Are you also able to opt out of emergency medical care? Because you should be required to do so if you choose not to get health insurance. Otherwise you're shifting the costs to others.
I've always supported the idea of denying emergency care to those that can afford insurance, but choose not to - unless they can pay up-front. Would probably solve a lot healthcare issues and societal problems - though the Darwin Award people might get over-worked.
If I don't like Apple's bugs or capacity problems, I have the option to never pay for another Apple product. I don't have the option to opt out of ObamaCare.
This thinking makes no sense. If you don't like the services of one of the health care plans - offered by private insurance companies, mind you - you can select another one. BC/BS alone offers about 30 multi-state plans as well as many state-specific plans. There are also different plan levels - coverage: bronze - 60%, silver - 70%, gold - 80%, platinum - 90%. (People eligible for subsidies must select silver or higher to receive those subsidies.)
Finally, if you don't want any insurance coverage, you *can* opt-out, but you must pay a fine - presently $95, slated to rise over the next few years, capped at a small percentage of adjusted gross income. This fine is to compensate for your missing premium, necessary to ensure that the rest of don't get screwed when you eventually need medical care and pop into an ER for the most expensive care available.
I'm pretty sure that large-scale shareholders consider small scale shareholders to be sort of like krill. Numerous; but not really worth much except to be filtered out and devoured in numbers large enough to be tasty.
Everyone knows the real Dread Pirate Roberts has been retired +15 years in Patagonia... But, of course, no one would care about arresting the Dread Pirate Ulbricht.
Thank you. We handled it pretty well. I knew from the moment I heard the probable diagnosis that she would die soon and we spent our remaining time together well w/o wasting time grasping for miracles. See the "Remember" link on the Tumblr page I included before for a short "creative non-fiction" story about our 20 years together.
And the question that never comes up often enough is why these medicines and treatments are so expensive?
The reason this medication, Temodar, is expensive is that it's very effective for only a small number of brain/skin cancer types, like Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) - in other words, it's an effective but relatively low-use drug. As I understand how it works, the medication itself isn't the active compound per-se, but is metabolized into the active compound and that may also be a factor. Just a note that the pills must be swallowed whole and the bottle included warnings to not inhale any dust as it's toxic and/or may cause cancer (I can't remember which) - which was fun for me.
As for the insurance vs. list price of the drug, I too was astonished and dismayed by the difference of $11,000 vs. $40 (HMO) or 10% (BC/BS). Though, I've seen this for other "orphan" disease medications, like for psoriasis.
If my wife had been a good candidate for and/or had chosen to have the tumor cells removed (it was next to her brain stem), she might have lived for another 12 months instead of 7 weeks, though she would have been completely paralyzed on the left side of her body. One of the reasons GBM are so difficult to treat and are always fatal is because rather than being a lump-type tumor, it's diffuse. I tell people it's like trying to remove a mound of salt from inside the center of bowl full of sugar *and* removing as little sugar as possible - and if you don't remove all the salt, it all comes back. Each surgery also reduces a patient's functionality, which doesn't help at all...
Do they receive other benefits?
Bummer being sent home in the run-up to the holiday season.
It's worth mentioning that House and Senate representatives and President - and perhaps at least some of their staff - are considered "essential" and will get paid through the shut down.
Most people are healthy and only need to learn to stay healthy.
And not get hit by a car, fall off a ladder, get a broken leg in high school football practice, not contract a horrible disease, etc... Other than, sure just "learn" to stay healthy. Then the *real* world comes along...
Case in point. My wife, who was the healthiest person I've ever known, was diagnosed with a brain tumor known as a Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM), which is always fatal within 5 years (max) of diagnosis, in 2006 and she died just seven weeks later. Without insurance her chemotherapy medication, Temodar, would have been $11,000/month (not a typo) - one bottle of pills mind you - with 4 months of treatment required. With her insurance, it was a $40/month co-pay (also not a typo) - my BC/BS wanted a 10% co-pay. With her insurance the total hospital bill was under $500; without insurance it would have been over $250,000 - I reviewed the insurance invoices. ** And she died w/o having resection surgery (tumor was too close to her brain stem) and before she completed her first round of combination radiation / chemotherapy treatment. **
The problem with relying on being "most people" is that eventually one is not.
No. Pay the penalty. If/when you get sick, buy insurance from the exchange with your smartphone on the way to the hospital.
That will work for now while the penalty is low, but it's designed to rise over the next few years to be commensurate with the actual insurance premium - at which time it will be more cost-effective to simply buy insurance. Also, remember that the penalty is per-person, not per-family.
As I said, I'm pro-choice and we're apparently master-debating here as you've stated you are pro-choice too. You've side-stepped most (all?) the thought-experiment points I've made - like #1 (if you *could* know with certainty, then you must abort) or #2 (police make this determination all the time), so you're not seriously interested in thinking about this issue or your (qualified) support for it.
I don't believe that a fetus has a guaranteed/absolute right-to-life at the expense of the mother's - and that decision is the mother's to make (the prioritization rests with her alone, not society) - while you apparently believe in moral relativism. Good for you, have fun with that and society "prioritizing" your (or your wife's) worth a-la The Handmaid's Tale...
I think we're done here. It seems we support the same thing, but for different reasons.
It's one thing to oppose terminating an innocent fetus. It's quite another to stand up and defend the life of a mass murderer. Most anyone would agree that it's OK to kill in certain circumstances. Let's say that I pointed a gun at you and told you that I was about to kill you. If you had some sort of opportunity to kill me first, would you not be justified in exercising that opportunity? I'd certainly argue that you would be within your rights to defend your own life!
Playing Devil's Advocate: (1) And if it were a certainty that the "innocent fetus" would grow up to be a mass murder...? (2) If you were about to kill me, but I could defend myself w/o killing you, would I still be justified in killing you in self-defense - "exercising that opportunity"? (3) If one is allowed to defend one's own life, then one must be allowed to protect one's own body - from external and internal threats... (as perceived by the self, not others). Just some food for thought that not everything is clear cut.
I'm pro-choice and my previous arguments that (1) I'm a male and (2) a woman has the right to control her own body are really the same argument - a person should have control over their own self and body. Other people, male or female, have no right to interfere. I don't believe that society has the right to "protect the innocent" in these cases, unless we want to play God and presume that the life and rights of the unborn is more valuable than the born (mother). Abortion is either acceptable or not and that choice is the individual woman's to make. Once the baby is born, then he/she is an individual within society.
Arguments along the lines of "what about past a certain point in the pregnancy?" offer little. What if it's discovered that the mother would die? It's one thing if she chooses to risk/sacrifice her life for her unborn child, quite another if society chooses for her. If society is to choose how valuable the child's life is/would be vs. the mothers, what about a contrary position where the child will be born horribly ill - or grow up to be a mass murder. Should society be allowed to intervene then too?
The fewer people involved in these decisions, the better.
You can't ban abortion in any effective fashion if you make an exception to the ban for rape and incest, because if you do, women who are seeking abortions will simply lie about the circumstances of their pregnancies in order to obtain legal abortions.
In this context, the law could require her to file a police report where she would have to either fabricate an entire story or implicate an innocent man (with whom she actually had consensual sex). Both avenues would prove problematic for her.
The larger point is that once one concedes an acceptable / allowable circumstance then limits are a case of relative ethics. Ultimately, it's either it's okay to kill something/one or it's not. If one says that the answer depends on the circumstances, then the answer (in my opinion) is actually "yes, it's okay to kill." In civil society, I accept that it's appropriate for the society/law determines under what circumstances it's allowed, but to argue it's "wrong with exceptions" is disingenuous - which is where the "pro-lifers" who also support the death penalty go wrong.
I took an interesting class in college on biomedical ethics and we spent the whole time discussing (arguing) things like this or allocation of sparse medical resources (e.g. should a younger/older person get saved if only one can be), with the teacher playing Devil's Advocate offering contrary opinions / examples for *every* argument. The class was very hard and thinking clearly about this stuff is very hard.
Personally, my position on abortion is: (1) I'm a male, so until I get a uterus it's not place to argue about this, and (B) a woman should have the right to control her own body, period (if men could get pregnant, I'm sure the right to contraception and abortion would be absolute - he said cynically).
My biological clock seems to run around a 26-30 hour cycle, which often makes it difficult for me to maintain "normal" work hours. Trying to go to sleep early is often fruitless so, eventually, I simply stay up all night and drag myself through the next day and then go to bed at an appropriate time to force reset my cycle. I've been this way for as long as I can remember - and I'm now 50. On the up side, I can (still) work productively for 36+ hours straight - I'm a senior mostly-Unix-ish system programmer/administrator btw.
There really should be a more convenient way... to send money to someone else, without giving them your credit card specifics. Visa, MasterCard, Amex, (and the others) should be providing this as a service to the cardholders...
Not exactly what you asked for but... at least one MasterCard vendor (Bank of America) offers Shop Safe enabling you to create temporary virtual CC numbers tied to your real CC. Each number includes a CCID and allows you to specify a credit limit and expiration date (2 months to 1 year, but you can delete it anytime). The virtual card is locked to the first merchant to charge against it.
The demonization of tax collectors goes way back. - There's the Sheriff of Nottingham. - Then there's Judas Iscariot. People really don't like the tax man.
I would say the Civil Rights movement in the US was a revolution.
I find it immensely depressing that the same generation that fought so hard and paid such a dear price for civil rights when they were young was the exact same generation to sell them back so cheaply when they were old.
Well... Judging from an old article in Rolling Stone (now archived) - informally referred to as "Tea and Crackers" - Tea Party rallies were (are?) populated mainly by older white people in (Medicare paid for) motorized scooters railing against the Guv'ment (who were/are obviously not taking their irony meds), so while it might be the same generation of which you speak, it's probably not the same people who "fought so hard and paid such a dear price for civil rights" - unless you meant fought *against*...
Slashdot Mirror
Are you also able to opt out of emergency medical care? Because you should be required to do so if you choose not to get health insurance. Otherwise you're shifting the costs to others.
I've always supported the idea of denying emergency care to those that can afford insurance, but choose not to - unless they can pay up-front. Would probably solve a lot healthcare issues and societal problems - though the Darwin Award people might get over-worked.
If I don't like Apple's bugs or capacity problems, I have the option to never pay for another Apple product. I don't have the option to opt out of ObamaCare.
This thinking makes no sense. If you don't like the services of one of the health care plans - offered by private insurance companies, mind you - you can select another one. BC/BS alone offers about 30 multi-state plans as well as many state-specific plans. There are also different plan levels - coverage: bronze - 60%, silver - 70%, gold - 80%, platinum - 90%. (People eligible for subsidies must select silver or higher to receive those subsidies.)
Finally, if you don't want any insurance coverage, you *can* opt-out, but you must pay a fine - presently $95, slated to rise over the next few years, capped at a small percentage of adjusted gross income. This fine is to compensate for your missing premium, necessary to ensure that the rest of don't get screwed when you eventually need medical care and pop into an ER for the most expensive care available.
Nut up and stop being a freeloading pussy.
Agreed. Remember the Apple maps problems.
Seems like Congress is still using that version for navigation...
I'm pretty sure that large-scale shareholders consider small scale shareholders to be sort of like krill. Numerous; but not really worth much except to be filtered out and devoured in numbers large enough to be tasty.
They're also a good source of Omega-3s...
Everyone knows the real Dread Pirate Roberts has been retired +15 years in Patagonia ... But, of course, no one would care about arresting the Dread Pirate Ulbricht.
Thank you. We handled it pretty well. I knew from the moment I heard the probable diagnosis that she would die soon and we spent our remaining time together well w/o wasting time grasping for miracles. See the "Remember" link on the Tumblr page I included before for a short "creative non-fiction" story about our 20 years together.
And the question that never comes up often enough is why these medicines and treatments are so expensive?
The reason this medication, Temodar, is expensive is that it's very effective for only a small number of brain/skin cancer types, like Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) - in other words, it's an effective but relatively low-use drug. As I understand how it works, the medication itself isn't the active compound per-se, but is metabolized into the active compound and that may also be a factor. Just a note that the pills must be swallowed whole and the bottle included warnings to not inhale any dust as it's toxic and/or may cause cancer (I can't remember which) - which was fun for me.
As for the insurance vs. list price of the drug, I too was astonished and dismayed by the difference of $11,000 vs. $40 (HMO) or 10% (BC/BS). Though, I've seen this for other "orphan" disease medications, like for psoriasis.
If my wife had been a good candidate for and/or had chosen to have the tumor cells removed (it was next to her brain stem), she might have lived for another 12 months instead of 7 weeks, though she would have been completely paralyzed on the left side of her body. One of the reasons GBM are so difficult to treat and are always fatal is because rather than being a lump-type tumor, it's diffuse. I tell people it's like trying to remove a mound of salt from inside the center of bowl full of sugar *and* removing as little sugar as possible - and if you don't remove all the salt, it all comes back. Each surgery also reduces a patient's functionality, which doesn't help at all...
Remember Sue...
Its all of our faults for electing them again
Well... whoever ordered the Tea and Crackers for dinner instead of something more substantial. :-)
Do they receive other benefits? Bummer being sent home in the run-up to the holiday season.
It's worth mentioning that House and Senate representatives and President - and perhaps at least some of their staff - are considered "essential" and will get paid through the shut down.
Most people are healthy and only need to learn to stay healthy.
And not get hit by a car, fall off a ladder, get a broken leg in high school football practice, not contract a horrible disease, etc... Other than, sure just "learn" to stay healthy. Then the *real* world comes along...
Case in point. My wife, who was the healthiest person I've ever known, was diagnosed with a brain tumor known as a Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM), which is always fatal within 5 years (max) of diagnosis, in 2006 and she died just seven weeks later. Without insurance her chemotherapy medication, Temodar, would have been $11,000/month (not a typo) - one bottle of pills mind you - with 4 months of treatment required. With her insurance, it was a $40/month co-pay (also not a typo) - my BC/BS wanted a 10% co-pay. With her insurance the total hospital bill was under $500; without insurance it would have been over $250,000 - I reviewed the insurance invoices. ** And she died w/o having resection surgery (tumor was too close to her brain stem) and before she completed her first round of combination radiation / chemotherapy treatment. **
The problem with relying on being "most people" is that eventually one is not.
No. Pay the penalty. If/when you get sick, buy insurance from the exchange with your smartphone on the way to the hospital.
That will work for now while the penalty is low, but it's designed to rise over the next few years to be commensurate with the actual insurance premium - at which time it will be more cost-effective to simply buy insurance. Also, remember that the penalty is per-person, not per-family.
Will people in the near future carry gene sequencers in their pockets?
Future pick-up line: "Is that a gene sequencer in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"
[Apologies to Mae West]
is that a simple quantum computer—whose results humans can verify—can in turn check the results of other dramatically more powerful quantum machines.
So: Deep Thought vs. Earth
As I said, I'm pro-choice and we're apparently master-debating here as you've stated you are pro-choice too. You've side-stepped most (all?) the thought-experiment points I've made - like #1 (if you *could* know with certainty, then you must abort) or #2 (police make this determination all the time), so you're not seriously interested in thinking about this issue or your (qualified) support for it.
I don't believe that a fetus has a guaranteed/absolute right-to-life at the expense of the mother's - and that decision is the mother's to make (the prioritization rests with her alone, not society) - while you apparently believe in moral relativism. Good for you, have fun with that and society "prioritizing" your (or your wife's) worth a-la The Handmaid's Tale ...
I think we're done here. It seems we support the same thing, but for different reasons.
It's one thing to oppose terminating an innocent fetus. It's quite another to stand up and defend the life of a mass murderer. Most anyone would agree that it's OK to kill in certain circumstances. Let's say that I pointed a gun at you and told you that I was about to kill you. If you had some sort of opportunity to kill me first, would you not be justified in exercising that opportunity? I'd certainly argue that you would be within your rights to defend your own life!
Playing Devil's Advocate: (1) And if it were a certainty that the "innocent fetus" would grow up to be a mass murder...? (2) If you were about to kill me, but I could defend myself w/o killing you, would I still be justified in killing you in self-defense - "exercising that opportunity"? (3) If one is allowed to defend one's own life, then one must be allowed to protect one's own body - from external and internal threats... (as perceived by the self, not others). Just some food for thought that not everything is clear cut.
I'm pro-choice and my previous arguments that (1) I'm a male and (2) a woman has the right to control her own body are really the same argument - a person should have control over their own self and body. Other people, male or female, have no right to interfere. I don't believe that society has the right to "protect the innocent" in these cases, unless we want to play God and presume that the life and rights of the unborn is more valuable than the born (mother). Abortion is either acceptable or not and that choice is the individual woman's to make. Once the baby is born, then he/she is an individual within society.
Arguments along the lines of "what about past a certain point in the pregnancy?" offer little. What if it's discovered that the mother would die? It's one thing if she chooses to risk/sacrifice her life for her unborn child, quite another if society chooses for her. If society is to choose how valuable the child's life is/would be vs. the mothers, what about a contrary position where the child will be born horribly ill - or grow up to be a mass murder. Should society be allowed to intervene then too?
The fewer people involved in these decisions, the better.
You can't ban abortion in any effective fashion if you make an exception to the ban for rape and incest, because if you do, women who are seeking abortions will simply lie about the circumstances of their pregnancies in order to obtain legal abortions.
In this context, the law could require her to file a police report where she would have to either fabricate an entire story or implicate an innocent man (with whom she actually had consensual sex). Both avenues would prove problematic for her.
The larger point is that once one concedes an acceptable / allowable circumstance then limits are a case of relative ethics. Ultimately, it's either it's okay to kill something/one or it's not. If one says that the answer depends on the circumstances, then the answer (in my opinion) is actually "yes, it's okay to kill." In civil society, I accept that it's appropriate for the society/law determines under what circumstances it's allowed, but to argue it's "wrong with exceptions" is disingenuous - which is where the "pro-lifers" who also support the death penalty go wrong.
I took an interesting class in college on biomedical ethics and we spent the whole time discussing (arguing) things like this or allocation of sparse medical resources (e.g. should a younger/older person get saved if only one can be), with the teacher playing Devil's Advocate offering contrary opinions / examples for *every* argument. The class was very hard and thinking clearly about this stuff is very hard.
Personally, my position on abortion is: (1) I'm a male, so until I get a uterus it's not place to argue about this, and (B) a woman should have the right to control her own body, period (if men could get pregnant, I'm sure the right to contraception and abortion would be absolute - he said cynically).
... It's wanting your beliefs to trump reality, when it's your beliefs that are faulty.
I'm sure access to some sort of affordable (mental) health care could help the Republicans with this psychosis - oh wait...
I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
[Or so I've heard.]
This could lead to more compact accelerators and X-ray devices.
Just don't cross the streams. It would be bad.
My biological clock seems to run around a 26-30 hour cycle, which often makes it difficult for me to maintain "normal" work hours. Trying to go to sleep early is often fruitless so, eventually, I simply stay up all night and drag myself through the next day and then go to bed at an appropriate time to force reset my cycle. I've been this way for as long as I can remember - and I'm now 50. On the up side, I can (still) work productively for 36+ hours straight - I'm a senior mostly-Unix-ish system programmer/administrator btw.
DEMOCRATS say "You WILL eat bugs."
REPUBLICANS say you won't eat at all /irrelevant-political-slam-rebuttal
... when all it really had was a rented file-cabinet room and the 'director' was actually the building landlord ...
Don't cheap out on the props for your cover story.
There really should be a more convenient way ... to send money to someone else, without giving them your credit card specifics. Visa, MasterCard, Amex, (and the others) should be providing this as a service to the cardholders ...
Not exactly what you asked for but... at least one MasterCard vendor (Bank of America) offers Shop Safe enabling you to create temporary virtual CC numbers tied to your real CC. Each number includes a CCID and allows you to specify a credit limit and expiration date (2 months to 1 year, but you can delete it anytime). The virtual card is locked to the first merchant to charge against it.
The demonization of tax collectors goes way back.
- There's the Sheriff of Nottingham.
- Then there's Judas Iscariot.
People really don't like the tax man.
Don't forget The Beatles.
I find it immensely depressing that the same generation that fought so hard and paid such a dear price for civil rights when they were young was the exact same generation to sell them back so cheaply when they were old.
Well... Judging from an old article in Rolling Stone (now archived) - informally referred to as "Tea and Crackers" - Tea Party rallies were (are?) populated mainly by older white people in (Medicare paid for) motorized scooters railing against the Guv'ment (who were/are obviously not taking their irony meds), so while it might be the same generation of which you speak, it's probably not the same people who "fought so hard and paid such a dear price for civil rights" - unless you meant fought *against*...
[ Oh ya, I implied things... :-) ]