And if you think only Americans without health insurance face financial troubles, think again. NerdWallet estimates nearly 10 million adults with year-round health-insurance coverage will still accumulate medical bills that they can't pay off this year.
Have you actually filed any claims totaling more than 2000$ in any year? Did they pay? Without hassles?
There are millions of people like you, who thought they had "platinum coverage", checked themselves into a hospital and ended up with more than 200K in bills. The insurance company would dredge up fine print and limit the total pay out to some small number leaving the policy holder holding the bag.
All the plans that existed when he said that were grandfathered. So if you liked the policy at that time, you could keep it if you still had them. But in the mean time many people changed their policies. That means they did not like the policy they had in 2010. If the original company still offers the original grandfathered 2010 policies, they can go back to it and claim grandfathered protection.
The insurance companies knew the grandfathering, so they very carefully moved people out of their grandfathered plans in 2011, 12 and 13. There is a class action lawsuit in California now, about policy holders claiming that they were not told they are losing the grandfathered protection status by changing policies in 2011, 12 and 13 by these insurance companies.
You probably think you had better insurance. Many such people find out that their plan is not as good as they thought.
What you say is anecdotal evidence. Insurance is based on statistics and actuarials. There is 50% chance you would have ended up bankrupt if you actually had to file medical claims. Have you filed substantial claims exceeding the premium any year? Was it paid without hassle?
More than half of the people who ended up bankrupt because of medical costs, had health insurance and thought they would be covered. But when they file the claims the fine print demon strikes back and they are left holding huge bills.
now forcing 50 year old to buy childbirth insurance does sound crazy so you fix that specific problem, you don't jettison the entire superior idea
any questions?
Actually mixing the risk pool of baby bearing younger women with 50 year old males is a good deal for the older males. The older males have much higher rates of heart attacks and hypertension compared to the young mothers. Childbirths are cheap compared to the statin drugs, angioplasty and bypass surgeries. Split the risk pools, you will find the males insurance rate go up. Have you seen the life insurance rates for men and women? Men pay higher premium because their risk pool is sequestered from women, who tend to be healthier for the same age.
No. By that time, they have removed the restriction and allowed me to browse the plans, save the plans and compare the plans. Only thing was the prices shown were the "full retail" price and there was a nagging side bar that kept saying "your actual cost could be lower please complete this form", "click here" "please please please click here".
The reason for the whole fiasco was they decided not to show the full retail price till people actually complete the eligibility because the politicians thought the sticker shock would be too much. That last minute change to hide the price till the income verification was done was the root cause of all problems. The income verification involves social security number, getting info from the hub etc etc. They could have rolled in income check and eligibility check even before the plan pricing was finalized. But that is all monday morning quarterbacking.
One of the first thing they did was to just open it all up for comparison shopping to reduce the load of window shoppers. Even now I am not sure how well the subsidy eligibility portion of the site is working. But for straight up comparison of plans and pricing, you could do it anytime. This alone is going to change the landscape of medical plans for everyone. Many small companies, people with "trustable" friend/broker etc were all buying health insurance blind. Pricing was very opaque and plans were not comparable at all. Right now so many people are figuring how trustable their friendly neighborhood broker had been.
Subsidy is nearly 100% at 32K income for a family of 4, sliding down to zero at 96K for a family of four. The median family income in USA is around 50K and around 75% of the people make less than 100K. Very few people with more than 100K were without health coverage prior to ACA/Obamacare. So vast majority of the 40 million Americans without healthcare would be eligible for subsidy. It is not going to be easy for the Republicans to roll back this program. No matter how bad the web site is, it would be impossible to go back to the bad old days of preexisting condition, "we will collect premium and cancel your policy if you get sick" health insurance company days.
It was already doing better. Since I knew I would not qualify for subsidy and already had employer provided insurance it was just a dry run. But still it worked mostly. Quite a few quibbles. Help opened a new tab and I did not realize I was on a different tab and spent a while looking for way out of the maze of helps and explanations. A few clickable links did not change the mouse pointer. But I was able to go all the way and compare the plans and prices and see that my employer is giving us gold coverage, and the cost was comparable. I was actually surprised by the "low" prices. Was expecting a sticker shock because "must take all comers", "no lifetime cap", "mental health coverage" etc. But not bad. Plans went from 600$ a month to 900$ a month for gold. So it was not bad even when there was this huge media frenzy.
Basically all accounts created in the first week ten days must be abandoned and fresh account created. If you try to continue with the old account, it would retrieve an old incomplete corrupt data file and you are screwed. But start a new account, new email id, and it would be a breeze for most people. If you want to check your subsidy etc I heard there were trouble. Also heard that most troubled were older people unfamiliar with internet and web pages and were intimidated by all the new fangled terms and legalese.
Two days back got an email saying, "why don't you try again?". I logged in opened a chat window and asked "williams" to cancel that account. He said dont bother it will time out and die by itself.
You communist! Why do you support price controls and intrusive big government.
You think corporations exist to provide people with goods and services at a fair price and reasonable profit? What a quaint Marxist idea! Learn this and remember this. People exist to provide profits to corporations. Corporations are people, unjailable people, but people nevertheless. And they have free speech rights, and even religious rights. And corporations have a fundamental right to be greedy, rapacious and to pursue profits.
It is really painful having to put up with Marxists and communists like you. The only solution is to provide corporations with voting rights. Then there will be peace and quiet in this land.
Richard Feynman mentions an incident in his freshman year in MIT in his book, "Surely you are joking, Mr Feynman". One of the standard hazing of freshman by seniors in his time was to take a bunch of freshman and drive them blindfolded far from civilization, dump them in the middle of boondocks. His batch was the one that made it back the fastest. Their technique, keep wandering till you come across a telephone line. Follow the line till another line joins it forming a junction. Follow whichever direction has maximum number of telephone wires. Once this technique has been developed that particular hazing practice fell to disuse.
Never fear, it has been archived and recorded, waiting, bidding its time till the phone lines become digital. Now that technique would not work any more. So that hazing practice can be revived.
In most Indian (dot, !feathers) traditions "arrow on the back" is considered a mark of great dishonor. Offhand I recall two stories.
One from the Tamil folk tradition. A mother was told her son died in the battlefield with an arrow on his back. Distraught mother ran to the battlefield, found the body, turned it over, and rejoiced when she found it was a chest wound not a back wound that killed her son.
The other is from my dim reaches of my memory. Not sure which version of Ramayana had this. When Lord Rama slayed the demon Ravana, the demon's wife Mandodari finds a back wound on the body of Ravana. She was shocked that her husband would turn away from the battlefield and doubly shocked Lord Rama would shoot at a fleeing enemy. Rama consoles Mandodari that her husband was a true hero who died bravely, the arrow from Lord Rama had gone all way through his body and the back wound was an exit wound.
Funny how different cultures interpret "arrow on the back".
Why taller SUV?. It would be easier to mount cameras on the passenger side of existing patrol cars near the roof line peering down. If necessary add small extension pole, heck, you could even make it retractable. That would be far cheaper, and have a recording of the "texting while driving motorist" to be used as evidence.
Take it cool buddy. I was just joking. I know lots of people start out on positions way below their standing to get a foot in, or to stay with a spouse etc. For example Penna turnpike jobs always open in the most desolate spots in the Appalachia, pushing snow in Tuscorara Tunnels or something. Then in three months they transfer you to suburb of Philadelphia and open another job in Tuscorara Tunnels. Them's the breaks.
The PhD in science, engineering and technology gets to be super specialized. The supply and demand do not synch up well. When you start your PhD in "unstructured tetrahedral mesh generation using advancing front technique for complex 3D domains" you are not very sure there will be a job in the field five years down the line. If there is a job, you will hurry and finish up. If not, you will delay, change the topics, to find a field with better job prospects. If you are too far along to change the thesis title, and your field suddenly goes cold, you finish the PhD, while away time in post doc, acquiring skills in related fields, ready to jump when some job comes by. Usually both PhDs and post docs get paid decent, but not industry standard, wages, in STEM (what is it now? 24 to 30K for PhD candidate and 36 to 48 K for post doc?). So you will have decent standard of living, completely flexible working hours (you can choose to divide the 24 hour day into any chunks adding up to18 for the lab and any chunks adding up to six for sleeping, cooking, eating, shaving and bathing).
When the economy gets hot, and you ditch mesh generation altogether and jump to computational electromagnetics. While doing the jump be careful not to collide with the Computational electromagnetics PhD jumping to mesh generation;-)
I heard one top executive from a very famous EDA company brag, "Every Fortune 100 company that actually makes some product, [he was excluding pure retailers and finance companies] uses our design and analysis tools. The only exception is RIM". This was back in 2007-2008 time frame. I was very surprised because there were so many models of blackberry phones, it was called crack berry. There were news items about aides prohibiting Obama from using his blackberry etc. But basically it never designed anything!
I think RIM has been mismanaged for a long time. It decided there is no margin in electronics and hand sets, and outsourced it completely and tried to stay in its high margin corporate email service business. But Apple and Google provided so much, the top executives demanded their IT departments support these devices. When it was no longer the exclusive mobile email provider for corporations, it had nothing else to offer. It just withered.
I once accidentally worked for the US Postal Service for a year and a half
Accidentally? How did that work? Did you think it was a sysadmin job when they were talking about mail delivery system?
He just means he has been collecting pay checks from the USPS for decades, but accidentally, in spite of himself, without really meaning to, inadvertently, he performed some activities that turned out to be working.
Give prisoners all the opportunities to redeem themselves. Absolutely no problem. The issue is we are neglecting orders of magnitude more working poor who deserve our sympathy. And at least the same level of help to help themselves.
It should be fundamental right of any poor non criminal person to avail any facility or help given to a prisoner. Homeless people should have the right to walk into any prison and demand a place to sleep and a meal. Like that character in O' Henry's story who commits minor crime to get three to four months jail time in winters.
I think we understand the evolutionary mechanism behind the development of altruism well enough now. The "tournament of algorithms" conducted by the U Mich in the late 1980s on the iterative prisoners dilemma provided the seminal breakthrough. Carl Sagan's article on the Golden Rule in the Parade mag in early 1990s and the newly added chapter 13 to "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins in the 30th anniversary edition of that book are easier to read. Game theory developed further. We are now able to explain the circumstances under which altruism develops, and we also understand why it is impossible to drive the "freeloaders" all the way down to zero. We are beginning to understand the role played by taboos and religion in reducing the freeloader problems. Some, like Steven Pinker, think evolution of the language 75000 years ago essentially needed a mechanism to check the freeloaders and religion was probably that mechanism.
So we are pretty far along these directions. Research on reciprocal altruism like this beer drinking ritual by some tribals is minor compared to the extensive work done on the bats regurgitating blood to share food with bats who did not have a successful hunt.
In optimization, you talk about the "curve must be monotonic", else you will converge to a false solution due to the "local minima" problem.
In the society, the curve with "standard of living" on y axis and effort by the individual on the x axis must be monotonic and increasing. You can mess with the slopes all you want. But if you make the curve non monotonic you will have hiccups.
Anyone not committing a crime must have a better standard of living than anyone who committed a crime.
Anyone working must have a higher standard of living, than anyone welfare.
Violate this principle, you would create incentives to commit crime, incentives to stay on welfare.
But, it is in the larger interest of the society to provide enough avenues and opportunities for people to help themselves. We need strong government incentives and investments for poorer people to see tangibly people working their way out of poverty.
Government must be seen like a private venture capital firm or a large mutual fund. It does not know who among the next generation is going to win who is going to struggle to make a living. But it will invest on everyone. Whoever wins, should return a portion of the winnings back to the government as dividend, you would call it tax. You might argue with the percentage and levels of dividend/taxation. But if you say, "all taxation is theft by the government" you would be a selfish ignorant unpatriotic unAmerican idiot. Government should invest the dividend back on the next generation of people.
The guideline should always be, "working poor doing better than welfare recipients, welfare recipients doing better than criminals".
It is well known that the squeaky wheel gets the oil, or as my grandma used to say, "the baby that cries gets milk".
There are millions of poor people who had enough sense not to commit crime who would do ten times more with similar help languish, every politician lectures them to pull themselves up by the boot strap while continuing to cut investment in social programs, every pundit talks about how "poor people don't have ambition" or "poor are the takers and the rich are the makers".
Wish there are charities dedicated to helping the working poor. The government spends billions of dollars in helping middle class people get to and from work in their cars, public transport, traffic management, highway etc etc. But helping an inner city poor person to get to work in the suburbs? Hardly any help. They all live just one blown tire, one alternator going on the blink, one fender bender away from being sucked into the vicious vortex of inability to get to work, inability to earn their way into the work force...
And all these felons, with newly minted tech skills thrown into the internet where nothing could be regulated or enforced... What can go wrong?
Fact is, christianity is about as much a "religion of peace" as any other large organized religion, be it buddhism, islam, hinduism, thaoism or any other.
For your information, Hinduism is not an organized religion. There is no hierarchy of clergy. They don't evangelize, (except for Christianity influenced Hare Krishna movement) there is no official ceremony to become a Hindu, Anyone can call himself/herself a Hindu and practice as much or as little as one wishes to. Hindu godmen have not had government backing or support for centuries. It is a mass religion, as many versions of Hinduism exists as there are clans and tribes.
Scientists at Ioan Space Agency are laughing at earth for lobbing back a few rocks with primitive life forms in them back it Io. They point out that it originally the ejecta from Io that actually seeded the biology of Earth.
Assuming we have distance descendants, that is. The man who did not invent the internet but played a small role by voting for the funding of an ARPANET project ages ago says our species might not last another 100 years, would by mighty inconvenient, if true, of course.
Under 10$ in Radio Shack. Deg/Rad/Grad. statistics. nPr and nCr. R -> P and P->R, sin, cos, tan, arcsin, arccos, arctan, sinh, cosh, tanh, arctsinh, arccosh, arctanh, 18 levels of parenthesis, log, ln, exp, 10^(x), 1/x, sqrt, x^2, x^y, x^(1/y). All solar no batteries. Good softkeys. M+, M-, Sto/ MR. Don't know the model num because it is at work, and I am home.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you think only Americans without health insurance face financial troubles, think again. NerdWallet estimates nearly 10 million adults with year-round health-insurance coverage will still accumulate medical bills that they can't pay off this year.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148
There are millions of people like you, who thought they had "platinum coverage", checked themselves into a hospital and ended up with more than 200K in bills. The insurance company would dredge up fine print and limit the total pay out to some small number leaving the policy holder holding the bag.
The insurance companies knew the grandfathering, so they very carefully moved people out of their grandfathered plans in 2011, 12 and 13. There is a class action lawsuit in California now, about policy holders claiming that they were not told they are losing the grandfathered protection status by changing policies in 2011, 12 and 13 by these insurance companies.
What you say is anecdotal evidence. Insurance is based on statistics and actuarials. There is 50% chance you would have ended up bankrupt if you actually had to file medical claims. Have you filed substantial claims exceeding the premium any year? Was it paid without hassle?
More than half of the people who ended up bankrupt because of medical costs, had health insurance and thought they would be covered. But when they file the claims the fine print demon strikes back and they are left holding huge bills.
now forcing 50 year old to buy childbirth insurance does sound crazy so you fix that specific problem, you don't jettison the entire superior idea
any questions?
Actually mixing the risk pool of baby bearing younger women with 50 year old males is a good deal for the older males. The older males have much higher rates of heart attacks and hypertension compared to the young mothers. Childbirths are cheap compared to the statin drugs, angioplasty and bypass surgeries. Split the risk pools, you will find the males insurance rate go up. Have you seen the life insurance rates for men and women? Men pay higher premium because their risk pool is sequestered from women, who tend to be healthier for the same age.
The reason for the whole fiasco was they decided not to show the full retail price till people actually complete the eligibility because the politicians thought the sticker shock would be too much. That last minute change to hide the price till the income verification was done was the root cause of all problems. The income verification involves social security number, getting info from the hub etc etc. They could have rolled in income check and eligibility check even before the plan pricing was finalized. But that is all monday morning quarterbacking.
One of the first thing they did was to just open it all up for comparison shopping to reduce the load of window shoppers. Even now I am not sure how well the subsidy eligibility portion of the site is working. But for straight up comparison of plans and pricing, you could do it anytime. This alone is going to change the landscape of medical plans for everyone. Many small companies, people with "trustable" friend/broker etc were all buying health insurance blind. Pricing was very opaque and plans were not comparable at all. Right now so many people are figuring how trustable their friendly neighborhood broker had been.
Subsidy is nearly 100% at 32K income for a family of 4, sliding down to zero at 96K for a family of four. The median family income in USA is around 50K and around 75% of the people make less than 100K. Very few people with more than 100K were without health coverage prior to ACA/Obamacare. So vast majority of the 40 million Americans without healthcare would be eligible for subsidy. It is not going to be easy for the Republicans to roll back this program. No matter how bad the web site is, it would be impossible to go back to the bad old days of preexisting condition, "we will collect premium and cancel your policy if you get sick" health insurance company days.
Basically all accounts created in the first week ten days must be abandoned and fresh account created. If you try to continue with the old account, it would retrieve an old incomplete corrupt data file and you are screwed. But start a new account, new email id, and it would be a breeze for most people. If you want to check your subsidy etc I heard there were trouble. Also heard that most troubled were older people unfamiliar with internet and web pages and were intimidated by all the new fangled terms and legalese.
Two days back got an email saying, "why don't you try again?". I logged in opened a chat window and asked "williams" to cancel that account. He said dont bother it will time out and die by itself.
You think corporations exist to provide people with goods and services at a fair price and reasonable profit? What a quaint Marxist idea! Learn this and remember this. People exist to provide profits to corporations. Corporations are people, unjailable people, but people nevertheless. And they have free speech rights, and even religious rights. And corporations have a fundamental right to be greedy, rapacious and to pursue profits.
It is really painful having to put up with Marxists and communists like you. The only solution is to provide corporations with voting rights. Then there will be peace and quiet in this land.
Never fear, it has been archived and recorded, waiting, bidding its time till the phone lines become digital. Now that technique would not work any more. So that hazing practice can be revived.
One from the Tamil folk tradition. A mother was told her son died in the battlefield with an arrow on his back. Distraught mother ran to the battlefield, found the body, turned it over, and rejoiced when she found it was a chest wound not a back wound that killed her son.
The other is from my dim reaches of my memory. Not sure which version of Ramayana had this. When Lord Rama slayed the demon Ravana, the demon's wife Mandodari finds a back wound on the body of Ravana. She was shocked that her husband would turn away from the battlefield and doubly shocked Lord Rama would shoot at a fleeing enemy. Rama consoles Mandodari that her husband was a true hero who died bravely, the arrow from Lord Rama had gone all way through his body and the back wound was an exit wound.
Funny how different cultures interpret "arrow on the back".
Why taller SUV?. It would be easier to mount cameras on the passenger side of existing patrol cars near the roof line peering down. If necessary add small extension pole, heck, you could even make it retractable. That would be far cheaper, and have a recording of the "texting while driving motorist" to be used as evidence.
But fonts are important. Michigan secretary of state invalidated signatures collected for a ballot measure because it did not have the right font or right point size. http://www.eclectablog.com/2012/07/michigan-sec-of-state-johnson-if-pa-4-repeal-petition-font-is-wrong-all-other-ballot-initiatives-are-disqualified-too.html
Take it cool buddy. I was just joking. I know lots of people start out on positions way below their standing to get a foot in, or to stay with a spouse etc. For example Penna turnpike jobs always open in the most desolate spots in the Appalachia, pushing snow in Tuscorara Tunnels or something. Then in three months they transfer you to suburb of Philadelphia and open another job in Tuscorara Tunnels. Them's the breaks.
What is your field?
When the economy gets hot, and you ditch mesh generation altogether and jump to computational electromagnetics. While doing the jump be careful not to collide with the Computational electromagnetics PhD jumping to mesh generation ;-)
I think RIM has been mismanaged for a long time. It decided there is no margin in electronics and hand sets, and outsourced it completely and tried to stay in its high margin corporate email service business. But Apple and Google provided so much, the top executives demanded their IT departments support these devices. When it was no longer the exclusive mobile email provider for corporations, it had nothing else to offer. It just withered.
Accidentally? How did that work? Did you think it was a sysadmin job when they were talking about mail delivery system?
He just means he has been collecting pay checks from the USPS for decades, but accidentally, in spite of himself, without really meaning to, inadvertently, he performed some activities that turned out to be working.
It should be fundamental right of any poor non criminal person to avail any facility or help given to a prisoner. Homeless people should have the right to walk into any prison and demand a place to sleep and a meal. Like that character in O' Henry's story who commits minor crime to get three to four months jail time in winters.
So we are pretty far along these directions. Research on reciprocal altruism like this beer drinking ritual by some tribals is minor compared to the extensive work done on the bats regurgitating blood to share food with bats who did not have a successful hunt.
In the society, the curve with "standard of living" on y axis and effort by the individual on the x axis must be monotonic and increasing. You can mess with the slopes all you want. But if you make the curve non monotonic you will have hiccups.
Anyone not committing a crime must have a better standard of living than anyone who committed a crime.
Anyone working must have a higher standard of living, than anyone welfare.
Violate this principle, you would create incentives to commit crime, incentives to stay on welfare.
But, it is in the larger interest of the society to provide enough avenues and opportunities for people to help themselves. We need strong government incentives and investments for poorer people to see tangibly people working their way out of poverty.
Government must be seen like a private venture capital firm or a large mutual fund. It does not know who among the next generation is going to win who is going to struggle to make a living. But it will invest on everyone. Whoever wins, should return a portion of the winnings back to the government as dividend, you would call it tax. You might argue with the percentage and levels of dividend/taxation. But if you say, "all taxation is theft by the government" you would be a selfish ignorant unpatriotic unAmerican idiot. Government should invest the dividend back on the next generation of people.
The guideline should always be, "working poor doing better than welfare recipients, welfare recipients doing better than criminals".
There are millions of poor people who had enough sense not to commit crime who would do ten times more with similar help languish, every politician lectures them to pull themselves up by the boot strap while continuing to cut investment in social programs, every pundit talks about how "poor people don't have ambition" or "poor are the takers and the rich are the makers".
Wish there are charities dedicated to helping the working poor. The government spends billions of dollars in helping middle class people get to and from work in their cars, public transport, traffic management, highway etc etc. But helping an inner city poor person to get to work in the suburbs? Hardly any help. They all live just one blown tire, one alternator going on the blink, one fender bender away from being sucked into the vicious vortex of inability to get to work, inability to earn their way into the work force ...
And all these felons, with newly minted tech skills thrown into the internet where nothing could be regulated or enforced... What can go wrong?
Fact is, christianity is about as much a "religion of peace" as any other large organized religion, be it buddhism, islam, hinduism, thaoism or any other.
For your information, Hinduism is not an organized religion. There is no hierarchy of clergy. They don't evangelize, (except for Christianity influenced Hare Krishna movement) there is no official ceremony to become a Hindu, Anyone can call himself/herself a Hindu and practice as much or as little as one wishes to. Hindu godmen have not had government backing or support for centuries. It is a mass religion, as many versions of Hinduism exists as there are clans and tribes.
Scientists at Ioan Space Agency are laughing at earth for lobbing back a few rocks with primitive life forms in them back it Io. They point out that it originally the ejecta from Io that actually seeded the biology of Earth.
Assuming we have distance descendants, that is. The man who did not invent the internet but played a small role by voting for the funding of an ARPANET project ages ago says our species might not last another 100 years, would by mighty inconvenient, if true, of course.
Under 10$ in Radio Shack. Deg/Rad/Grad. statistics. nPr and nCr. R -> P and P->R, sin, cos, tan, arcsin, arccos, arctan, sinh, cosh, tanh, arctsinh, arccosh, arctanh, 18 levels of parenthesis, log, ln, exp, 10^(x), 1/x, sqrt, x^2, x^y, x^(1/y). All solar no batteries. Good softkeys. M+, M-, Sto/ MR. Don't know the model num because it is at work, and I am home.