If no plan covered preexisting conditions, then people simply didn't switch providers, and were covered. If every plan covers preexisting conditions, then people change plans freely, with no more cost than before. The changes were much smaller than the naysayers say.
Then they would be investment companies, not banks. It would take some changes in rules for banks to allow them to only grant loans to the fed. The liquidity and such are designed for consumer loans and such, not super-long-term T-bills.
But, as you say, the fed could easily change the rules to allow banks to become buyers of T-bills, and if the rates continue to increase, they may do that, in an attempt to limit the interest rates they have to pay, as higher rates mean greater debt/deficit. But if consumer credit is stifled, the entire economy will collapse.
If interest rates on T-bills climb, the government will do something to encourage *anybody* to buy them including banks, so long as it doesn't shut off consumer credit.
US is not a "private only" system. Emergency care is still universal. Child healthcare is still universal. Elderly care is still universal.
Emergency care is private and unfunded. It's a cost of doing business, like marking parking lots with fire lanes, and having handicapped spots.
Child-only care that's income tested isn't "universal" and neither is an age-tested system. That you don't understand "universal" doesn't make it true.
Medicare and Medicaid are government paid plans, who only pay private for-profit providers who opt-in to their system (also note, Medicaid is a state system, not federal, though uses federal funds). You should have gone for VA. A medical system overlay, the only government medical system with no "profit" in it. Deliberately kept at bare minimums to "prove" how bad government health care would be.
The VA would be a better basis for Universal Health Care than the Medi[care|caid] system. Fund the VA, and send all Medi[care|caid] to the VA, shutting them down as the care transfers to the VA, then expand the VA until it can serve the entire population. It would take years to do gracefully, but would be an effective and reasonable path to universal care. No changes to the private system, but creating universal care.
Wealthy and healthy people get annoyed that they pay a lot of taxes, and they still have to sit five hours in ER queue with all the junkies and alcoholics.
Healthy people don't go to the ER. And in my Universal Care location, I can go to my GP and get a referral to the hospital and get no lines. And yes, that even works for ER, with private ERs referring to the hospital and eliminating the wait, so you have to go through triage at the "free" ER, then skip to the front of the line. And there are lots of private facilities you can go to and never touch the public system. So the 20% (since apparently 1% offends you) gets private insurance, and goes to private doctors, and doesn't use the public system if it's that important to them.
And yes, one thing the rich do best is complain about taxes.
lowering the quality for the top payers.
Which is true.
Bullshit. Most single payer systems have a parallel private system, and the 1% can go to private hospitals all they want. The quality doesn't fall. The options aren't restricted. And there's no death panels.
Single payer is better than the US system (pre and post Obama) in every way.
Even here in Finland, if you want high quality care in many fields, you have to go to private sector.
Wait, so does it lower quality for the top payers, or allow the top payers full access to the best care, but only if they go to the private sector that still exists in the single-payer world?
Your complaint isn't even consistent.
And if you're employed at a sizable company, guess what? You get private healthcare because it's mandated by law, to be paid by your employer.
So you have single-payer with everyone else and private on top of that through most companies? That's how many single payer systems do it. UK, NZ, and others with "pure' single-payer systems (where everyone authorized has 100% covered health care), also have a parallel private system as "competition".
So to pretend that there aren't pros to private-only system is folly. You need to understand that there are pros and cons to each system, and when you misrepresent this in an attempt to sell universal health care, you'll get overwhelming rejection when people notice that they have been fooled.
What pro is there to a private-only system? I've never seen any. The costs are higher, and the care worse in the US with private-only, than many other places (costs higher than anywhere, care worse in the US than most industrialized countries for the "average' user, and not much better for the 1%).
Paying a doctor for his time is different than a for-profit pharma, who all spend more on marketing than R&D, and for-profit insurance company paying a for-profit hospital. About 50% of health care expenses ar profit-related. This is new. Previously, almost all hospitals were non-profit, and many insurance companies started as non-profit. Everyone trying to profit from it is the #1 cause of the increasing costs.
No. The fed could pay 90% interest on T-bills, while charging banks 1% for the FED rate. Sure, that would cause problems with debt, but there's no physical reason why it wouldn't work.
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well.
This shit is simple. Lots of companies have replicated non-core business functions to reduce cost, often eventually spinning them off as separate businesses, selling them at a profit and continuing to buy from them.
Woking in telecom, some of the most used subscriber tracking programs are spinoff companies from other telcos. GMAC is not a division of GM, as they started, but is a separate company, and unrelated (and since, renamed).
Health Care is easy. Price books, discounts, and tricks that are well known. Negotiating for the insurer discount off the price book, and you are 99% of the way to solving the problem, from there you simply set up fraud protections and spread the cost. Easy. The problem is it takes enough spread of risk to cover everyone, something that 3 large companies covers.
Right, the first 2 seconds lost to ambient noise, the last 3 "exercise" not heard because of the shock of "this is not a drill". Simple mistake. The process was broken, and any thought before the exercise would have discovered that. Much like airline safety, the reason everything is "pilot error" is that human factors is always the last thought of engineers. 99% of "pilot error" is due to process or engineering encouraging error.
Causing the problem is known human factors. The message wasn't clear, and being over a speakerphone in a crowded room, the ability for mishearing is quite high.
That such things weren't though of in the process is proof of their incompetence. I can't understand why you are defending obvious incompetence.
That's why we have exercises in the first place -- to test the system and learn.
Better to have learned from previous mistakes than keep making basic human factors mistakes over and over again. Why do you hate learning from mistakes? They've been made before.
That he inherited from the last two administrations.
Is that code for "started under Bush?"
You can see the Republican apologists. It's like for Vietnam, where the Republicans still blame JFK, when the first American boots on the ground in Vietnam and first American losses were under Eisenhower. And it was Eisenhower who explicitly interrupted the elections that was the proximate cause of the "civil war" that became a proxy war. But that's forgotten and "continuing a failed policy by a Republican" is somehow turned into "started by a Democrat."
I'm not a Democrat, but I do believe in telling the truth.
Played back on a speakerphone with ambient noise, the "exercise, exercise, exercise" was either not heard, or effectively discarded because "this is not a drill" shocked the worker.
Management deliberately violates good human factors practices, then blames humans for errors.
Single pass, audio only, conflicting messages. What kind of idiot devised that system?
A friend with that complaint showed me the pre-ACA options and post-ACA options. What happened is that the company picked new plans for everyone, and cut employer matching, to make ACA look bad, while saving money. So forgive me if I consider the anti-ACA lies to be lies. Though I'm not in PA, so the options there could be different. The employers cut payments and blamed ACA. The workers without unions had no choice. The PA union looked to fight back against abusive treatment by their employers. Exactly what unions should do.
Fine. Call it final interrogation before arrest. Other than your complaint about my word choice, the rest of what I said is true. And you said nothing that contradicted it.
They can't charge you until they arrest you. THey can't arrest you until they final interrogate you. But, nothing in your irrelevant copy-paste indicates why they refused to final interrogate Julian in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Sweden routinely final interrogates people who are no longer in sweden. There has never been any reason given why they refused to do so in this case. By Sweden's standards, he was already final interrogated once, charged, acquitted, and is now being double-jeopardied, which is much more irregular than a remote final interrogation.
"What's the top sector in the US" "Oil and Coal." "Have they bribed me?" "Yes." "OK, 25% tariff on solar. Who's next?" "Telecommunications, no bribe." "Nationalize 5G, Privatize if they spend $500M at Mar-a-Lago." "Done"
Nationalization of the spectrum (along with the hardware in the tower) is a great idea. Rent it to everyone at the same price. Eliminate monopoly, and force competition on service, not lies about speeds and coverage.
But the cynic in me thinks it's just a public announcement to manipulate, not a serious suggestion.
Japan didn't immediately issue a public apology, offer reparations, and have a reasonable explanation for how they were aiming for a similar target and got it wrong.
Have no illusions, an attack on an embassy is an act of war. But not all acts of war lead to war. The US didn't attack the Chinese embassy, they accidentally bombed it. There is a difference.
Legally, the embassy is foreign soil. Attacks on it are considered acts of war. The foreign soil is by treaty, so it can be unmade, but for all legal purposes, it's "in" the embassy country. If two ecuadorians were to shoot at each other inside the ecuadorian embassy, would the UK government claim that there was a crime on UK soil? No, the land is ecuadorian by treaty, so the UK would leave it to the ecuadorians, unless explicitly asked to interfere.
the Swedish and British legal systems are doing the right thing in prosecuting Assange.
Sweden has routinely traveled to foreign countries to interview those they were unable to to get to come locally. They refused to do so with Assange. Sweden has less regularly held interviews over phone or video conference, but has still done so. They refused to do so with Assange.
If they are doing "the right thing", then why aren't they following their own policies and practices? Assange "fled" Sweden when cleared of all charges. Then, after US pressure, they reinstated the charges, and started the process to try him again for the same offenses he was cleared of before. The US and Swedish systems don't align but he's effectively being tried twice for the same crime, which is allowed, but very unusual. Much more unusual than interviewing someone outside Sweden.
So how can we believe Sweden's "doing the right thing" when they are breaking their own standards without rational explanation?
Really? Because I see the Republican standing with the police union every time the police union is backing a cop that shot an unarmed Black man. Sure, Republicans hate pensions, and other benefits, but do frequently stand with the Police union, and almost every police union member I know is Republican.
You don't even have to talk to the controller most of the time.
Obviously. If two craft were on the same frequency (As is required if they are both talking to the same controller), and both were talking most of the time, then they'd necessarily be interrupting each other. You communicate very little, but when you do it's generally very important.
Human factors requires minimal communications. You can't talk and fly. A drone has no issue with multitasking, and can talk and fly at the same time without doing either more poorly than if it was only doing one.
All this will be moot, when the FAA creates a central control for all autonomous drones. Every AI drone must identify the path (to the mm) and flight time (to the ms) to the central server. Every drone GPS synchronized for clock and location, and the central server tracking all drones at once. So long as no drone comes within [safety] distance/time of another, then they are approved for the flightplan. Real-time monitoring of billions of small drones is doable now, but would be easier by the time it was necessary. The anti-government government wouldn't do anything so useful and simple, so we'll have chaos and band on almost everything for 20 years longer than everyone else.
Except Police unions, and many other governmental unions (except teachers). I suspect it's because the teachers' unions are anti-Republican that the Republicans are so deliberately destructive when it comes to education.
Because the first trip showed that the body was lifeless, inert, and relatively uninteresting. Nobody need "waste" money duplicating the effort. Put up satellites. Look to Mars. But, unless someone is proposing a permanent colony on the Moon, there's no reason to go back.
Europe is less likely to have a mega-corp with unrelated arms. Sony and the like are less common. But companies like Bosch are considered #1 in the world in their field. And many of the #1 in the world in their field are in Europe.
Space travel. The Internet. iPhones. Commercial space travel. Quantum mechanics. Nuclear bombs. Tang. Google.
Yes, the US used to do great things. But genetic engineering on humans? China only, due to regulations. Space travel? Well, the US government canceled all its programs, and buys space on other's launches. Some private work, but that's being duplicated by others elsewhere in the world, and the lead isn't clear, and the lead is by an immigrant from Africa. Nuclear Bombs. Nope. The US is not working on new nuclear bombs. Rather than decommissioning thousands and replacing them with hundreds, for cost savings while not decreasing strike capabilities, the US spends defense budgets on airplanes to replace old ones that do a better job than the new ones.
It's harder to name something innovative that DIDN'T start here than the reverse.
Well, since you are going back 50+ years, who made the first automobile?And your space travel example is insane. First man in space? First man in orbit? First satellite? First rocket? None of that was US. The US had the first man on the moon. Yay, one first out of hundreds. So let's pretend that's the only one that matters. How's that Space Shuttle program doing?
A super-smart person can't be likable. The problem is that they make others around them appear dumb, simply by comparison. That's why bad leaders find dumb people. They look better by comparison.
But the smart people don't relate as well. Either you dumb yourself down, or others will notice. That's the same reason good car salesmen look and act dumb. If they are dumb, then you'll feel you got a good deal.
That's why there are so many Autism diagnoses. Parlty Munchausen by Proxy, and part belief that shopping for Autism proves intelligence. You see it a lot on Slashdot, all the people bragging about "the spectrum". Of course, "emotional intelligence" was made up by dumb people to make them feel better. But not having empathy is a sign of sociopathy, not intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
If no plan covered preexisting conditions, then people simply didn't switch providers, and were covered. If every plan covers preexisting conditions, then people change plans freely, with no more cost than before. The changes were much smaller than the naysayers say.
Then they would be investment companies, not banks. It would take some changes in rules for banks to allow them to only grant loans to the fed. The liquidity and such are designed for consumer loans and such, not super-long-term T-bills.
But, as you say, the fed could easily change the rules to allow banks to become buyers of T-bills, and if the rates continue to increase, they may do that, in an attempt to limit the interest rates they have to pay, as higher rates mean greater debt/deficit. But if consumer credit is stifled, the entire economy will collapse.
If interest rates on T-bills climb, the government will do something to encourage *anybody* to buy them including banks, so long as it doesn't shut off consumer credit.
US is not a "private only" system. Emergency care is still universal. Child healthcare is still universal. Elderly care is still universal.
Emergency care is private and unfunded. It's a cost of doing business, like marking parking lots with fire lanes, and having handicapped spots.
Child-only care that's income tested isn't "universal" and neither is an age-tested system. That you don't understand "universal" doesn't make it true.
Medicare and Medicaid are government paid plans, who only pay private for-profit providers who opt-in to their system (also note, Medicaid is a state system, not federal, though uses federal funds). You should have gone for VA. A medical system overlay, the only government medical system with no "profit" in it. Deliberately kept at bare minimums to "prove" how bad government health care would be.
The VA would be a better basis for Universal Health Care than the Medi[care|caid] system. Fund the VA, and send all Medi[care|caid] to the VA, shutting them down as the care transfers to the VA, then expand the VA until it can serve the entire population. It would take years to do gracefully, but would be an effective and reasonable path to universal care. No changes to the private system, but creating universal care.
Wealthy and healthy people get annoyed that they pay a lot of taxes, and they still have to sit five hours in ER queue with all the junkies and alcoholics.
Healthy people don't go to the ER. And in my Universal Care location, I can go to my GP and get a referral to the hospital and get no lines. And yes, that even works for ER, with private ERs referring to the hospital and eliminating the wait, so you have to go through triage at the "free" ER, then skip to the front of the line. And there are lots of private facilities you can go to and never touch the public system. So the 20% (since apparently 1% offends you) gets private insurance, and goes to private doctors, and doesn't use the public system if it's that important to them.
And yes, one thing the rich do best is complain about taxes.
lowering the quality for the top payers. Which is true.
Bullshit. Most single payer systems have a parallel private system, and the 1% can go to private hospitals all they want. The quality doesn't fall. The options aren't restricted. And there's no death panels.
Single payer is better than the US system (pre and post Obama) in every way.
Even here in Finland, if you want high quality care in many fields, you have to go to private sector.
Wait, so does it lower quality for the top payers, or allow the top payers full access to the best care, but only if they go to the private sector that still exists in the single-payer world?
Your complaint isn't even consistent.
And if you're employed at a sizable company, guess what? You get private healthcare because it's mandated by law, to be paid by your employer.
So you have single-payer with everyone else and private on top of that through most companies? That's how many single payer systems do it. UK, NZ, and others with "pure' single-payer systems (where everyone authorized has 100% covered health care), also have a parallel private system as "competition".
So to pretend that there aren't pros to private-only system is folly. You need to understand that there are pros and cons to each system, and when you misrepresent this in an attempt to sell universal health care, you'll get overwhelming rejection when people notice that they have been fooled.
What pro is there to a private-only system? I've never seen any. The costs are higher, and the care worse in the US with private-only, than many other places (costs higher than anywhere, care worse in the US than most industrialized countries for the "average' user, and not much better for the 1%).
Paying a doctor for his time is different than a for-profit pharma, who all spend more on marketing than R&D, and for-profit insurance company paying a for-profit hospital. About 50% of health care expenses ar profit-related. This is new. Previously, almost all hospitals were non-profit, and many insurance companies started as non-profit. Everyone trying to profit from it is the #1 cause of the increasing costs.
No. The fed could pay 90% interest on T-bills, while charging banks 1% for the FED rate. Sure, that would cause problems with debt, but there's no physical reason why it wouldn't work.
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well.
This shit is simple. Lots of companies have replicated non-core business functions to reduce cost, often eventually spinning them off as separate businesses, selling them at a profit and continuing to buy from them.
Woking in telecom, some of the most used subscriber tracking programs are spinoff companies from other telcos. GMAC is not a division of GM, as they started, but is a separate company, and unrelated (and since, renamed).
Health Care is easy. Price books, discounts, and tricks that are well known. Negotiating for the insurer discount off the price book, and you are 99% of the way to solving the problem, from there you simply set up fraud protections and spread the cost. Easy. The problem is it takes enough spread of risk to cover everyone, something that 3 large companies covers.
Right, the first 2 seconds lost to ambient noise, the last 3 "exercise" not heard because of the shock of "this is not a drill". Simple mistake. The process was broken, and any thought before the exercise would have discovered that. Much like airline safety, the reason everything is "pilot error" is that human factors is always the last thought of engineers. 99% of "pilot error" is due to process or engineering encouraging error.
That such things weren't though of in the process is proof of their incompetence. I can't understand why you are defending obvious incompetence.
That's why we have exercises in the first place -- to test the system and learn.
Better to have learned from previous mistakes than keep making basic human factors mistakes over and over again. Why do you hate learning from mistakes? They've been made before.
Oh, wait, that was the last two administrations.
Is that code for "started under Bush?"
Oops, it was those last two administrations.
Is that code for "started under Bush?"
That he inherited from the last two administrations.
Is that code for "started under Bush?"
You can see the Republican apologists. It's like for Vietnam, where the Republicans still blame JFK, when the first American boots on the ground in Vietnam and first American losses were under Eisenhower. And it was Eisenhower who explicitly interrupted the elections that was the proximate cause of the "civil war" that became a proxy war. But that's forgotten and "continuing a failed policy by a Republican" is somehow turned into "started by a Democrat."
I'm not a Democrat, but I do believe in telling the truth.
Played back on a speakerphone with ambient noise, the "exercise, exercise, exercise" was either not heard, or effectively discarded because "this is not a drill" shocked the worker.
Management deliberately violates good human factors practices, then blames humans for errors.
Single pass, audio only, conflicting messages. What kind of idiot devised that system?
A friend with that complaint showed me the pre-ACA options and post-ACA options. What happened is that the company picked new plans for everyone, and cut employer matching, to make ACA look bad, while saving money. So forgive me if I consider the anti-ACA lies to be lies. Though I'm not in PA, so the options there could be different. The employers cut payments and blamed ACA. The workers without unions had no choice. The PA union looked to fight back against abusive treatment by their employers. Exactly what unions should do.
Fine. Call it final interrogation before arrest. Other than your complaint about my word choice, the rest of what I said is true. And you said nothing that contradicted it.
They can't charge you until they arrest you. THey can't arrest you until they final interrogate you. But, nothing in your irrelevant copy-paste indicates why they refused to final interrogate Julian in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Sweden routinely final interrogates people who are no longer in sweden. There has never been any reason given why they refused to do so in this case. By Sweden's standards, he was already final interrogated once, charged, acquitted, and is now being double-jeopardied, which is much more irregular than a remote final interrogation.
Here's how I picture it.
"What's the top sector in the US"
"Oil and Coal."
"Have they bribed me?"
"Yes."
"OK, 25% tariff on solar. Who's next?"
"Telecommunications, no bribe."
"Nationalize 5G, Privatize if they spend $500M at Mar-a-Lago."
"Done"
Nationalization of the spectrum (along with the hardware in the tower) is a great idea. Rent it to everyone at the same price. Eliminate monopoly, and force competition on service, not lies about speeds and coverage.
But the cynic in me thinks it's just a public announcement to manipulate, not a serious suggestion.
Japan didn't immediately issue a public apology, offer reparations, and have a reasonable explanation for how they were aiming for a similar target and got it wrong.
Have no illusions, an attack on an embassy is an act of war. But not all acts of war lead to war. The US didn't attack the Chinese embassy, they accidentally bombed it. There is a difference.
Legally, the embassy is foreign soil. Attacks on it are considered acts of war. The foreign soil is by treaty, so it can be unmade, but for all legal purposes, it's "in" the embassy country. If two ecuadorians were to shoot at each other inside the ecuadorian embassy, would the UK government claim that there was a crime on UK soil? No, the land is ecuadorian by treaty, so the UK would leave it to the ecuadorians, unless explicitly asked to interfere.
the Swedish and British legal systems are doing the right thing in prosecuting Assange.
Sweden has routinely traveled to foreign countries to interview those they were unable to to get to come locally. They refused to do so with Assange. Sweden has less regularly held interviews over phone or video conference, but has still done so. They refused to do so with Assange.
If they are doing "the right thing", then why aren't they following their own policies and practices? Assange "fled" Sweden when cleared of all charges. Then, after US pressure, they reinstated the charges, and started the process to try him again for the same offenses he was cleared of before. The US and Swedish systems don't align but he's effectively being tried twice for the same crime, which is allowed, but very unusual. Much more unusual than interviewing someone outside Sweden.
So how can we believe Sweden's "doing the right thing" when they are breaking their own standards without rational explanation?
Really? Because I see the Republican standing with the police union every time the police union is backing a cop that shot an unarmed Black man. Sure, Republicans hate pensions, and other benefits, but do frequently stand with the Police union, and almost every police union member I know is Republican.
You don't even have to talk to the controller most of the time.
Obviously. If two craft were on the same frequency (As is required if they are both talking to the same controller), and both were talking most of the time, then they'd necessarily be interrupting each other. You communicate very little, but when you do it's generally very important.
Human factors requires minimal communications. You can't talk and fly. A drone has no issue with multitasking, and can talk and fly at the same time without doing either more poorly than if it was only doing one.
All this will be moot, when the FAA creates a central control for all autonomous drones. Every AI drone must identify the path (to the mm) and flight time (to the ms) to the central server. Every drone GPS synchronized for clock and location, and the central server tracking all drones at once. So long as no drone comes within [safety] distance/time of another, then they are approved for the flightplan. Real-time monitoring of billions of small drones is doable now, but would be easier by the time it was necessary. The anti-government government wouldn't do anything so useful and simple, so we'll have chaos and band on almost everything for 20 years longer than everyone else.
AI in the FAA? I'd be happy with human intelligence.
Except Police unions, and many other governmental unions (except teachers). I suspect it's because the teachers' unions are anti-Republican that the Republicans are so deliberately destructive when it comes to education.
They should have delivered it by drone.
First, and still only.
Because the first trip showed that the body was lifeless, inert, and relatively uninteresting. Nobody need "waste" money duplicating the effort. Put up satellites. Look to Mars. But, unless someone is proposing a permanent colony on the Moon, there's no reason to go back.
Europe is less likely to have a mega-corp with unrelated arms. Sony and the like are less common. But companies like Bosch are considered #1 in the world in their field. And many of the #1 in the world in their field are in Europe.
Space travel. The Internet. iPhones. Commercial space travel. Quantum mechanics. Nuclear bombs. Tang. Google.
Yes, the US used to do great things. But genetic engineering on humans? China only, due to regulations. Space travel? Well, the US government canceled all its programs, and buys space on other's launches. Some private work, but that's being duplicated by others elsewhere in the world, and the lead isn't clear, and the lead is by an immigrant from Africa. Nuclear Bombs. Nope. The US is not working on new nuclear bombs. Rather than decommissioning thousands and replacing them with hundreds, for cost savings while not decreasing strike capabilities, the US spends defense budgets on airplanes to replace old ones that do a better job than the new ones.
It's harder to name something innovative that DIDN'T start here than the reverse.
Well, since you are going back 50+ years, who made the first automobile?And your space travel example is insane. First man in space? First man in orbit? First satellite? First rocket? None of that was US. The US had the first man on the moon. Yay, one first out of hundreds. So let's pretend that's the only one that matters. How's that Space Shuttle program doing?
A super-smart person can't be likable. The problem is that they make others around them appear dumb, simply by comparison. That's why bad leaders find dumb people. They look better by comparison.
But the smart people don't relate as well. Either you dumb yourself down, or others will notice. That's the same reason good car salesmen look and act dumb. If they are dumb, then you'll feel you got a good deal.
That's why there are so many Autism diagnoses. Parlty Munchausen by Proxy, and part belief that shopping for Autism proves intelligence. You see it a lot on Slashdot, all the people bragging about "the spectrum". Of course, "emotional intelligence" was made up by dumb people to make them feel better. But not having empathy is a sign of sociopathy, not intelligence.