if you wish to keep the moral high ground, and especially not twice in a row without even giving them the opportunity to surrender after the first.
Well, if it stands up that they're not hostile, I want a Predator for Christmas.
The registrar doesn't have to be in the USA, since ICANN is based inside the USA. Aside from some foreign TLDs, they have the final say.
That was my first thought. The US has absolutely no possible way to claim jurisdiction, unless the site he ran was hosted on US-based servers. From what I can tell, the host was in China prior to being seized by ICE.
Not that jurisdiction means much in the US anymore.
I quite agree, it would have been perfectly fine. It is also perfectly fine as-is, being a relatively recent form of colloquial agreement as noted by the Anonymous Coward a bit earlier.
I use relatively few of them; this one I happen to like, and use it where I feel it is contextually appropriate.
This.
Vim is an incredibly useful tool, but does not replace other tools for producing websites with even an insignificant amount of complexity.