How much do you want to bet that the benefactors of this funding turn out to be connected to some political party pretty tightly.
I'm wondering if this isn't actually some sort of payback. This isn't a lot of money to start something like this when there isn't really anything that specifically meets the stated criteria on the market right now.
I typically go through about 10,000 or more rounds of different kinds of ammo a year. The only time I injured someone is when they came up beside me to get my attention and a hot shell ejected and went into his shirt burning his chest. And yes, I know that's not the bullet.
Anyways, what would be more interesting might be instead of just the number of bullets fired per people injured, but also the number of justified injuries including deaths. I mean some or most of those injuries will be because of actions justified by law either in self defense or serving and protecting society.
What does that matter? I mean slaves weren't eligable for citizenship in most stated until the 12th or 14th amendment.
And no, this wasn't born out of hate, it was a tactic put in place after a rebellion in Virginia back in the 14 or 1600's in which white and black slaves banded together, killed a lot of their masters and hightailed it to Florida. Separating the white slaves who could regain full citizenship from black slaves who would never get citizen rights separated their willingness to band together as they were now separate classes of people.
as far as I know, the farmer didn't get far enough to get it to any market so it can't be interfering with any markets.
Anyways, to show how silly your/the argument is, if you were to start taking baths instead of using toilet paper every time you went number 2, are you interfering with a market and under the purview of government regulation in that regard? How about if you start a coop/group between your neighbors who go around telling people to do that instead of wasting paper because they don't need to cut as many trees down that way, you are effecting the markets for toilet paper now, can they regulate? How about you create a book telling people about this and sell it at the stores in the TP isle? OR how about if you make grow corn and pull the leaves off of it, say use these instead of TP, and grow more then you could ever use in a years time?
Do you see where that gets silly? I mean the Interstate commerce clause is there to allow the feds to deal with interstate commerce, not intrastate commerce. Should the fact that one of your competitors might be from another state all the sudden put the feds in charge of regulating your activities that do not even flow outside your neighborhood?
Well, no matter how you attempt to justify it, you owe copyright holders what the law says.
You probably can justify why the law is stupid, unnecessary, ill thought, not logical, and so on, but as long as the law is there, you owe the copyright holders for any use the law specifically allows them control over. There is a serious ethical problem with purposefully violating the law.
However, there is no ethical issues with protesting the law or anything you can do in order to repeal it or remove its scope. But as long as it's there, you can't justify violating it unless you can claim the alternative is somehow worse. That creates a pretty strong ethical challenge to overcome.
Well, that's also besides the fact that they were at the same party last weekend so they probably aren't too far away from each other. A sneaker net, burn on a CD, or copied to a thumb drive doesn't seem all that out of context here.
I mean hell, there are even free FTP servers available that you can install on windows with little to no experience and they can just dump the pics onto your computer. Of course this required internet access and sure as shit, if you're expected to check facebook for them, that's not an issue.
BTW, I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm attempting to expand on how absurd relying on facebook for everything is. My step mother died (about a year after my father) recently and my step sister didn't call anyone to let us know (including her natural family), she posted a few blurbs on face book about it and we all found out from a 13 year old surfing the net the day afterward. She didn't even get the Obituary into the paper or details about the funeral until the day before it took place. I mean common, who is that fucking stupid and lazy? I guess I really hate the idea a little more then some.
Ayatollah Khomeini: They dropped his coffin during his burial, making his corpse fall out. For me, this is one of the funniest moments in television history.
Well, it was only true in the sense that he could have done anything else including not participating in any activity and avoided buying wheat and that would have impacted trade too. However, there is nothing indicating that the trade impacted would have been interstate which is the problem with how true the argument is (pertaining to the ICC).
In other words, could the feds require you to use a certain type of toilet paper when your intending on doing the middle east thing and wipe with a sponge that you can reuse because it impacts trade? I know that's sort of a strawman argument but it represents the absurdity of "if it can impact trade" argument.
Although your explanation of the Interstate Commerce Clause pretty much shows the lack of Jurisdiction of the federal government because the federal government used the ICC in order to justify this prosecution. So even setting other jurisdictional issues aside, the way they attempted to make the law apply is outside their scope of jurisdiction at least on the issue they argued claiming to make it apply. I have no idea if they claimed jurisdiction in another way, I just know they used the ICC in order to prosecute this guy for completely acting intrastate.
It appears that in order for any copyrighted works to be imported into the US for resale, the copyright holder has to give permission for the importation and has a right to control that. It appears that this is independent of the first sale doctrine because the first sale happened outside the US.
So it's both, where they made it and where they bought it. But once it's legally inside the US, the first sale doctrine clearly applies. At first, I thought this was something concerning a law outside the US, but it's actually US law requiring the permissions to import. Evidently, the 9th circuit court thought that stuck more then the rights after the first sale.
Still, if it's in the US legally, the first sale doctrine should apply.
Evidently, foreign law applies to the first sale in which it came to the chain of markets to the final retailer. The US is under treaty to respect foreign copyright laws where applicable. the argument put forth was that the first sale wasn't legal because under "their" copyright law (not ours), they have certain rights that weren't observed, so all subsequent sales couldn't be legal either.
In this matter, the US first sale doctrine or right wouldn't even apply because from the court's perspective, once they determined the original law gave those people those rights in that country, and that those rights were infringed on, all other sales weren't legally binding under US law.
It's like saying if you couldn't legally obtain it where it was located, then doing so and laundering it through another country won't make it legal even though it's legal in the other country. The copyright distribution issue was only to show the first sale in the other country wasn't legal.
Actually, it doesn't work that way. This ruling only applies to goods sold overseas and then imported into the US by the same person.
If you purchase something in the US, US law applies and so does the first sale doctrine. IF you purchase it in London, and there is a law saying they have control over it's distribution, then that law is still binding when you bring it back to the US.
What was at stake here isn't really that someone can't sell something. It's that the watch maker was selling it cheaper in other parts of the world and Cosco purchased it off the street there for cheaper and sold it cheaper then the retailer could get it from the original manufacturer. But since Costco purchased it in a foreign country, those laws apply to the ownership of the property as purchased. Costco could certainly purchase it in the US baring any contract stating otherwise they might have with the manufacturer, and sell it below costs under US law. They could sell it to you at their contracted price then you would have complete first sale doctrine over it. The sticky part is purchasing it under one set of laws and attempting to have another apply to it later.
It wasn't about whether black people were people, it was whether they were citizens or not which allowed them to be treated differently then American "citizens". And yes, it took a constitutional amendment to clarify that blacks, if the meet the same criteria as white people, were actually citizens too and they got the same protections as other citizens.
And your reference to the preamble of the US constitution sort of shows a little ignorance on this subject. Despite it being non-binding, it clearly signifies that the people "of the United States", not foreigners, illegal aliens, transvestite martians, cartoons, or people not qualified for citizenship but here legally.
The problems wasn't that legally that blacks weren't people, the problem was that legally, they could never be citizens. This is something they started a couple hundred years before the US became a country as a way to suppress rebellion collaboration between white indentured servants who could eventually become citizens and have rights and slaves who could never become citizens and would never have rights.
It doesn't matter if he grew twice the amount he could use in a year. The federal government simply does not have jurisdiction inside the state on matters that the US constitution doesn't grant it.
FDR probably said it best when he said
"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject1, but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere."
He said this in a speech about the Volstead Act which was printed in its entirety on March 3, 1930 by the New York Times. Of course this was two years before he became president and set the stage as well as the motion in works for the expansion of the interstate commerce clause in the US constitution.
You see, no one has to justify anything to something that never should have been allowed to happen. If the guy was participating in interstate commerce, then the feds get jurisdiction. He did not sell in interstate commerce so it was solely a state matter. If the state enacted the same laws and brought the same prosecution about, it never would have reached the supreme court unless something in the state constitution bared that type of law, seeing how US constitution specifically gives the states this jurisdiction within the state.
It should make your brain hurt. There are nine supreme court justices, why in the hell is only 8 splitting a ruling for?
It would seem to me that even if the case was started before a vacancy was created, that in the case of a tie, replacement would be required to review the facts including watching recordings of the pleadings and so on and break that tie. That's what happened in Ohio when Chief Justice Thomas Moyer passed away unexpectedly. The entire reason for an odd number on the court is to stop ties from happening.
Actually, I was attempting to make a joke like in the movies where all you needed to defeat a million dollar security system was pretend to be the guy repairing it.
It would likely depend on the context and whether it's loaded or not.
The requirement in most states if that the gun and ammunition are in separate compartments when transporting a firearm with the compartment the gun is in being locked or stripped open to easily show if it's loaded or unloaded and in plain sight. The concept is at least three deliberate, separate, and noticeable steps to arm the weapon for use. I doubt California is much different if you are just transporting the firearm for legal use.
I thought that was the most important part of dating for most of us- making sure they are chicks first. the rest seems trivial as it's function is more ancillary then utilitarian.
Um.. You mean all they have to do is put on a set of blue coveralls, carry a small tool box with some sticker from one of the Ma Bells or even a printer manufacturer on the side, and claim he is there is complete some order started a month ago and we are all doomed?
Well, we have to remember that the republicans at the time aren't exactly the same republicans as of now. Some are, but the majority aren't. That might explain some of the about faces. You also have to think about how someone reevaluates a concept over time. For instance, I thought if I lives on a hill, I could coast to work and save a crap load of gas, after a while, I then realized how stupid that was because I had to drive back up the hill at the end of the day. Another example, I have a garden that always produces more then I can eat. I though I would save some money and can some of it and/or perhaps freeze some of it. After purchasing canning supplies and getting the ability to safely do it, I won't see a savings until something like 10 years of doing it every year if nothing needs replaced in that time. (but hey, at least I know my vegetables are preserved within hours of being picked and are clean and chemical free so it's not a total loss).
I'm all against cap and trade in any shape. All it does is attempt to take the long way around for getting technology and science to figure a way out of using energy that has carbon based emissions.
It would be much more productive if we simply placed a.05% tax on all energy used and divert that money to various science and technology quests attempting to find reasonable replacements or sequestering technology- give that as it becomes viable to anyone wanting to use it, buy up existing patents concerning the tech and offer them and no cost or low costs licenses, then require through existing regulation capabilities, the use of the tech when it become feasible.
Well, there are two basic problems with that figure. For one, it include the amount of money counted as charitable in which the hospital forgives an uninsured patient from being responsible for. They do this to keep profits below an 8% margin (it used to be 6% but I believe it was raised a decade or so ago) in order to remain tax free as a charitable organization. I found out about this about 20 years ago when our local country hospital donated 250k to the dog shelter to keep charitable expenses offsetting profit and remain in the low to no tax zone. Now that's the other problem. If they are getting a tax benefit for having these unpaid debts, then that tax benefit needs to offset the total which it doesn't. In essence, it's not unpaid, it's the government paying for the person by not collecting as much tax as they normally would.
Something to think about is, lets say there are one out of every ten people who don't pay their hospital bills (10% of the population). So if they averaged $1000 per bill, raising their rates by 10% could easily drive that costs up 10% without ever resorting to more people skipping out or more services being rendered. And when the incentive is a higher markup so the averages computed for medicare payments are higher, well I think you can see the trend.
It's interesting. HP is a US company with offices all over the world that outsources most of it's production to foreign labor.
Why you are limiting this to the US government is sort of interesting in that it could have been slipped in by about any worker in almost any country working for almost any outside interest. And because HP doesn't individually develop and install custom firmware for each and every product it produces, it's only obvious that once it gets in, it would be in all of them that have the same firmware/operating system. But here you are already speaking about how your hoping some conspiracy to steal secrets from political contributor's competitors as if there isn't any other motivation.
If you ask me, I would say it's simply a debug account that was supposed to be removed before final production and someone dropped the ball.
Well, you can't really claim that a hospital's $300k treatment of a heart attack on an uninsured person is because the last guy died and stiffed them $300k.
The problem is that a lot of their services in the ER are there anyways. It's already paid for and accounted for. The EKG machines, the Ventilators, the staff and so on is already there. You could make a terrific case attempting to claim that the markup is there to ensure that those things and people will always be there. However, that case get twiddled away pretty quickly when someone with insurance ends up paying 30% through their insurance and co pay.
I cut a finger a few years back requiring 4 stitches in it. No problem, there are a bunch of nurses in my family so I sought on out, asked if it needed stitches or not (I knew it did) and ended up getting one of the family practitioners so sow it up for $50. If I went to the ER, that would have been $175 per hour for the room (and it wouldn't even be private), plus about $120-$150 for the numbing crap and 10 minutes with an intern to put the three stitches in while making jokes about looking like his wife's meatloaf (yes, I've been to the ER for Stitched too many time before). Oh yea, and then there is the 45 minute wait in the room to see a doc, and another 30 minutes or so after to see the discharge nurse. Altogether, the last time I got stitches, I was charged for about 2 hours ER time at $120 in which I only talked to a person for maybe 20-25 minutes total. In those remaining hour and a half, if I wasn't there, the room most certainly still was.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure the doc gave me the "this is the costs" discount. The alternative could have been 2 to 5 hundred dollars.
I don't really think there are too many people who are not paying their ER visit bills either. The rich, well they have insurance to cover their wealth in case something like that happens. The extremely poor, well they are covered by some government program whether it be medicaid or medicare or some variation. This leaves a lot of people who make more then enough to qualify for government assistance but not enough to purchase a health insurance policy. As for those who elect not to get coverage, they typically have somewhat decent jobs and will pay to save their credit rating or whatever.
In short, I do not think there are too many people who do not pay their medical bills. I think this is especially true with programs like HCAP which is designed compensate hospitals for this specific type of claim.
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How much do you want to bet that the benefactors of this funding turn out to be connected to some political party pretty tightly.
I'm wondering if this isn't actually some sort of payback. This isn't a lot of money to start something like this when there isn't really anything that specifically meets the stated criteria on the market right now.
I typically go through about 10,000 or more rounds of different kinds of ammo a year. The only time I injured someone is when they came up beside me to get my attention and a hot shell ejected and went into his shirt burning his chest. And yes, I know that's not the bullet.
Anyways, what would be more interesting might be instead of just the number of bullets fired per people injured, but also the number of justified injuries including deaths. I mean some or most of those injuries will be because of actions justified by law either in self defense or serving and protecting society.
What does that matter? I mean slaves weren't eligable for citizenship in most stated until the 12th or 14th amendment.
And no, this wasn't born out of hate, it was a tactic put in place after a rebellion in Virginia back in the 14 or 1600's in which white and black slaves banded together, killed a lot of their masters and hightailed it to Florida. Separating the white slaves who could regain full citizenship from black slaves who would never get citizen rights separated their willingness to band together as they were now separate classes of people.
as far as I know, the farmer didn't get far enough to get it to any market so it can't be interfering with any markets.
Anyways, to show how silly your/the argument is, if you were to start taking baths instead of using toilet paper every time you went number 2, are you interfering with a market and under the purview of government regulation in that regard? How about if you start a coop/group between your neighbors who go around telling people to do that instead of wasting paper because they don't need to cut as many trees down that way, you are effecting the markets for toilet paper now, can they regulate? How about you create a book telling people about this and sell it at the stores in the TP isle? OR how about if you make grow corn and pull the leaves off of it, say use these instead of TP, and grow more then you could ever use in a years time?
Do you see where that gets silly? I mean the Interstate commerce clause is there to allow the feds to deal with interstate commerce, not intrastate commerce. Should the fact that one of your competitors might be from another state all the sudden put the feds in charge of regulating your activities that do not even flow outside your neighborhood?
Well, no matter how you attempt to justify it, you owe copyright holders what the law says.
You probably can justify why the law is stupid, unnecessary, ill thought, not logical, and so on, but as long as the law is there, you owe the copyright holders for any use the law specifically allows them control over. There is a serious ethical problem with purposefully violating the law.
However, there is no ethical issues with protesting the law or anything you can do in order to repeal it or remove its scope. But as long as it's there, you can't justify violating it unless you can claim the alternative is somehow worse. That creates a pretty strong ethical challenge to overcome.
Well, that's also besides the fact that they were at the same party last weekend so they probably aren't too far away from each other. A sneaker net, burn on a CD, or copied to a thumb drive doesn't seem all that out of context here.
I mean hell, there are even free FTP servers available that you can install on windows with little to no experience and they can just dump the pics onto your computer. Of course this required internet access and sure as shit, if you're expected to check facebook for them, that's not an issue.
BTW, I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm attempting to expand on how absurd relying on facebook for everything is. My step mother died (about a year after my father) recently and my step sister didn't call anyone to let us know (including her natural family), she posted a few blurbs on face book about it and we all found out from a 13 year old surfing the net the day afterward. She didn't even get the Obituary into the paper or details about the funeral until the day before it took place. I mean common, who is that fucking stupid and lazy? I guess I really hate the idea a little more then some.
Then you might not have seen this clip.
At least I think it's funnier...
Einstein was the brain child of the A-bomb, I read it in time magazine you dolt.
Well, it was only true in the sense that he could have done anything else including not participating in any activity and avoided buying wheat and that would have impacted trade too. However, there is nothing indicating that the trade impacted would have been interstate which is the problem with how true the argument is (pertaining to the ICC).
In other words, could the feds require you to use a certain type of toilet paper when your intending on doing the middle east thing and wipe with a sponge that you can reuse because it impacts trade? I know that's sort of a strawman argument but it represents the absurdity of "if it can impact trade" argument.
Yes..
Thank you for putting it so eloquently.
Although your explanation of the Interstate Commerce Clause pretty much shows the lack of Jurisdiction of the federal government because the federal government used the ICC in order to justify this prosecution. So even setting other jurisdictional issues aside, the way they attempted to make the law apply is outside their scope of jurisdiction at least on the issue they argued claiming to make it apply. I have no idea if they claimed jurisdiction in another way, I just know they used the ICC in order to prosecute this guy for completely acting intrastate.
I read a little more on the case.
It appears that in order for any copyrighted works to be imported into the US for resale, the copyright holder has to give permission for the importation and has a right to control that. It appears that this is independent of the first sale doctrine because the first sale happened outside the US.
So it's both, where they made it and where they bought it. But once it's legally inside the US, the first sale doctrine clearly applies. At first, I thought this was something concerning a law outside the US, but it's actually US law requiring the permissions to import. Evidently, the 9th circuit court thought that stuck more then the rights after the first sale.
Still, if it's in the US legally, the first sale doctrine should apply.
Evidently, foreign law applies to the first sale in which it came to the chain of markets to the final retailer. The US is under treaty to respect foreign copyright laws where applicable. the argument put forth was that the first sale wasn't legal because under "their" copyright law (not ours), they have certain rights that weren't observed, so all subsequent sales couldn't be legal either.
In this matter, the US first sale doctrine or right wouldn't even apply because from the court's perspective, once they determined the original law gave those people those rights in that country, and that those rights were infringed on, all other sales weren't legally binding under US law.
It's like saying if you couldn't legally obtain it where it was located, then doing so and laundering it through another country won't make it legal even though it's legal in the other country. The copyright distribution issue was only to show the first sale in the other country wasn't legal.
Actually, it doesn't work that way. This ruling only applies to goods sold overseas and then imported into the US by the same person.
If you purchase something in the US, US law applies and so does the first sale doctrine. IF you purchase it in London, and there is a law saying they have control over it's distribution, then that law is still binding when you bring it back to the US.
What was at stake here isn't really that someone can't sell something. It's that the watch maker was selling it cheaper in other parts of the world and Cosco purchased it off the street there for cheaper and sold it cheaper then the retailer could get it from the original manufacturer. But since Costco purchased it in a foreign country, those laws apply to the ownership of the property as purchased. Costco could certainly purchase it in the US baring any contract stating otherwise they might have with the manufacturer, and sell it below costs under US law. They could sell it to you at their contracted price then you would have complete first sale doctrine over it. The sticky part is purchasing it under one set of laws and attempting to have another apply to it later.
It wasn't about whether black people were people, it was whether they were citizens or not which allowed them to be treated differently then American "citizens". And yes, it took a constitutional amendment to clarify that blacks, if the meet the same criteria as white people, were actually citizens too and they got the same protections as other citizens.
And your reference to the preamble of the US constitution sort of shows a little ignorance on this subject. Despite it being non-binding, it clearly signifies that the people "of the United States", not foreigners, illegal aliens, transvestite martians, cartoons, or people not qualified for citizenship but here legally.
The problems wasn't that legally that blacks weren't people, the problem was that legally, they could never be citizens. This is something they started a couple hundred years before the US became a country as a way to suppress rebellion collaboration between white indentured servants who could eventually become citizens and have rights and slaves who could never become citizens and would never have rights.
It doesn't matter if he grew twice the amount he could use in a year. The federal government simply does not have jurisdiction inside the state on matters that the US constitution doesn't grant it.
FDR probably said it best when he said
He said this in a speech about the Volstead Act which was printed in its entirety on March 3, 1930 by the New York Times. Of course this was two years before he became president and set the stage as well as the motion in works for the expansion of the interstate commerce clause in the US constitution.
You see, no one has to justify anything to something that never should have been allowed to happen. If the guy was participating in interstate commerce, then the feds get jurisdiction. He did not sell in interstate commerce so it was solely a state matter. If the state enacted the same laws and brought the same prosecution about, it never would have reached the supreme court unless something in the state constitution bared that type of law, seeing how US constitution specifically gives the states this jurisdiction within the state.
It should make your brain hurt. There are nine supreme court justices, why in the hell is only 8 splitting a ruling for?
It would seem to me that even if the case was started before a vacancy was created, that in the case of a tie, replacement would be required to review the facts including watching recordings of the pleadings and so on and break that tie. That's what happened in Ohio when Chief Justice Thomas Moyer passed away unexpectedly. The entire reason for an odd number on the court is to stop ties from happening.
Actually, I was attempting to make a joke like in the movies where all you needed to defeat a million dollar security system was pretend to be the guy repairing it.
It would likely depend on the context and whether it's loaded or not.
The requirement in most states if that the gun and ammunition are in separate compartments when transporting a firearm with the compartment the gun is in being locked or stripped open to easily show if it's loaded or unloaded and in plain sight. The concept is at least three deliberate, separate, and noticeable steps to arm the weapon for use. I doubt California is much different if you are just transporting the firearm for legal use.
I thought that was the most important part of dating for most of us- making sure they are chicks first. the rest seems trivial as it's function is more ancillary then utilitarian.
Um.. You mean all they have to do is put on a set of blue coveralls, carry a small tool box with some sticker from one of the Ma Bells or even a printer manufacturer on the side, and claim he is there is complete some order started a month ago and we are all doomed?
That's not very comforting.
Well, we have to remember that the republicans at the time aren't exactly the same republicans as of now. Some are, but the majority aren't. That might explain some of the about faces. You also have to think about how someone reevaluates a concept over time. For instance, I thought if I lives on a hill, I could coast to work and save a crap load of gas, after a while, I then realized how stupid that was because I had to drive back up the hill at the end of the day. Another example, I have a garden that always produces more then I can eat. I though I would save some money and can some of it and/or perhaps freeze some of it. After purchasing canning supplies and getting the ability to safely do it, I won't see a savings until something like 10 years of doing it every year if nothing needs replaced in that time. (but hey, at least I know my vegetables are preserved within hours of being picked and are clean and chemical free so it's not a total loss).
I'm all against cap and trade in any shape. All it does is attempt to take the long way around for getting technology and science to figure a way out of using energy that has carbon based emissions.
It would be much more productive if we simply placed a .05% tax on all energy used and divert that money to various science and technology quests attempting to find reasonable replacements or sequestering technology- give that as it becomes viable to anyone wanting to use it, buy up existing patents concerning the tech and offer them and no cost or low costs licenses, then require through existing regulation capabilities, the use of the tech when it become feasible.
Well, there are two basic problems with that figure. For one, it include the amount of money counted as charitable in which the hospital forgives an uninsured patient from being responsible for. They do this to keep profits below an 8% margin (it used to be 6% but I believe it was raised a decade or so ago) in order to remain tax free as a charitable organization. I found out about this about 20 years ago when our local country hospital donated 250k to the dog shelter to keep charitable expenses offsetting profit and remain in the low to no tax zone. Now that's the other problem. If they are getting a tax benefit for having these unpaid debts, then that tax benefit needs to offset the total which it doesn't. In essence, it's not unpaid, it's the government paying for the person by not collecting as much tax as they normally would.
Something to think about is, lets say there are one out of every ten people who don't pay their hospital bills (10% of the population). So if they averaged $1000 per bill, raising their rates by 10% could easily drive that costs up 10% without ever resorting to more people skipping out or more services being rendered. And when the incentive is a higher markup so the averages computed for medicare payments are higher, well I think you can see the trend.
It's interesting. HP is a US company with offices all over the world that outsources most of it's production to foreign labor.
Why you are limiting this to the US government is sort of interesting in that it could have been slipped in by about any worker in almost any country working for almost any outside interest. And because HP doesn't individually develop and install custom firmware for each and every product it produces, it's only obvious that once it gets in, it would be in all of them that have the same firmware/operating system. But here you are already speaking about how your hoping some conspiracy to steal secrets from political contributor's competitors as if there isn't any other motivation.
If you ask me, I would say it's simply a debug account that was supposed to be removed before final production and someone dropped the ball.
Well, you can't really claim that a hospital's $300k treatment of a heart attack on an uninsured person is because the last guy died and stiffed them $300k.
The problem is that a lot of their services in the ER are there anyways. It's already paid for and accounted for. The EKG machines, the Ventilators, the staff and so on is already there. You could make a terrific case attempting to claim that the markup is there to ensure that those things and people will always be there. However, that case get twiddled away pretty quickly when someone with insurance ends up paying 30% through their insurance and co pay.
I cut a finger a few years back requiring 4 stitches in it. No problem, there are a bunch of nurses in my family so I sought on out, asked if it needed stitches or not (I knew it did) and ended up getting one of the family practitioners so sow it up for $50. If I went to the ER, that would have been $175 per hour for the room (and it wouldn't even be private), plus about $120-$150 for the numbing crap and 10 minutes with an intern to put the three stitches in while making jokes about looking like his wife's meatloaf (yes, I've been to the ER for Stitched too many time before). Oh yea, and then there is the 45 minute wait in the room to see a doc, and another 30 minutes or so after to see the discharge nurse. Altogether, the last time I got stitches, I was charged for about 2 hours ER time at $120 in which I only talked to a person for maybe 20-25 minutes total. In those remaining hour and a half, if I wasn't there, the room most certainly still was.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure the doc gave me the "this is the costs" discount. The alternative could have been 2 to 5 hundred dollars.
I don't really think there are too many people who are not paying their ER visit bills either. The rich, well they have insurance to cover their wealth in case something like that happens. The extremely poor, well they are covered by some government program whether it be medicaid or medicare or some variation. This leaves a lot of people who make more then enough to qualify for government assistance but not enough to purchase a health insurance policy. As for those who elect not to get coverage, they typically have somewhat decent jobs and will pay to save their credit rating or whatever.
In short, I do not think there are too many people who do not pay their medical bills. I think this is especially true with programs like HCAP which is designed compensate hospitals for this specific type of claim.
You know what, There was another one which had no mandatory coverage. I'll see if I can find it and post it.
Obviously, I was wrong. There was a bill with universal coverage in it supported by the republicans.