Have you heard about Google? You can google the health plans by name to uncover details...
For example, I was looking at "Gold" plans in my zip code in NJ, and came across this policy: "AmeriHealth NJ Standard Local Value Gold HMO"
When I googled that plan name I was given a link to Value Penguin, which had a page for this very plan. They appear to have the details for many plans offered in many states.
What do you imagine each unneccessary AP they deployed cost? If such an antenna costs as much as one displaced AP and provides a better signal, it's money well spent.
High gain directional antennas work better than low gain onni-directional antennas... Who knew?
Wasting 75% of your transmitted power by sending your signal out in a 360 degree radiation pattern instead of focusing all your power on a 90 degree 'wedge' is just stupid - I have to wonder who designed their wifi deployment, commission-based access point salesmen or results-oriented networking specialists?
The White House has had active, public campaigns trying to intimidate, shutout, and marginalize Fox News to a degree I've not seen in prior administrations.
The key here is the administration's willingness to intimidate PUBLICLY - I'm sure prior administrations have intimidated news organizations, just not publicly.
"the bill behind the study specifically calls for the researchers to look at 'cyclical' climate change. In so doing, it completely leaves out human contributions to global warming.'
Because they have to ignore 'cyclical climate change' to practice 'real' science?
I fail to see how the inclusion of 'cyclical climate change' in the study makes for flawed science - are these scientists 'cyclical climate change' deniers? It sounds like they are afraid that a study including 'cyclical climate change' would disprove heir own hand-selected outcome for their climate study...
Seems to me any reasonable scientist could incorporate almost anything into their study, and all they need to do is either prove or disprove the effect of the required factors (in this case 'cyclical climate change' - if it isn't a factor, prove it isn't, if you're afraid you can't, then YOU are the problem, not the folks requiring the inclusion of 'cyclic climate change').
The Pharma industry has been using specially treated temerature indicators in their packaging to note exceptional/out-of-range temperatures for pharmaceuticals in transit, llike these tempstrips:
These are single change strips that monitor surface temperature and show a permanent record of the highest temperature. When your item has reached the temperature monitored it will turn black. The strips are oil, water and steam resistant.
The milk examle use is silly - the risk of milk spoiling is low, but the technology could have other, more useful applications, esp. if they could integrate it with an RFID tag to sense spoiled product without visually inspecting each container.
AT&T had a guaranteed profit of 5-6% (IIRC) as a concession to staying out of certain businesses. Healthcare providers, under ACA, have a guaranteed 15% overhead/profit (sold as spending 85% on subscriber care).
The business model of health insurance is very simple - when the subscriber is healthy, the premiums exceed the cost of care provided; when the subscriber is sick, the premiums are a fraction of the cost of the care provided. Larding up the healthcare policy with freebies (free birth control, as an example) only increases the cost, as does the elimination of annual/lifetime caps, elimination of pre-existing condition exclusion, etc. you can argue that policies with those attributes are 'better' but the impact of those add-zones to the cost of coverage is undeniable.
The only element of ACA that actually reduces subscriber costs (premiums) is the part that takes money out of the general fund and pays down certain people's premiums - plain and simple wealth redistribution.
Every advantage offered by ACA (kid until 26, loss of per-existing condition exclusion, elimination of annual/lifetime caps) could have been added to your healthcare plan before Obama ever took office, but no one wanted to pay the insane premiums to cover such programs. The private insurance market allowed anyone to offer anything their customers wanted. Problem was, most american's insurance was designed by their employer, not themselves, and their employers were interested in cost-effective coverage, not comprehensive coverage.
Obama turned a healthcare problem into a healthcare coverage problem! hoping that by stuffing insurance cards in more people's hands they could somehow cause more people to get better health care. All it really did was force them to pay premiums that MAY give them the opportunity to see a healthcare provider - maybe - but they will have to keep on paying their premiums regardless.
If you could wait until the cards were shown, it wouldn't be a bet any more, and no one would bother getting it until they needed something paid for. Which is a fancy way of saying that no one would get it at all, because if everyone who bought insurance for some condition needed that insurance to pay for treatment of that condition, the cost of insurance would, necessarily, be equal to the cost of treatment of the condition.
The cost of the treatment PLUS overhead, set at 15% of premiums and guaranteed by ACA/Obamacare.
Please describe the involvement of Republicans in the passage of ObamaCare/ACA? Explain the support the bill received from the GOP in both the House and the Senate...
The compromised nature of the ACA is a result of Dems bargaining with other Dems, and a nation-wide single-payer system hurt the Dems much more than you may understand. Would such a system earn Dems the support of those now unemployed that used to be part of the health insurance industry? Would it earn Dems the support of doctors and nurses who would essentially become federal employees? Etc. Anecdotal stories from every country with a single-payer system are what made such a move so unpopular with most Americans.
ObamaCare requires every American to buy healthcare coverage, typically from a private carrier, and guarantees those private carriers a 15% overhead/profit on their insurance premiums.
Exactly how is this anything but a big wet kiss for the private health insurance carriers?
Insurance companies get to keep 15% of the inflated, pre-subsidy premiums, not the subsidized premium rate, BTW.
Obamacare turned a healthcare 'issue' into a healthcare coverage issue! with the assumption that if enough people have coverage the care will be available... The options for folks enrolled in ObamaCare will be very limited, rendering their coverage near useless in most cases.
What good is free birth control if the local pharmacy won't fill the prescription because they don't accept your insurance policy's low reimbursement levels?
What good is free birth control if no local OB/GYN will see you to write the prescription because they don't accept Obamacare patients?
You apparently forgot about the stories if hospital patients drinking water out of the potted plants to survive, the stories of sick patients left for hours in idling ambulances at the emergency room entrance because the hospitals won't let them in until a doctor is available, or how hard it is to find a doctor in one country. Those problems are in the UK, UK, and Canada - and we feel we need that level of service here in America?
No thanks.
And before you argue that your politicians want to try and fix it to avoid those problems from happening here, why do you assume politicians in those other countries failed to prevent them? The problems are the natural outcome of a single-payer system.
The fraud, abuse and waste within the Medicare system is legendary, and expanding that coverage to all Americans would destroy our economy in no time.
The fact that people like getting health coverage they pay no direct premiums for (in most cases) and that covers expenses without question is not surprising. Neither is the fact that many/most doctors are refusing to take on new Medicare patients because of the dwindling reimbursement levels for medical procedures that, in most cases, fails to even approach covering the real cost of providing the service covered.
Based on what? For most people their two weeks into their efforts into completing the account creation process and once they are able to sign-up the coverage doesn't kick in until Jan. 1, 2014.
When my family lost employer-subsidized coverage due to job change last year, it took less than a week to secure coverage (from submitting paperwork to having insurance cards in-hand). One year later, we're told our coverage will run out at the end of the year, since it doesn't comply with ACA minimums. Since my state opted to let the Federal Gov't set up our exchange, we use that 'cluster-mistake' of a website and I have been unable to create a user account on the site yet.
If/when you develop diabetics, cancer, what have you, then you can sign up for healthcare coverage since it will be illegal to deny anyone coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
Seems pretty simple to me - you collect a well-defined amount of information, compare it against a small number of possible healthcare coverage options available, then present the user with a list of possible/available choices w/ prices (factoring in the legislated subsidies, if applicable) and once a selection is made, you hand the customer info off to the selected insurance company...
None of those are hard nuts to crack, most first-year programming students could do it.
As for the 'amazingly high number of visitors' some officials are liming, pish-posh, a quarter-million hits/day is nothing staggering, and is probably smaller than when the Gov't rolled-out a similar website for all retires to enroll in Medicare part d, andi'm sure it is a fraction of the traffic the Obama For America 2008 & 2012 campaigns administered for a tiny fraction of the reported $600+ Million cost (so far).
Is there any real reason a dozen techs in silicon valley couldn't have implemented this in less than 6 months for under $1 M?
Slashdot Mirror
Have you heard about Google? You can google the health plans by name to uncover details...
For example, I was looking at "Gold" plans in my zip code in NJ, and came across this policy: "AmeriHealth NJ Standard Local Value Gold HMO"
When I googled that plan name I was given a link to Value Penguin, which had a page for this very plan. They appear to have the details for many plans offered in many states.
Lawyer fees I'd imagine, to enforce the patents.
Yeah, it's about 95% profit.
What do you imagine each unneccessary AP they deployed cost? If such an antenna costs as much as one displaced AP and provides a better signal, it's money well spent.
High gain directional antennas work better than low gain onni-directional antennas... Who knew?
Wasting 75% of your transmitted power by sending your signal out in a 360 degree radiation pattern instead of focusing all your power on a 90 degree 'wedge' is just stupid - I have to wonder who designed their wifi deployment, commission-based access point salesmen or results-oriented networking specialists?
If you want to 'keep politics out' don't asleep politicians to fund your research...
Shareholders do, in the case of public corporations.
And government can't intimidate Fox News?
Seriously?
The White House has had active, public campaigns trying to intimidate, shutout, and marginalize Fox News to a degree I've not seen in prior administrations.
The key here is the administration's willingness to intimidate PUBLICLY - I'm sure prior administrations have intimidated news organizations, just not publicly.
Because they have to ignore 'cyclical climate change' to practice 'real' science?
I fail to see how the inclusion of 'cyclical climate change' in the study makes for flawed science - are these scientists 'cyclical climate change' deniers? It sounds like they are afraid that a study including 'cyclical climate change' would disprove heir own hand-selected outcome for their climate study...
Seems to me any reasonable scientist could incorporate almost anything into their study, and all they need to do is either prove or disprove the effect of the required factors (in this case 'cyclical climate change' - if it isn't a factor, prove it isn't, if you're afraid you can't, then YOU are the problem, not the folks requiring the inclusion of 'cyclic climate change').
What, exactly, doesn't fall under your definition of 'General Welfare'?
If enough people agree that broccoli is good for you, can the government require everyone to buy broccoli?
The Pharma industry has been using specially treated temerature indicators in their packaging to note exceptional/out-of-range temperatures for pharmaceuticals in transit, llike these tempstrips:
Source
The milk examle use is silly - the risk of milk spoiling is low, but the technology could have other, more useful applications, esp. if they could integrate it with an RFID tag to sense spoiled product without visually inspecting each container.
AT&T had a guaranteed profit of 5-6% (IIRC) as a concession to staying out of certain businesses. Healthcare providers, under ACA, have a guaranteed 15% overhead/profit (sold as spending 85% on subscriber care).
The business model of health insurance is very simple - when the subscriber is healthy, the premiums exceed the cost of care provided; when the subscriber is sick, the premiums are a fraction of the cost of the care provided. Larding up the healthcare policy with freebies (free birth control, as an example) only increases the cost, as does the elimination of annual/lifetime caps, elimination of pre-existing condition exclusion, etc. you can argue that policies with those attributes are 'better' but the impact of those add-zones to the cost of coverage is undeniable.
The only element of ACA that actually reduces subscriber costs (premiums) is the part that takes money out of the general fund and pays down certain people's premiums - plain and simple wealth redistribution.
Every advantage offered by ACA (kid until 26, loss of per-existing condition exclusion, elimination of annual/lifetime caps) could have been added to your healthcare plan before Obama ever took office, but no one wanted to pay the insane premiums to cover such programs. The private insurance market allowed anyone to offer anything their customers wanted. Problem was, most american's insurance was designed by their employer, not themselves, and their employers were interested in cost-effective coverage, not comprehensive coverage.
Obama turned a healthcare problem into a healthcare coverage problem! hoping that by stuffing insurance cards in more people's hands they could somehow cause more people to get better health care. All it really did was force them to pay premiums that MAY give them the opportunity to see a healthcare provider - maybe - but they will have to keep on paying their premiums regardless.
The cost of the treatment PLUS overhead, set at 15% of premiums and guaranteed by ACA/Obamacare.
Please describe the involvement of Republicans in the passage of ObamaCare/ACA? Explain the support the bill received from the GOP in both the House and the Senate...
The compromised nature of the ACA is a result of Dems bargaining with other Dems, and a nation-wide single-payer system hurt the Dems much more than you may understand. Would such a system earn Dems the support of those now unemployed that used to be part of the health insurance industry? Would it earn Dems the support of doctors and nurses who would essentially become federal employees? Etc. Anecdotal stories from every country with a single-payer system are what made such a move so unpopular with most Americans.
ObamaCare requires every American to buy healthcare coverage, typically from a private carrier, and guarantees those private carriers a 15% overhead/profit on their insurance premiums.
Exactly how is this anything but a big wet kiss for the private health insurance carriers?
Insurance companies get to keep 15% of the inflated, pre-subsidy premiums, not the subsidized premium rate, BTW.
Obamacare turned a healthcare 'issue' into a healthcare coverage issue! with the assumption that if enough people have coverage the care will be available... The options for folks enrolled in ObamaCare will be very limited, rendering their coverage near useless in most cases.
What good is free birth control if the local pharmacy won't fill the prescription because they don't accept your insurance policy's low reimbursement levels?
What good is free birth control if no local OB/GYN will see you to write the prescription because they don't accept Obamacare patients?
You apparently forgot about the stories if hospital patients drinking water out of the potted plants to survive, the stories of sick patients left for hours in idling ambulances at the emergency room entrance because the hospitals won't let them in until a doctor is available, or how hard it is to find a doctor in one country. Those problems are in the UK, UK, and Canada - and we feel we need that level of service here in America?
No thanks.
And before you argue that your politicians want to try and fix it to avoid those problems from happening here, why do you assume politicians in those other countries failed to prevent them? The problems are the natural outcome of a single-payer system.
The fraud, abuse and waste within the Medicare system is legendary, and expanding that coverage to all Americans would destroy our economy in no time.
The fact that people like getting health coverage they pay no direct premiums for (in most cases) and that covers expenses without question is not surprising. Neither is the fact that many/most doctors are refusing to take on new Medicare patients because of the dwindling reimbursement levels for medical procedures that, in most cases, fails to even approach covering the real cost of providing the service covered.
Based on what? For most people their two weeks into their efforts into completing the account creation process and once they are able to sign-up the coverage doesn't kick in until Jan. 1, 2014.
When my family lost employer-subsidized coverage due to job change last year, it took less than a week to secure coverage (from submitting paperwork to having insurance cards in-hand). One year later, we're told our coverage will run out at the end of the year, since it doesn't comply with ACA minimums. Since my state opted to let the Federal Gov't set up our exchange, we use that 'cluster-mistake' of a website and I have been unable to create a user account on the site yet.
If/when you develop diabetics, cancer, what have you, then you can sign up for healthcare coverage since it will be illegal to deny anyone coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
That should be 'claiming' not 'laiming', and it's 250K users/day (not page hits).
Sorry.
Seems pretty simple to me - you collect a well-defined amount of information, compare it against a small number of possible healthcare coverage options available, then present the user with a list of possible/available choices w/ prices (factoring in the legislated subsidies, if applicable) and once a selection is made, you hand the customer info off to the selected insurance company...
None of those are hard nuts to crack, most first-year programming students could do it.
As for the 'amazingly high number of visitors' some officials are liming, pish-posh, a quarter-million hits/day is nothing staggering, and is probably smaller than when the Gov't rolled-out a similar website for all retires to enroll in Medicare part d, andi'm sure it is a fraction of the traffic the Obama For America 2008 & 2012 campaigns administered for a tiny fraction of the reported $600+ Million cost (so far).
Is there any real reason a dozen techs in silicon valley couldn't have implemented this in less than 6 months for under $1 M?
Wasn't the operation of the military fully-funded by act of Congress, passed by the Senate, and signed into law by the President? Why are any military personnel on furlough?