I think Vancouver decided to go the other way. I seem to recall that they recently installed improved ticket checking and gate infrastructure that cost some large number of million dollars (100?) and was expected to prevent a big but not as big amount of fare cheating (50 million?)
Standard "self-employed" IRS forms (Schedule C as I recall) allow one to account for business use of a car.
That's true. But being self-employed also means paying all of your social security tax. That's about 7% more off the top than an employee pays. And of course it means no benefits. The primary scam of Uber and Lyft is to hire lackey employees and call them contractors, thereby saddling them with those extra expenses.
Also, that deduction doesn't come close to covering the cost/maintenance/gas for a car. You're only counting gas and repairs. On an older car repairs are very expensive. Buying a new car is very expensive. You can't use your car for business very long before you need to account for those expenses. Schedule C deductions are a help, but only a help.
A very valid point about being a contractor vs an employee in terms of benefits and taxes.
However unless I am misunderstanding your point, you are incorrect about the deduction not covering all the costs. If using the actual expenses rather than the "standard per mile", it does in fact cover all of the actual expenses - fuel, maintenance, depreciation, tires, insurance, registration - everything. If you buy a car, use it for a few years, then sell it - all of your expenses and costs (less the final sales price) would be available to be deducted (or the pro-rated mileage fraction that is business-use if you also make use of it in non-business contexts). Unless I have been doing it wrong for over a couple of decades now, all actual expenses are covered.
Actual Car Expenses include: Depreciation, License and Registration, Gas and Oil, Tolls and Parking fees, Lease Payments, Insurance, Garage Rent and Repairs and Tires. What is missing?
OK, there are some complications on the depreciation amounts available depending on when it was purchased and when it was put into service. And using the standard deduction one year might preclude using the actual costs (or visa versa I never remember which way is forbidden) the next year. In my case I calculate it both ways, and I think the standard deduction is always greater than the itemized one - but if you drive a gas guzzler this might not be the case. Then again for super high mileage driving perhaps the standard deduction allows you to make out like a bandit expense-wise since many of the costs (parking, license, insurance) are time based and thus uncoupled from mileage, and depreciation and maintenance are partially time based and not completely mileage based.
So unless they setup as an LLC, register a business name, and register for a DOT number that's on the vehicle, how can they write that off as a business expense. If they don't, they are NOT as business and are not employees of Uber / Lyft (well at least not historically in most places).
Standard "self-employed" IRS forms (Schedule C as I recall) allow one to account for business use of a car.
To deduct vehicle expenses, you can use standard mileage or actual expenses. For either method, keep a log of the miles you drive for your business. Both methods allow self-employed tax deductions for tolls and parking fees.
If you use the standard mileage rate, you can only deduct the mileage at a standard rate. For 2017, the rate is $0.535.
Over the past few decades, with three different vehicles, of various ages (new through 14 years of age), I have had a couple of years where the actual expenses have come close to the standard mileage rate, but usually the standard rate is higher (and easier to track). Usually for me business use of the vehicle has been under 10% of the total use, which is much less than a ride sharing vehicle would be.
The moment it is no longer cheaper, then devs will go elsewhere.
The issue is that 'app stores' take an obscene cut compared to rates in other industries.
Do they? A 30% overall manufacturer/wholesaler/retailer markup seems on the low side to me. I'm not saying it is low enough, but for TVs and shoes and hamburgers it is significantly higher I think.
I've never understood why anyone but card-carrying, dues paying, party members would have a say in who a party nominates to run in an election. Is there anywhere other than the US where the general public gets a say in who the party nominates? Do the Libertarians, Communists, Greens, or other "3rd party" groups do things differently?
One thing that ranked voting does well in my opinion is to change the mindset of voters to one of "picking people you agree with" rather than "avoiding people you dislike". There is much less of an incentive to do the meta-analysis of "which candidates have a reasonable chance of wining, and how should I vote in light of that analysis?". Eventually, it seems like successful candidates would be incentivized to develop wide-spread appeal and that voters would feel more engaged and represented. Getting to express your opinion when voting rather than holding one's nose to pick the "lesser of two evils", even when the final result is that "one of the two evils" ends up being elected, in my mind, would be a good thing. I think the political climate of the US would be very different if the 2016 election had been voted on using ranked ballots even if the outcome was the same - it would be much easier to feel that "the will of the people" had been invoked if people had been able to express their actual desires rather than the "this is who I will vote for given how I expect other people to vote" decisions everybody needed to do.
Anyhow, hopefully the Maine election will give some positive US experiences in "different" voting methods that will inform future changes. Since we seem almost incapable of learning from other countries' experiences, learning from inside the US might be our only hope.
Ah, the difference between 'I wish... ' and 'I would'.
I wish some laws reflected my faith, but I know that's actually not right. So I don't ask for legislation. And after all, Christianity doesn't rely on laws, but on repentance. Legislation solves nothing of faith.
It is possible that is true, but there certainly have been laws on the books in the US that are "faith based". Sunday shopping laws come to mind:
When a politician says "I wish there was a law saying x-y-z", unless they immediately qualify the statement by saying "but I know that would be a bad law so I would never act to implement it" or something similar, I do think it is fair to worry that they might work to make it come to pass.
Yeah, I understand that statements on the campaign trail often come to naught, but to dismiss what a candidate says before the election seems stupid. If they say they want to do something stupid, immoral, or repugnant, maybe we shouldn't elect them, even if it seems unlikely that they would ever do that sort of thing.
Maybe if we had more ranked-choice ballots available, we would get better options and end up electing better candidates: https://www.fairvote.org/
Back in the 1990s I think we had a safe deposit box at the local credit union. Here is a credit union that lists safe deposit boxes: https://uoficreditunion.org/ba... though I have no idea how common it might be.
I've always had a delusional idea similar to what you were proposing. A questionnaire is developed that addresses "key" issues, let's call it 15 of them. The politicians privately respond to each question, the answers are "scrubbed" to obscure the candidate. (Not change the fundamental answer, just make it clear, concise, and not obvious who it is. "How do you feel about immigration?" wouldn't have the answer "Build that wall")
At voting time, the voter assigns a priority to the 15 items, and selects one of the proposed solutions. A magical algorithm would then match the answers with the candidate, and that's the person's vote.
Slightly related, the CBC put together something like this a while back: http://votecompass.com/ You enter your location and answer a bunch of questions then it matches those answers to the candidates you have on your ballot.
When it was first launched, it caused a bit of a stir as people found out that their stance on various issues was actually better aligned with the "wrong" party. The obvious solution: change your opinion to match your party! I think the science is pretty clear that much of the time, that is in fact what we tend to do, unfortunately.
Of course it does. In my case it does so for ebooks, or rather it used to do so.
I get irritated by authors/publishers who do not even have ebook versions of their books. How hard would it be to take the torrent of the fan-transcribed book and sell that one? OK, maybe you want to read it over to make sure that it doesn't have too many typos but it seems like it would be almost pure profit.
Howard the Duck is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik. Howard the Duck first appeared in Adventure into Fear #19 (cover-dated Dec. 1973) and several subsequent series have chronicled the misadventures of the ill-tempered, anthropomorphic "funny animal" trapped on a human-dominated Earth.
Re:Already playing videos may work
on
YouTube is Down
·
· Score: 1
The content delivery network does not seem to be affected. I have a couple videos paused and playing, and those do continue to load ahead.
I had been playing a 30 minute video and it finished without interruption before I found that the rest of the world seemed to be without access to Youtube while I was viewing it. I could not start anything further however.
Personally, I don't like the dude as a judge and I would vote against because of my dislike... but it disgusts me to see this behavior by adults trying to hold another adult accountable for something he did as a child.
If we assume that he did in fact have this type of bad behaviour as a child, at least acknowledging it as an adult doesn't seem to be too much to ask. ("Yes, I occasionally drank heavily as a youth, which was a mistake and something I should not have done. I have grown since then and would never condone such behavior.")
I agree that "punishing" poor choices of a child/youth as an adult is not the direction we should go as a society, but surely there are qualified candidates who made better choices? Maybe we should be raising some of them to such high offices? I would estimate that more than 50% of the people I observed in high school and college did not exhibit any of these sorts of behaviors - surely there are some out these?
Turbines do not need cooling towers because they are small and distributed. They have other ways of shedding heat. It would be informative to know which one of the two (nuclear and wind power) actually generated less waste heat per unit of output.
Considering that the wind that turns the windmill would end up causing frictional heating over the other things it wacks into, it seems as though extracting some of that energy to use for electrical generation cannot possibly create MORE thermal energy. Incidentally, the wind blows because of differential solar heating of the earth - wind energy is really solar energy. So any electrical generation from wind energy does not add any extra thermal energy to the earth.
Nuclear or fossil fuel generation of electricity does extract energy from the coal or uranium (or whatever the fuel is) and all of that extracted energy eventually ends up as thermal energy. Thus, even without any "greenhouse gas" effects, they would tend to increase the earth's temperature, but I suspect that the amount of extra thermal energy added by electrical generation pales in significance compared to the solar energy hitting the earth.
Kavanaugh is that you? Yeah I mean the expectation of living in a society without rapists thieves and creeps is horrible. It was totally her fault she got assaulted.
Not being a General mishandling document to his mistress. Being a peon, a plebeian, is hard. Fair!
Hint: google Petraeus.
Totally different! In this case it looks like someone stupidly broke security for the purposes of doing legitimate work at home, with no intention of letting anyone else see the information, while Petraeus intentionally gave classified info to someone who wasn't supposed to have it.
Of course the Director of the CIA intentionally giving classified info to someone else should be charged with a misdemeanor, while a lower level employee taking work home deserves jail time! We need to send a broad message to the masses! Agency directors can be easily told "don't do this" by a simple meeting - there are so few of them. Low level employees only learn when one of their own is thrown into "the big house" on national news.
Well, I guess your response clearly demonstrates that my meaning was unclear. My apologies for not being more literate. I have been suitably chastised by your demonstration of my failings. Thank you.
You clearly are interested in my comments, so I will try to make them more explicit.
I feel that while a single-payer, socialized system of delivering healthcare to the entire population is a worthy goal, I accept that there are difficulties and negative consequences to probably any conceivable system of that type. However, I feel that it is possible to minimize those downsides when compared to the negatives associated with the current way healthcare is funded and delivered in the USA. I also recognize that aspects of the current way healthcare is funded and delivered in the USA have many positive features, some of which may be difficult or impossible to replicate in a single-payer, socialized system of delivering healthcare to the entire population. The fact that the USA is virtually alone among G20 nations (G30? G50?) in not having some form of "universal" health care, would seem to indicate that such systems are not impossible.
I am sorry to have sewn confusion in my off-the-cuff response to a such a clear analysis of the "pros and cons" of Canada's health care system, as embodied by the AC's statement:
"Please, do not introduce logic to this thread...it in will not be tolerated. You should also be ashamed for pointing out the cons of socialized medicine...only the pros should be so smokey the emphasized...there must be some..."
I guess I was just "so smokey the emphasized". I hang my head in shame.
I think that those are some good points, but health care can be complicated, and the financial incentives can have unintended consequences.
If someone only has "catastrophic' coverage, they might have an incentive to avoid the outlays associated with "minor" issues, and thus those issues might tend to develop into major ones. Whoops, missed that early cancer diagnosis and now you are dead and/or a major money drain. Whoops, you skipped a cheap vaccination, now the whole town/school/business is sick. I guess we would need to employ some actuaries to figure out how common this type of thing is an how much more or less expensive it is then other systems that cover various "preventive" medical tests and procedures, even if they are "minor" expenses.
I general we as a society end up covering a lot of emergency catastrophic medical expenses, regardless of the patient's individual coverage (emergency care is usually rendered before checking billing status). It makes sense to me to use a single-payer system with a mandate to cover the whole population, but at the very least all of the paperwork and forms should be standardized if we are gong to have a mess of different insurance and HMO systems out these.
We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to elected officials to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
False dilemmas aside, in a private system your healthcare decisions are not made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy. You can switch insurers, or pay out of pocket to go to another doctor. When the whole country is one system you have neither of those choices. You are literally forced to accept the fate handed to you by a single bureaucracy.
Every "single payer" system I am aware of does allow one to pay for items that are not universally covered (dental in Canada for example) items out-of-pocket. In any case, while the ability to "switch providers" would be good in theory, in practice it seems to be fairly uncommon. The point at which one needs to make these types of decisions are exactly the times at which one is least able to make them.
When over 40 percent of bankruptcies are because the shitty citizens simply cannot pay their medical bills, that means that the upstanding citizens like Martin Shkreli and Nirmal Mulye do not get their rightful and morally needed money. How can the good right thinking citizens put up with that sin. We need to start executing these foul creatures that are not providing God's emissaries on earth the money that is their due.
I think the fix for that is to put medical bills in the same category as student loans so they are difficult to discharge via personal bankruptcy. We don't want people running up their medical debt just so they can get it discharged via bankruptcy!
Socialize the risk, privatize the profits, that's the American way!
Slashdot Mirror
I think Vancouver decided to go the other way. I seem to recall that they recently installed improved ticket checking and gate infrastructure that cost some large number of million dollars (100?) and was expected to prevent a big but not as big amount of fare cheating (50 million?)
Ok, it looks more like 10 million to prevent a quarter million: http://www.railforthevalley.co...
Anyhow, I thought the fare gates made everything less friendly, but I do like the electronic payment smart card system.
Standard "self-employed" IRS forms (Schedule C as I recall) allow one to account for business use of a car.
That's true. But being self-employed also means paying all of your social security tax. That's about 7% more off the top than an employee pays. And of course it means no benefits. The primary scam of Uber and Lyft is to hire lackey employees and call them contractors, thereby saddling them with those extra expenses.
Also, that deduction doesn't come close to covering the cost/maintenance/gas for a car. You're only counting gas and repairs. On an older car repairs are very expensive. Buying a new car is very expensive. You can't use your car for business very long before you need to account for those expenses. Schedule C deductions are a help, but only a help.
A very valid point about being a contractor vs an employee in terms of benefits and taxes.
However unless I am misunderstanding your point, you are incorrect about the deduction not covering all the costs. If using the actual expenses rather than the "standard per mile", it does in fact cover all of the actual expenses - fuel, maintenance, depreciation, tires, insurance, registration - everything. If you buy a car, use it for a few years, then sell it - all of your expenses and costs (less the final sales price) would be available to be deducted (or the pro-rated mileage fraction that is business-use if you also make use of it in non-business contexts). Unless I have been doing it wrong for over a couple of decades now, all actual expenses are covered.
See Chapter 4 of IRS Publication 463: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pd...
Actual Car Expenses include: Depreciation, License and Registration, Gas and Oil, Tolls and Parking fees, Lease Payments, Insurance, Garage Rent and Repairs and Tires. What is missing?
OK, there are some complications on the depreciation amounts available depending on when it was purchased and when it was put into service. And using the standard deduction one year might preclude using the actual costs (or visa versa I never remember which way is forbidden) the next year. In my case I calculate it both ways, and I think the standard deduction is always greater than the itemized one - but if you drive a gas guzzler this might not be the case. Then again for super high mileage driving perhaps the standard deduction allows you to make out like a bandit expense-wise since many of the costs (parking, license, insurance) are time based and thus uncoupled from mileage, and depreciation and maintenance are partially time based and not completely mileage based.
So unless they setup as an LLC, register a business name, and register for a DOT number that's on the vehicle, how can they write that off as a business expense. If they don't, they are NOT as business and are not employees of Uber / Lyft (well at least not historically in most places).
Standard "self-employed" IRS forms (Schedule C as I recall) allow one to account for business use of a car.
Here is what H&R block says about it: https://www.hrblock.com/tax-ce...
To deduct vehicle expenses, you can use standard mileage or actual expenses. For either method, keep a log of the miles you drive for your business. Both methods allow self-employed tax deductions for tolls and parking fees.
If you use the standard mileage rate, you can only deduct the mileage at a standard rate. For 2017, the rate is $0.535.
Over the past few decades, with three different vehicles, of various ages (new through 14 years of age), I have had a couple of years where the actual expenses have come close to the standard mileage rate, but usually the standard rate is higher (and easier to track). Usually for me business use of the vehicle has been under 10% of the total use, which is much less than a ride sharing vehicle would be.
The moment it is no longer cheaper, then devs will go elsewhere.
The issue is that 'app stores' take an obscene cut compared to rates in other industries.
Do they? A 30% overall manufacturer/wholesaler/retailer markup seems on the low side to me. I'm not saying it is low enough, but for TVs and shoes and hamburgers it is significantly higher I think.
I've never understood why anyone but card-carrying, dues paying, party members would have a say in who a party nominates to run in an election. Is there anywhere other than the US where the general public gets a say in who the party nominates? Do the Libertarians, Communists, Greens, or other "3rd party" groups do things differently?
One thing that ranked voting does well in my opinion is to change the mindset of voters to one of "picking people you agree with" rather than "avoiding people you dislike". There is much less of an incentive to do the meta-analysis of "which candidates have a reasonable chance of wining, and how should I vote in light of that analysis?". Eventually, it seems like successful candidates would be incentivized to develop wide-spread appeal and that voters would feel more engaged and represented. Getting to express your opinion when voting rather than holding one's nose to pick the "lesser of two evils", even when the final result is that "one of the two evils" ends up being elected, in my mind, would be a good thing. I think the political climate of the US would be very different if the 2016 election had been voted on using ranked ballots even if the outcome was the same - it would be much easier to feel that "the will of the people" had been invoked if people had been able to express their actual desires rather than the "this is who I will vote for given how I expect other people to vote" decisions everybody needed to do.
Anyhow, hopefully the Maine election will give some positive US experiences in "different" voting methods that will inform future changes. Since we seem almost incapable of learning from other countries' experiences, learning from inside the US might be our only hope.
https://bangordailynews.com/20...
Ah, the difference between 'I wish... ' and 'I would'.
I wish some laws reflected my faith, but I know that's actually not right. So I don't ask for legislation. And after all, Christianity doesn't rely on laws, but on repentance. Legislation solves nothing of faith.
It is possible that is true, but there certainly have been laws on the books in the US that are "faith based". Sunday shopping laws come to mind:
https://www.newyorker.com/busi...
When a politician says "I wish there was a law saying x-y-z", unless they immediately qualify the statement by saying "but I know that would be a bad law so I would never act to implement it" or something similar, I do think it is fair to worry that they might work to make it come to pass.
Yeah, I understand that statements on the campaign trail often come to naught, but to dismiss what a candidate says before the election seems stupid. If they say they want to do something stupid, immoral, or repugnant, maybe we shouldn't elect them, even if it seems unlikely that they would ever do that sort of thing.
Maybe if we had more ranked-choice ballots available, we would get better options and end up electing better candidates: https://www.fairvote.org/
Back in the 1990s I think we had a safe deposit box at the local credit union. Here is a credit union that lists safe deposit boxes: https://uoficreditunion.org/ba... though I have no idea how common it might be.
I've always had a delusional idea similar to what you were proposing. A questionnaire is developed that addresses "key" issues, let's call it 15 of them. The politicians privately respond to each question, the answers are "scrubbed" to obscure the candidate. (Not change the fundamental answer, just make it clear, concise, and not obvious who it is. "How do you feel about immigration?" wouldn't have the answer "Build that wall")
At voting time, the voter assigns a priority to the 15 items, and selects one of the proposed solutions. A magical algorithm would then match the answers with the candidate, and that's the person's vote.
Slightly related, the CBC put together something like this a while back: http://votecompass.com/ You enter your location and answer a bunch of questions then it matches those answers to the candidates you have on your ballot.
When it was first launched, it caused a bit of a stir as people found out that their stance on various issues was actually better aligned with the "wrong" party. The obvious solution: change your opinion to match your party! I think the science is pretty clear that much of the time, that is in fact what we tend to do, unfortunately.
Of course it does. In my case it does so for ebooks, or rather it used to do so.
I get irritated by authors/publishers who do not even have ebook versions of their books. How hard would it be to take the torrent of the fan-transcribed book and sell that one? OK, maybe you want to read it over to make sure that it doesn't have too many typos but it seems like it would be almost pure profit.
Seems Google didn't make these available after all.
I wonder if this is likely to increase piracy of the movies in question that are "video blocked in country".
"Hey, that Stan Lee thing seems interesting."
"Oh, not available. :-("
"I wonder if there is a torrent...."
No, George Lucas still alive and well.
Neither:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The content delivery network does not seem to be affected. I have a couple videos paused and playing, and those do continue to load ahead.
I had been playing a 30 minute video and it finished without interruption before I found that the rest of the world seemed to be without access to Youtube while I was viewing it. I could not start anything further however.
Personally, I don't like the dude as a judge and I would vote against because of my dislike... but it disgusts me to see this behavior by adults trying to hold another adult accountable for something he did as a child.
If we assume that he did in fact have this type of bad behaviour as a child, at least acknowledging it as an adult doesn't seem to be too much to ask. ("Yes, I occasionally drank heavily as a youth, which was a mistake and something I should not have done. I have grown since then and would never condone such behavior.")
I agree that "punishing" poor choices of a child/youth as an adult is not the direction we should go as a society, but surely there are qualified candidates who made better choices? Maybe we should be raising some of them to such high offices? I would estimate that more than 50% of the people I observed in high school and college did not exhibit any of these sorts of behaviors - surely there are some out these?
Turbines do not need cooling towers because they are small and distributed. They have other ways of shedding heat. It would be informative to know which one of the two (nuclear and wind power) actually generated less waste heat per unit of output.
Considering that the wind that turns the windmill would end up causing frictional heating over the other things it wacks into, it seems as though extracting some of that energy to use for electrical generation cannot possibly create MORE thermal energy. Incidentally, the wind blows because of differential solar heating of the earth - wind energy is really solar energy. So any electrical generation from wind energy does not add any extra thermal energy to the earth.
Nuclear or fossil fuel generation of electricity does extract energy from the coal or uranium (or whatever the fuel is) and all of that extracted energy eventually ends up as thermal energy. Thus, even without any "greenhouse gas" effects, they would tend to increase the earth's temperature, but I suspect that the amount of extra thermal energy added by electrical generation pales in significance compared to the solar energy hitting the earth.
Amazon doesn't care if you don't steal because you are honest or if you don't steal because you know you will get caught.
Sounds just like God.
If the only thing keeping one from being a criminal is the threat of eternal torture I will question their morality.
Me too, but I'm still glad that they aren't "being a criminal".
burn!
Where are my "insightful" mod points when i need them?
Kavanaugh is that you? Yeah I mean the expectation of living in a society without rapists thieves and creeps is horrible. It was totally her fault she got assaulted.
oh to have mod points! funny or insightful?
Not being a General mishandling document to his mistress. Being a peon, a plebeian, is hard. Fair!
Hint: google Petraeus.
Totally different! In this case it looks like someone stupidly broke security for the purposes of doing legitimate work at home, with no intention of letting anyone else see the information, while Petraeus intentionally gave classified info to someone who wasn't supposed to have it.
Of course the Director of the CIA intentionally giving classified info to someone else should be charged with a misdemeanor, while a lower level employee taking work home deserves jail time! We need to send a broad message to the masses! Agency directors can be easily told "don't do this" by a simple meeting - there are so few of them. Low level employees only learn when one of their own is thrown into "the big house" on national news.
Well, I guess your response clearly demonstrates that my meaning was unclear. My apologies for not being more literate. I have been suitably chastised by your demonstration of my failings. Thank you.
You clearly are interested in my comments, so I will try to make them more explicit.
I feel that while a single-payer, socialized system of delivering healthcare to the entire population is a worthy goal, I accept that there are difficulties and negative consequences to probably any conceivable system of that type. However, I feel that it is possible to minimize those downsides when compared to the negatives associated with the current way healthcare is funded and delivered in the USA. I also recognize that aspects of the current way healthcare is funded and delivered in the USA have many positive features, some of which may be difficult or impossible to replicate in a single-payer, socialized system of delivering healthcare to the entire population. The fact that the USA is virtually alone among G20 nations (G30? G50?) in not having some form of "universal" health care, would seem to indicate that such systems are not impossible.
I am sorry to have sewn confusion in my off-the-cuff response to a such a clear analysis of the "pros and cons" of Canada's health care system, as embodied by the AC's statement:
"Please, do not introduce logic to this thread...it in will not be tolerated. You should also be ashamed for pointing out the cons of socialized medicine...only the pros should be so smokey the emphasized...there must be some..."
I guess I was just "so smokey the emphasized". I hang my head in shame.
I think that those are some good points, but health care can be complicated, and the financial incentives can have unintended consequences.
If someone only has "catastrophic' coverage, they might have an incentive to avoid the outlays associated with "minor" issues, and thus those issues might tend to develop into major ones. Whoops, missed that early cancer diagnosis and now you are dead and/or a major money drain. Whoops, you skipped a cheap vaccination, now the whole town/school/business is sick. I guess we would need to employ some actuaries to figure out how common this type of thing is an how much more or less expensive it is then other systems that cover various "preventive" medical tests and procedures, even if they are "minor" expenses.
I general we as a society end up covering a lot of emergency catastrophic medical expenses, regardless of the patient's individual coverage (emergency care is usually rendered before checking billing status). It makes sense to me to use a single-payer system with a mandate to cover the whole population, but at the very least all of the paperwork and forms should be standardized if we are gong to have a mess of different insurance and HMO systems out these.
I do worry that my above comments have been labeled "insightful". One never knows if one's message is being read as intended...
We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to elected officials to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
False dilemmas aside, in a private system your healthcare decisions are not made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy. You can switch insurers, or pay out of pocket to go to another doctor. When the whole country is one system you have neither of those choices. You are literally forced to accept the fate handed to you by a single bureaucracy.
Every "single payer" system I am aware of does allow one to pay for items that are not universally covered (dental in Canada for example) items out-of-pocket. In any case, while the ability to "switch providers" would be good in theory, in practice it seems to be fairly uncommon. The point at which one needs to make these types of decisions are exactly the times at which one is least able to make them.
When over 40 percent of bankruptcies are because the shitty citizens simply cannot pay their medical bills, that means that the upstanding citizens like Martin Shkreli and Nirmal Mulye do not get their rightful and morally needed money. How can the good right thinking citizens put up with that sin. We need to start executing these foul creatures that are not providing God's emissaries on earth the money that is their due.
I think the fix for that is to put medical bills in the same category as student loans so they are difficult to discharge via personal bankruptcy. We don't want people running up their medical debt just so they can get it discharged via bankruptcy!
Socialize the risk, privatize the profits, that's the American way!
if I don't really care what people think I think, and my goal is to influence how they think
You must be deeply conflicted!
Aren't we all?