Yes, they can continue their insurance if they can pay for it out of pocket (at full price, since their employer is no longer contributing to it).
Of course, most people would have a hard time paying the full price out of their own pocket even while they were still employed. How exactly are they going to pay for it while they're between jobs?
Ask all those people who eat at McDonald's a lot if they care about prevention. Gosh, you're right, none of those people deserve to live. Who cares if they can't afford to see a doctor when they have chest pains? They can always go to the ER when it turns into a full-blown heart attack.
Oh wait, that's what a sociopathic prick would say.
Allow a free market in health care and insurance and costs will go down, competition does mazing things. Any real-world examples of a "free market in health care" actually leading to lower prices and better outcomes? Or are you just hoping that if we disband the FDA, things will magically get better?
When people can afford to get insurance on their own there's no need to stay with the current employer. Yes, that's nice.
Of course, it could never happen without regulations, so there goes your free market ideal. It's already hard enough to get health insurance if you have any preexisting conditions; in a totally unregulated market, it'd be impossible, because insurers don't want unprofitable customers.
Any kind of socialist system [... long winded rant about the evils of "socialism"] 99% of that is irrelevant. We're talking about national health care here, not the revolution of the proletariat.
In addition, I just don't trust a huge government entity that centralizes all health records. I'm not sure how that's relevant, either. Is someone trying to centralize your health records?
If you want to see what government run health care will look like, go to the DMV, go to the post office, go to the county recorders office. In those offices you will see a slow and unfriendly bureacracy that cares nothing about you. First, no one is proposing "government run health care" in the US. Clinton and Obama's proposals both boil down to setting up a government-run payment system.
Second, if you want to see what government run health care already looks like, go to one of the countries where it exists. Even in Canada and the UK, which conservatives love to hold up as shameful examples of The Evils Of Socialism, you'll find millions of satisfied customers who wouldn't dream of going back to a private system.
The solutions are simple. Allow more choice and allow people huge tax deductions for their choices. Any real-world examples of a system like this actually working?
Do you have data that specifically show the difference of the cost of medical insurance for a changed job versus the incremental salary increase? How do you classify a job as "better?" [...] "Better" is a dangerously subjective word in this context.
Of course it's subjective; it's supposed to be. My point is that people are often forced to choose between keeping their health coverage by staying at their current job, and finding another job they'd prefer but losing their health coverage (either losing it indefinitely because the new job doesn't offer health benefits, or losing it for a period of weeks-to-months as they search for jobs and wait for their benefits to kick in).
They can go with an alternative, that may be less-expensive in the short-run, or they can be not selfish, think about their families and look at it from a cost-benefit perspective. "Hmmm, if I do this, sure i'll live an extra couple of years, but my family's screwed after that."
Yes, and that's a shitty set of options too. National health care would expand the set to include some not-so-shitty options.
It's not a strawman at all. I was merely illustrating that the only things to which people have a "right" are those things that are spelled out in what is the supreme law of the land.
It was indeed a strawman, because you were arguing against a phony position that I never actually put forth. You're the one talking about health care as a "right" here, not me.
Perhaps a question that better illustrates the point I was trying to make is how healthcare as a basic need is any different from the other basic needs I listed.
Well, in one sense it isn't all that different. Housing, food, and transportation are basic needs too. But, of course, the government does provide those things to people in need: food stamps, buses, subsidized rentals and mortgages, etc.
In another sense it's quite different, because health care costs are unpredictable and can be astronomical. You can be pretty sure your food, transportation, and housing costs will be the same next month as they are this month. You can also reasonably expect to pay those costs. Medical costs, however, can appear out of nowhere and end up costing far more than anyone can reasonably be expected to pay.
That is, the ways in which health care as a basic need is different from those other basic needs are the same as the reasons why it's typically paid for by insurance rather than out of pocket.
They want something that they don't want to buy on the market given to them. If someone chooses to pay for it through private insurance, then they are paying for it. If they rely on the government for it, it comes out of someone elses pocket, not theirs.
If that were the case, then no one except the poorest members of society would support national health care. But in fact, plenty of national health care supporters would likely end up paying more than they do now. They support it anyway, because it has benefits other than its impact on their bottom line: mainly, the human-level benefit of knowing that millions of people will be better off because of it.
* ability to pay for medical care, that includes accounting for wisdom of spending habits and financial responsibility
Not sure which specific claim you're referring to here, and in any case, "wisdom of spending habits and financial responsibility" is your claim, not mine.
* leading cause of bankruptcies being medical expenses
Delphi and Pascal are other puzzlers. Pascal is great as a teaching language, but there are later iterations of that family of languages - Modula-2 and Modula-3 - that arguably provide better rigor if rigor is what you are after. And I see no obvious reason to use Pascal or related languages if you're not after truly rigorous code. Delphi's advantage isn't the Object Pascal language. Think of Delphi as Visual Basic done right (well, mostly right).
Unlike VB, Delphi is a straightforward compiled language with nothing very magical going on. There's a big class library, but the source code is all available. There's a form designer, but it edits human-readable files, and you can look through the library code to see exactly how those files work. You don't need a runtime; it can statically link the parts of the library you need and strip the rest. And you don't have to buy a separate set of grown-up tools when you want to make your own components or IDE plugins; you can do it all from Delphi.
Unlike "Visual" C++, Delphi gives you the same rapid development environment as VB. You don't have to switch back and forth between 3 or 4 editors, or tread lightly when editing your code for fear of deleting some magical comment that the IDE needs. You don't have to go through a multi-page wizard to add a new method. You don't have to design a whole model-view-controller architecture for a simple application with one or two forms. You just drag pieces together and they work.
Nowadays, many of Delphi's benefits are available in.NET -- thanks perhaps to the fact that the designer of Object Pascal went on to design C# -- as well as Java and other systems with the right IDE and library support. But Delphi was there in the early 90s, and all the Delphi apps that have been written over the years still work and still need maintenance.
Medical expenses, even those that are the incremental dollar triggering a bankruptcy, are not the "cause" of the bankruptcy. There's always choices in medical care, and often it's a trade-off---treat, or don't treat, expensive experimental treatment, or traditional drug therapy, etc., but a choice none the less. [...] They ARE perfectly able to change jobs. They just CHOOSE not to for whatever reason. No need for "whatever"; it's not a mystery. Specifically, as I explained, the reason is that they'd lose their health coverage if they did so.
Look, choice is a fun word to throw around, but it isn't a root password. When a karate master grabs your wrist and "forces" you to the ground, technically you aren't being forced at all, because you have a choice: you can either fall to the ground, or stand there and let him break your wrist. But that isn't much of a choice, now is it?
If you're going to argue that none of this is a problem, because people can always choose to let their health problems go untreated instead of bankrupting themselves, all I can do is laugh, because that argument makes a mockery out of the word "choice". You can't rationally expect people not to bankrupt themselves to pay for health care, when their only alternative is not to pay for it at all.
A market-based approach does guarantee that you'll be able to be treated as quickly as you want to be. Um, no. There are millions of people who want health care but can't get it. Perhaps you meant "as quickly as you are willing and able to pay for".
Anyway, the long and short of it is that medical care isn't a Constitutional right, any more than gasoline, flush toilets, running water, or food are, and those are certainly basic needs as well that are neither Constitutionally addressed, nor provided to the masses by the government for no cost beyond one's tax contribution. Of course. No one said it was a Constitutional right; that's a strawman.
Most people don't subscribe to the minimalist libertarian view that the government is only there to run the courts and defend the borders: they believe that government can, and in many cases should, also be a parallel system to accomplish things that the market can't or won't accomplish on its own. If We The People believe that everyone deserves medical care, whether they can afford it or not, well, the market sure isn't going to make that happen on its own, is it?
People often just want something for nothing. I'm sure they often do, but this isn't one of those cases. Everyone realizes that health care costs money, whether that money is funneled through private insurers or government agencies.
I'd certainly be interested in reading the studies and looking at the data through which you made a lot of your claims, so please, enlighten us. Perhaps you could rephrase that general request into one or more requests about specific claims, so I can be sure I'm finding the right cites for you.
You see, the whole point of the exercise is rationing scarce resources, not according to the free market but according to the misbegotten notions of a self selected elite. Self-selected elite? Oh... I get it. You mean doctors.
Well, if you don't like those "elitists" making decisions about your health care, I'm sure they'd be glad to let you make all your own medical decisions in your garage with a hacksaw and a stick to bite on.
Seriously, though... yes, of course the point is to change the allocation of scarce resources. Most rational people realize that although the free market is an efficient way to allocate resources, efficiency isn't the only factor worth considering.
The rationing system that works for plasma TVs isn't necessarily appropriate for health care. Even if a lack of conscience has left you completely unable to appreciate the difference on a human level -- the fundamental repulsiveness of a system where physical suffering is alleviated based on how much you can afford to pay, rather than the urgency of your medical situation -- you should still be able to appreciate the differences in the market at an economic level. If TV prices are too high, you can wait a year and see if they come down; if health care prices are too high, all you can do is bankrupt yourself and/or die. The invisible hand doesn't work very well when you have no choice but to pay whatever price they're asking.
Once that reality hits, those with the resources to afford more than the universal rationed services will want to buy more. But that undermies the whole system because those getting the smaller and smaller rationed services (as the whole system goes to hell) become jealous again and new demands for 'fairness' go out from the usual suspects. Er, no. That's fantasy, not reality: real life is not an Ayn Rand screed where everyone's out to get you.
See, for example, all the European countries where private and public health systems coexist. Canada and the UK are the exception, not the rule.
There are some who cannot afford health insurance, and there does need to be a solution for them. However, do not forget that a sizable percentage of those that don't have health coverage choose to forgo that expense, figuring that they don't need it. Sure... and many of those people do exactly what I said: they wait for their problems to become emergencies, and then they go to the emergency room.
Just because they figure they don't need health insurance doesn't mean they save up to pay their routine medical bills with cash. It can also mean that they skip the routine medical stuff and wait until it's a big enough problem that someone else will pay for it.
There are about 300 million people in the US. A rough average of uncovered residents is about 45 million. That means that 255 million are covered. I'm fairly certain that 85% of the country includes a lot more than just those that are wealthy. Being "covered" doesn't necessarily mean much - see Sicko for a few examples.
Life-threatening situations are treated much more quickly, of course, but those kinds of waits go beyond a nuisance for someone whose life is being affected by a given condition. I would find it simply outrageous to have to wait such times. Then I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that the proposals for national health care in the US wouldn't prevent you from paying for immediate treatment, either out of pocket or via private insurance.
On top of this, the overhead for a nationalized system is not necessarily better than in a corporation. Its budget has ballooned from £65.4 billion to £105.6 in five years, a 12.3% annualized increase. It's doubled in the past ten years. Either it was grossly underfunded before -- a possibility -- or it's administered in a grossly inefficiently fashion now. Try comparing that against the US. Then compare health expenses vs. outcomes in all the other countries with national health care. Despite the fluctuations you may have found in one country, national health care is still a winner in terms of cost.
Hell, even here in the US, Medicare has lower overhead than private insurers.
If you're referring to shopping around for doctors, my understanding is that the national health care systems proposed are closer to HMOs, which do restrict your ability to move from doctor to doctor. What I said was "If your private insurer won't pay for a facility that can provide those 'basic services' immediately, I suppose you can shop around and find a facility that will". Today, if you want an MRI and your local hospital has a waiting list, you can go to some other hospital. Maybe your insurer won't cover it, but you can still pay out of pocket, or you can find a better insurer who will cover it.
That wouldn't change.
Obama (PDF): "No, you will not have to change plans. [...] Under the Obama health care plan, you will be able to keep your doctor and your health insurance if you want. No government bureaucrat will second-guess decisions about your care. [...] If you like the insurance you have now, nothing will change under the Obama plan, except that you will pay less. If you do not have insurance you can choose to enroll in the new public plan, which will offer benefits similar to what every federal employee and member of Congress gets. Or you can choose private plan options through the national health exchange."
Clinton: "the plan builds on the current system to give businesses and their employees greater choice of health plans - including keeping the one they have [...] In addition to the broad array of private options that Americans can choose from, they will be offered the choice of a public plan option similar to Medicare."
["millions of people are unable to move to better jobs... because they're dependent on their current employers for health insurance."] This has not been the case for a long time. Please explain. I, for example, have health insurance through my place of employment. If I quit this job, are you saying I'd still somehow have health insurance? How does that work?
I've read about HIPAA and I don't think it provides this. What it does, as far as I can tell, is prevent your new insurer -- if you have one -- from denying you coverage for pre-existing conditions. That is, if you develop Achy Breaky Pelvis while working at Company A, HIPAA says that your new health plan at Company B has to cover it.
I'm sure that's helpful to a lot of people, but it's not what I was talking about. The problem I referred to is that if you get your health coverage through your employer, and you can't afford a separate plan (unemployment benefits sure won't cover it!), then you have no coverage starting from the time you leave that job up until the time you're covered by a new job's health benefits. Depending on what the new job is, your benefits there might not even kick in for 3-6 months, during which time you're just screwed if you get sick or injured.
There won't BE any opt out, accepting payment for medical services outside of Hillarycare will be a felony. That's not true. Either you're misinformed about the health care plans that have been proposed by the 2008 candidates, or you're just lying to make them sound worse than they are. Which is it?
We do [have the best health care in the world] by every metric that matters. In other words, it doesn't matter to you that millions of people are unable to afford routine preventive health care, and are forced to wait until their problems become emergencies (because the ER can't turn them away for non-payment), driving up costs for the rest of us.
It doesn't matter to you that medical expenses are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and for millions of Americans, getting sick or injured at the wrong time can destroy their savings and ruin them for the rest of their lives.
It doesn't matter to you that millions of people are unable to move to better jobs, even when those jobs are available, because they're dependent on their current employers for health insurance.
No, apparently all that matters to you is how well the system works for the wealthiest individuals, and to hell with everyone else.
In America people do not wait months for basic services. Actually, they often do. Private health insurance (especially HMO) doesn't guarantee that you'll be treated any more quickly than people in Canada or the UK.
If your private insurer won't pay for a facility that can provide those "basic services" immediately, I suppose you can shop around and find a facility that will, but you can also do that under the national health care systems that Obama and Clinton are proposing.
How on earth is that going to work, cramming 50,000 articles into 1000 pages? They could edit each article down to a single paragraph and you'd still need a magnifying glass to read it.
Yes, but what do you do with all of the puppies that don't quite meet your expectations? Well, they send horses to the dog food factory. I modestly propose sending those extra puppies to the horse food factory.
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When you're this close to natural language, the distinctive and necessary bits are pretty subtle, and the chance for confusion is much higher, IMO. On the other hand, you have to do the same thing when you play one of these games. The game's parser only understands a subset of English: "ROBOT, FETCH ME THE COG" is OK, but "ASK JIM IF HE WAS KIDDING ABOUT GRANDMA FALLING DOWN THE STAIRS" is not. That's what I was hinting at with the subject line: in I7, authors end up having to deal with the compiler in the same way that players eventually have to deal with the actual games.
I think Inform 7 comes way too close to falling into an "uncanny valley" of natural language. [...] When you're this close to natural language, the distinctive and necessary bits are pretty subtle, and the chance for confusion is much higher, IMO. At this point, you're not learning a language so much as a new dialect. That's very true, and people have been lamenting it since Inform 7 first came out. To successfully grok I7 code, you have to avoid the temptation to think of it as English -- it looks like English, but it's still a programming language, albeit one with a complicated, context-dependent syntax that's hard to describe in BNF.
The compiler does make a lot of assumptions, but it's also open-ended enough that you can duplicate most of that for your own code.
For example, the one sentence "Peter wears a hat" sets up a wearing relation between Peter and the hat, but since that relation is implicitly defined as something like "Wearing relates one person to various things", Inform can also conclude that Peter is a person. Likewise, if you say "The lamp is on the table", it concludes that the table is a supporter. If you say "The chest is closed", it concludes that the chest can be opened.
Most of the assumptions that are built into I7 can be harnessed in your own code: you can define your own relations, rulebooks, actions, etc. and they'll mostly be treated the same as the built in ones. You can define a new property and say that objects with this property usually also have some other property (like closed -> openable).
It does, however, assume that you're using it to make a text game. Inform 7 works by translating your code into Inform 6, and although you have a lot of control over that translation process (in your own code, or by hacking the library files), you're still going to end up with Inform 6 code that can only really be compiled into a game.
Also, the code I've posted so far has almost all been declarative code that sets up the world model. The imperative code that goes in the bodies of rules is, in a sense, much less flexible: instead of analyzing each line as a sentence, Inform just matches them against a list of "phrases" -- basically multi-dispatch functions. However, you can define your own phrases, and since you can define phrases that translate into specific Inform 6 code templates, you can do some pretty wacky things with them.
Think about it--Inform 7 code has just as much arbitrary grammar as Inform 6 (or any 'classic' programming language) did, and is only marginally faster to read if you're not familiar with Inform 6 code. True, the syntax is arbitrary either way, but what really sets I7 apart is how you can express certain concepts, which tend to show up over and over again in interactive fiction, in a way that's more natural than writing loops and conditions. Those concepts are rules governing behavior, relationships between objects, and descriptions of sets of objects.
Here's an example of all three:
After printing the name of a person who attends an accredited university, say ", Ph.D".
This is a rule about what to do in a certain situation: aspect-oriented programming, essentially. Here the situation involves an activity (printing the name) and the object which is the subject of the activity (any person who matches the description).
"A person who attends an accredited university" is an object description, which can be used in various ways as a condition -- does object X match the description? -- or as an iterator: show me all the matching objects. Here, "person" and "university" are kinds of object (classes) and "accredited" is an either-or property (a boolean flag).
"Attends" is a relation that expresses the link between a student and his school. Here it's being used as part of a description, but it can also be used in a condition ("if the player attends Harvard") or changed at runtime ("now the player attends MIT;").
These concepts can all be expressed in Inform 6 or any other OOP language, using properties, methods, loops, etc. But making them fundamental parts of the language gives them a whole new life.
Now, obviously Infocom did some pretty amazing things with Inform (1-5?) and Inform 6, before Inform 7 came out. Actually, Infocom used their own language called ZIL, which looked a lot like LISP with angle brackets. Inform was created in the 90s after Infocom's virtual machine had been reverse engineered.
But now I'm curious (as a programmer unfamiliar with either environment outside of this/. thread!), what would have been the "Inform 6" way of constructing the "source code"? Something like this:
Object assembly_line "Deathbot Assembly Line"
with description "Here is the heart of the whole operation, where your opponents are assembled fresh from scrap metal and bits of old car.",
has light;
Object -> dangerous_robot "dangerous robot"
with name 'dangerous' 'robot',
description "One dangerous robot looks ready to take you on!";
Object -> -> robot_head "robotic head" with name 'robotic' 'head'; Object -> -> drill_arm "drill arm" with name 'drill' 'arm'; Object -> -> needle_arm "needle arm" with name 'needle' 'arm'; Object -> -> crushing_leg "crushing leg" with name 'crushing' 'leg'; Object -> -> kicking_leg "kicking leg" with name 'kicking' 'leg';
After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform). This is fascinating not just for Infocom fans, but also for programmers. For example:
The Deathbot Assembly Line is a room. "Here is the heart of the whole operation, where your opponents are assembled fresh from scrap metal and bits of old car." The dangerous robot is a thing in the Assembly Line. "One dangerous robot looks ready to take you on!" A robotic head, a drill arm, a needle arm, a crushing leg and a kicking leg are parts of the dangerous robot.
That's source code. Inform 7 has been out for a couple years, and I've been working intimately with it for most of that time, but I'm still impressed.
>>>"Actually, things like cable, water, and power are often considered "natural monopolies"
No, yes, yes.
Cable in not a natural monopoly. There's no reason why I can't have 3 or 4 companies (comcast, cox, time-warner) feeding wires into my house. Cable is no different in that sense from water and power. You could just as easily say there's "no reason" why you can't have 3 or 4 companies feeding power lines or water pipes into your house, and it would be just as wrong: there are reasons, as I explained in my earlier post.
The laws preventing companies from laying their own cable lines are how the cable monopoly thrives. Well, that and the massive expense of having to lay lines across a huge area before they sign up a single customer. And the fact that people don't necessarily want a bundle of two dozen different wires running over their heads.
Face it, bandwidth shaping is necessary on shared media as it is completely uneconomical to allot fixed bandwidth. I'd have to have a dedicated OC-192 connection into my building to _guarantee_ 10Mb/s without some sort of shaping. You don't have to guarantee 10 Mb/s for every customer who you're selling 10 Mb/s service too. Overselling is fine as long as you have enough total bandwidth to handle actual use. Since not everyone is actually going to use the whole 10 Mb/s at once, you can get away with providing less.
It's just like the all-you-can-eat restaurant. Just because one guy comes in and eats ten plates of food doesn't mean you need to cook ten plates worth of food for every patron. You do, however, need to cook enough so that every patron can fill his own appetite (which would only be only 1 or 2 plates per person on average). And if all your customers decide to go on the "stuff yourself thin" diet one day, bringing the average up to 3 or 4 plates each, you need to start cooking more food and/or rethinking your business model.
The problem Comcast is facing is that actual use is increasing as high-bandwidth applications like P2P get more popular, but they don't want to build more lines. Instead, they want to forcibly limit their customers' actual use to the previous, lower level.
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Yes, they can continue their insurance if they can pay for it out of pocket (at full price, since their employer is no longer contributing to it).
Of course, most people would have a hard time paying the full price out of their own pocket even while they were still employed. How exactly are they going to pay for it while they're between jobs?
Oh wait, that's what a sociopathic prick would say. Allow a free market in health care and insurance and costs will go down, competition does mazing things. Any real-world examples of a "free market in health care" actually leading to lower prices and better outcomes? Or are you just hoping that if we disband the FDA, things will magically get better? When people can afford to get insurance on their own there's no need to stay with the current employer. Yes, that's nice.
Of course, it could never happen without regulations, so there goes your free market ideal. It's already hard enough to get health insurance if you have any preexisting conditions; in a totally unregulated market, it'd be impossible, because insurers don't want unprofitable customers.
Second, if you want to see what government run health care already looks like, go to one of the countries where it exists. Even in Canada and the UK, which conservatives love to hold up as shameful examples of The Evils Of Socialism, you'll find millions of satisfied customers who wouldn't dream of going back to a private system. The solutions are simple. Allow more choice and allow people huge tax deductions for their choices. Any real-world examples of a system like this actually working?
I thought not.
Do you have data that specifically show the difference of the cost of medical insurance for a changed job versus the incremental salary increase? How do you classify a job as "better?" [...] "Better" is a dangerously subjective word in this context.
Of course it's subjective; it's supposed to be. My point is that people are often forced to choose between keeping their health coverage by staying at their current job, and finding another job they'd prefer but losing their health coverage (either losing it indefinitely because the new job doesn't offer health benefits, or losing it for a period of weeks-to-months as they search for jobs and wait for their benefits to kick in).
They can go with an alternative, that may be less-expensive in the short-run, or they can be not selfish, think about their families and look at it from a cost-benefit perspective. "Hmmm, if I do this, sure i'll live an extra couple of years, but my family's screwed after that."
Yes, and that's a shitty set of options too. National health care would expand the set to include some not-so-shitty options.
It's not a strawman at all. I was merely illustrating that the only things to which people have a "right" are those things that are spelled out in what is the supreme law of the land.
It was indeed a strawman, because you were arguing against a phony position that I never actually put forth. You're the one talking about health care as a "right" here, not me.
Perhaps a question that better illustrates the point I was trying to make is how healthcare as a basic need is any different from the other basic needs I listed.
Well, in one sense it isn't all that different. Housing, food, and transportation are basic needs too. But, of course, the government does provide those things to people in need: food stamps, buses, subsidized rentals and mortgages, etc.
In another sense it's quite different, because health care costs are unpredictable and can be astronomical. You can be pretty sure your food, transportation, and housing costs will be the same next month as they are this month. You can also reasonably expect to pay those costs. Medical costs, however, can appear out of nowhere and end up costing far more than anyone can reasonably be expected to pay.
That is, the ways in which health care as a basic need is different from those other basic needs are the same as the reasons why it's typically paid for by insurance rather than out of pocket.
They want something that they don't want to buy on the market given to them. If someone chooses to pay for it through private insurance, then they are paying for it. If they rely on the government for it, it comes out of someone elses pocket, not theirs.
If that were the case, then no one except the poorest members of society would support national health care. But in fact, plenty of national health care supporters would likely end up paying more than they do now. They support it anyway, because it has benefits other than its impact on their bottom line: mainly, the human-level benefit of knowing that millions of people will be better off because of it.
* ability to pay for medical care, that includes accounting for wisdom of spending habits and financial responsibility
Not sure which specific claim you're referring to here, and in any case, "wisdom of spending habits and financial responsibility" is your claim, not mine.
* leading cause of bankruptcies being medical expenses
Harvard study: Illness and Medical Bills Cause Half of All Bankruptcies. "Medical problems contributed to about half of all bankruptcies [...] the total number of people directly affected by medical bankruptcies [is] more than two million annually.
"Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters were ins
Unlike VB, Delphi is a straightforward compiled language with nothing very magical going on. There's a big class library, but the source code is all available. There's a form designer, but it edits human-readable files, and you can look through the library code to see exactly how those files work. You don't need a runtime; it can statically link the parts of the library you need and strip the rest. And you don't have to buy a separate set of grown-up tools when you want to make your own components or IDE plugins; you can do it all from Delphi.
Unlike "Visual" C++, Delphi gives you the same rapid development environment as VB. You don't have to switch back and forth between 3 or 4 editors, or tread lightly when editing your code for fear of deleting some magical comment that the IDE needs. You don't have to go through a multi-page wizard to add a new method. You don't have to design a whole model-view-controller architecture for a simple application with one or two forms. You just drag pieces together and they work.
Nowadays, many of Delphi's benefits are available in
[...]
They ARE perfectly able to change jobs. They just CHOOSE not to for whatever reason. No need for "whatever"; it's not a mystery. Specifically, as I explained, the reason is that they'd lose their health coverage if they did so.
Look, choice is a fun word to throw around, but it isn't a root password. When a karate master grabs your wrist and "forces" you to the ground, technically you aren't being forced at all, because you have a choice: you can either fall to the ground, or stand there and let him break your wrist. But that isn't much of a choice, now is it?
If you're going to argue that none of this is a problem, because people can always choose to let their health problems go untreated instead of bankrupting themselves, all I can do is laugh, because that argument makes a mockery out of the word "choice". You can't rationally expect people not to bankrupt themselves to pay for health care, when their only alternative is not to pay for it at all. A market-based approach does guarantee that you'll be able to be treated as quickly as you want to be. Um, no. There are millions of people who want health care but can't get it. Perhaps you meant "as quickly as you are willing and able to pay for". Anyway, the long and short of it is that medical care isn't a Constitutional right, any more than gasoline, flush toilets, running water, or food are, and those are certainly basic needs as well that are neither Constitutionally addressed, nor provided to the masses by the government for no cost beyond one's tax contribution. Of course. No one said it was a Constitutional right; that's a strawman.
Most people don't subscribe to the minimalist libertarian view that the government is only there to run the courts and defend the borders: they believe that government can, and in many cases should, also be a parallel system to accomplish things that the market can't or won't accomplish on its own. If We The People believe that everyone deserves medical care, whether they can afford it or not, well, the market sure isn't going to make that happen on its own, is it? People often just want something for nothing. I'm sure they often do, but this isn't one of those cases. Everyone realizes that health care costs money, whether that money is funneled through private insurers or government agencies. I'd certainly be interested in reading the studies and looking at the data through which you made a lot of your claims, so please, enlighten us. Perhaps you could rephrase that general request into one or more requests about specific claims, so I can be sure I'm finding the right cites for you.
Even under COBRA, you have to pay out of pocket to continue your health coverage. Good luck paying for that with your unemployment checks.
Well, if you don't like those "elitists" making decisions about your health care, I'm sure they'd be glad to let you make all your own medical decisions in your garage with a hacksaw and a stick to bite on.
Seriously, though... yes, of course the point is to change the allocation of scarce resources. Most rational people realize that although the free market is an efficient way to allocate resources, efficiency isn't the only factor worth considering.
The rationing system that works for plasma TVs isn't necessarily appropriate for health care. Even if a lack of conscience has left you completely unable to appreciate the difference on a human level -- the fundamental repulsiveness of a system where physical suffering is alleviated based on how much you can afford to pay, rather than the urgency of your medical situation -- you should still be able to appreciate the differences in the market at an economic level. If TV prices are too high, you can wait a year and see if they come down; if health care prices are too high, all you can do is bankrupt yourself and/or die. The invisible hand doesn't work very well when you have no choice but to pay whatever price they're asking. Once that reality hits, those with the resources to afford more than the universal rationed services will want to buy more. But that undermies the whole system because those getting the smaller and smaller rationed services (as the whole system goes to hell) become jealous again and new demands for 'fairness' go out from the usual suspects. Er, no. That's fantasy, not reality: real life is not an Ayn Rand screed where everyone's out to get you.
See, for example, all the European countries where private and public health systems coexist. Canada and the UK are the exception, not the rule.
Just because they figure they don't need health insurance doesn't mean they save up to pay their routine medical bills with cash. It can also mean that they skip the routine medical stuff and wait until it's a big enough problem that someone else will pay for it. There are about 300 million people in the US. A rough average of uncovered residents is about 45 million. That means that 255 million are covered. I'm fairly certain that 85% of the country includes a lot more than just those that are wealthy. Being "covered" doesn't necessarily mean much - see Sicko for a few examples. Life-threatening situations are treated much more quickly, of course, but those kinds of waits go beyond a nuisance for someone whose life is being affected by a given condition. I would find it simply outrageous to have to wait such times. Then I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that the proposals for national health care in the US wouldn't prevent you from paying for immediate treatment, either out of pocket or via private insurance. On top of this, the overhead for a nationalized system is not necessarily better than in a corporation. Its budget has ballooned from £65.4 billion to £105.6 in five years, a 12.3% annualized increase. It's doubled in the past ten years. Either it was grossly underfunded before -- a possibility -- or it's administered in a grossly inefficiently fashion now. Try comparing that against the US. Then compare health expenses vs. outcomes in all the other countries with national health care. Despite the fluctuations you may have found in one country, national health care is still a winner in terms of cost.
Hell, even here in the US, Medicare has lower overhead than private insurers. If you're referring to shopping around for doctors, my understanding is that the national health care systems proposed are closer to HMOs, which do restrict your ability to move from doctor to doctor. What I said was "If your private insurer won't pay for a facility that can provide those 'basic services' immediately, I suppose you can shop around and find a facility that will". Today, if you want an MRI and your local hospital has a waiting list, you can go to some other hospital. Maybe your insurer won't cover it, but you can still pay out of pocket, or you can find a better insurer who will cover it.
That wouldn't change.
Obama (PDF): "No, you will not have to change plans. [...] Under the Obama health care plan, you will be able to keep your doctor and your health insurance if you want. No government bureaucrat will second-guess decisions about your care. [...] If you like the insurance you have now, nothing will change under the Obama plan, except that you will pay less. If you do not have insurance you can choose to enroll in the new public plan, which will offer benefits similar to what every federal employee and member of Congress gets. Or you can choose private plan options through the national health exchange."
Clinton: "the plan builds on the current system to give businesses and their employees greater choice of health plans - including keeping the one they have [...] In addition to the broad array of private options that Americans can choose from, they will be offered the choice of a public plan option similar to Medicare."
This has not been the case for a long time. Please explain. I, for example, have health insurance through my place of employment. If I quit this job, are you saying I'd still somehow have health insurance? How does that work?
I've read about HIPAA and I don't think it provides this. What it does, as far as I can tell, is prevent your new insurer -- if you have one -- from denying you coverage for pre-existing conditions. That is, if you develop Achy Breaky Pelvis while working at Company A, HIPAA says that your new health plan at Company B has to cover it.
I'm sure that's helpful to a lot of people, but it's not what I was talking about. The problem I referred to is that if you get your health coverage through your employer, and you can't afford a separate plan (unemployment benefits sure won't cover it!), then you have no coverage starting from the time you leave that job up until the time you're covered by a new job's health benefits. Depending on what the new job is, your benefits there might not even kick in for 3-6 months, during which time you're just screwed if you get sick or injured.
It doesn't matter to you that medical expenses are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and for millions of Americans, getting sick or injured at the wrong time can destroy their savings and ruin them for the rest of their lives.
It doesn't matter to you that millions of people are unable to move to better jobs, even when those jobs are available, because they're dependent on their current employers for health insurance.
No, apparently all that matters to you is how well the system works for the wealthiest individuals, and to hell with everyone else. In America people do not wait months for basic services. Actually, they often do. Private health insurance (especially HMO) doesn't guarantee that you'll be treated any more quickly than people in Canada or the UK.
If your private insurer won't pay for a facility that can provide those "basic services" immediately, I suppose you can shop around and find a facility that will, but you can also do that under the national health care systems that Obama and Clinton are proposing.
How on earth is that going to work, cramming 50,000 articles into 1000 pages? They could edit each article down to a single paragraph and you'd still need a magnifying glass to read it.
That's right. Don't listen to the pusher robot; he'll say anything to get elected.
It's a lot like legalese, actually.
The compiler does make a lot of assumptions, but it's also open-ended enough that you can duplicate most of that for your own code.
For example, the one sentence "Peter wears a hat" sets up a wearing relation between Peter and the hat, but since that relation is implicitly defined as something like "Wearing relates one person to various things", Inform can also conclude that Peter is a person. Likewise, if you say "The lamp is on the table", it concludes that the table is a supporter. If you say "The chest is closed", it concludes that the chest can be opened.
Most of the assumptions that are built into I7 can be harnessed in your own code: you can define your own relations, rulebooks, actions, etc. and they'll mostly be treated the same as the built in ones. You can define a new property and say that objects with this property usually also have some other property (like closed -> openable).
It does, however, assume that you're using it to make a text game. Inform 7 works by translating your code into Inform 6, and although you have a lot of control over that translation process (in your own code, or by hacking the library files), you're still going to end up with Inform 6 code that can only really be compiled into a game.
Also, the code I've posted so far has almost all been declarative code that sets up the world model. The imperative code that goes in the bodies of rules is, in a sense, much less flexible: instead of analyzing each line as a sentence, Inform just matches them against a list of "phrases" -- basically multi-dispatch functions. However, you can define your own phrases, and since you can define phrases that translate into specific Inform 6 code templates, you can do some pretty wacky things with them.
Here's an example of all three:This is a rule about what to do in a certain situation: aspect-oriented programming, essentially. Here the situation involves an activity (printing the name) and the object which is the subject of the activity (any person who matches the description).
"A person who attends an accredited university" is an object description, which can be used in various ways as a condition -- does object X match the description? -- or as an iterator: show me all the matching objects. Here, "person" and "university" are kinds of object (classes) and "accredited" is an either-or property (a boolean flag).
"Attends" is a relation that expresses the link between a student and his school. Here it's being used as part of a description, but it can also be used in a condition ("if the player attends Harvard") or changed at runtime ("now the player attends MIT;").
These concepts can all be expressed in Inform 6 or any other OOP language, using properties, methods, loops, etc. But making them fundamental parts of the language gives them a whole new life.
That's source code. Inform 7 has been out for a couple years, and I've been working intimately with it for most of that time, but I'm still impressed.
No, yes, yes.
Cable in not a natural monopoly. There's no reason why I can't have 3 or 4 companies (comcast, cox, time-warner) feeding wires into my house. Cable is no different in that sense from water and power. You could just as easily say there's "no reason" why you can't have 3 or 4 companies feeding power lines or water pipes into your house, and it would be just as wrong: there are reasons, as I explained in my earlier post.
"even though Reagan dramatically reduced tax rates, he actually dramatically increased total government spending, particularly in the areas of defense, and ironically, social welfare programs. Although Congress cut billions of dollars a year from the social welfare agenda, the rate of spending was still increasing. The American President Biography series noted that social welfare spending increased between 1980 and 1988 from $313 billion a year to $533 billion a year."
It's just like the all-you-can-eat restaurant. Just because one guy comes in and eats ten plates of food doesn't mean you need to cook ten plates worth of food for every patron. You do, however, need to cook enough so that every patron can fill his own appetite (which would only be only 1 or 2 plates per person on average). And if all your customers decide to go on the "stuff yourself thin" diet one day, bringing the average up to 3 or 4 plates each, you need to start cooking more food and/or rethinking your business model.
The problem Comcast is facing is that actual use is increasing as high-bandwidth applications like P2P get more popular, but they don't want to build more lines. Instead, they want to forcibly limit their customers' actual use to the previous, lower level.