My personal take is that it's just hit a breaking point where people have finally decided that it's not worth the money. Im not the only person I know with an uninsured wife, and only coverage for my kids. If it weren't for my kids, I wouldn't have enrolled in insurance either. The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues. And with the government cutting back spending, which you can see that hitting big insurers like UNH directly, the market is getting a little tighter.
> The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues.
The thing is, bad and expensive health issues can literally come upon you over night. You can get hit by a vehicle or get beaten up with no perpetrator to be held accountable, you can develop an aneurysm, get food poisoning, get pregnant unexpectedly (with all the risk that comes with, including healthcare not being accessible because of anti-abortion BS), or you can simply fall over a step in your own house.
All those things could happen but the healthcare provider will mug you once a month.
There has to be SOME point where the constant muggings aren't worth it vs the risk, otherwise they would simply demand all our money, knowing we won't say no with our life on the line.
Agreed and generally insurance would be a value bet between you and the insurance providee with a slight operation overhead. In the US the market is basically circular as the insurance provider also has hands in all related pies so the bet odds are in such awful state that some people take the risk and rely on crazy stuff like gofundme for survival. I'm not an american but this doesn't look like something that can be solved with more market - the odds are just so broken in many cases.
"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.”
That's true to an extent, but the majority of US healthcare spending goes to treating chronic conditions caused more by lifestyle choices than misfortune. There's a fundamental issue in public health policy about individual responsibility and whether to charge people more (or potentially even deny care) over factors at least partially under their control. For example, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) allows health plans to charge tobacco users higher premiums. Is that fair? Should we also charge higher premiums to alcohol users or those with sedentary lifestyles? There are no clear right or wrong answers here.
That topic should be a non-starter as long as US government policy is to keep shitting in the food bowl. There's way too many communities living under the toxic spill or waste of some unregulated industrial process -- and the country seems perfectly ok with that kind of "lifestyle". I really don't see why we should villify individual lifestyle choices when the entire country is happy with intentionally harmful policy choices.
So, if health insurers want to start charging premiums I suggest they send their bills to Superfund sites first, then to regular toxic cities like Flint, Camden, Hinkley or Picher, then to producers of known-carcinogenic substances (like Chrome-6 or Roundup), and then to advertisers of known-harmful products like alcohol or tobacco. Only when they run out of those targets can we have a discussion on individual lifestyle choices.
OK cute rant but do you have a realistic proposal? I absolutely agree that we should do more to reduce exposure to toxins but there's no legal mechanism for health plans to shift costs that way. Ultimately some of the money spent caring for others with lifestyle-related chronic conditions is going to come out of your pocket through insurance premiums and taxes. This is inevitable. Are you willing to pay more for people who choose to smoke and get lung cancer / emphysema / heart failure / etc? Yes or no?
There's very little tobacco advertising anymore so we're not going to squeeze many dollars out there.
Desk jobs like programming are nearly as bad as smoking based on some of the research I’ve seen. We could just make smokers and programmers pay higher taxes. I guess smokers already do; learned recently that cigarettes are like $10 a pack, a few thousand per year for the average smoker. Not sure how best to tax programmers though.
Why do you immediately call charging the worst polluters for the bad health effects of their pollution "unrealistic"? Having a sufficient answer to that question seems like a good basis to start your proposal from.
Realistic in this administration? No. They will keep taking and taking from the working class and pitting them against one another. There's no solution there when the government is actively looking to sabatoge the system.
Arguing over tobacco premiums is pennies on the dollar. Pretty much every other civilized country has figured something out with regards to universal healthcare. I'm sure there's dozens of solutions out there to choose from. The only real steps to take right now is to have Americans stop licking the boot and actually push for something that helps them.
Socialized healthcare means that the State has a direct financial incentive to reduce or ban consumption of poisonous goods, and crackdown on pollution.
That's a meaningless statement. You can find many examples of "working" national healthcare systems (for various definitions of working) and they're all different in how they allocate costs to consumers.
For one example there are some positive aspects to the Japanese system in that they achieve good outcomes (on average) at lower costs. But that's partly due to the "Metabo Law" aka "fat tax" which voters in other countries might see as punitive or discriminatory. I'm not necessarily arguing for any particular approach to lifestyle-related health conditions but any choice involves trade-offs.
In practice everyone has vastly different preferences, expectations, and desires different levels of care then.
For example Some people want to see a specific doctor they know in a private session to discuss life and family stresses. Others only go to urgent clinics if they need an immediate medication.
What percentage of the market actually pays it this way? IIRC, somewhere north of a third of Americans are already on a form of single payer healthcare. Most of the remainder are getting it through their job, subsidized to varying degrees. The fraction of the population that actually pays the full premiums out of their own pocket is pretty limited, AFAIK.
I think it's also worth considering that taxpayer funded US government spending on health care is about the same as in a typical single-payer European country. Then many tax payers still have to pay for private health care on top, to actually get health care for themselves.
Yeah, doctors get paid way more in the US. There's a number of changes beyond the payment method that we'd have to make if we wanted to have costs on par with a typical European country.
> What percentage of the market actually pays it this way?
The only way this can make sense mathematically is if you're including children, seniors, and/or the ill—populations who are unable to work. What is your reference?
Pew Research says just under 7% of the population uses the exchanges to buy insurance. Overall, about 36% of the population is on public healthcare, according to Census.gov. KFF says that about 80% of the working population, plus or minus, gets insurance through their employer, with an average of $570/month out-of-pocket for premiums.
These numbers are incommensurate in a way that may not be obvious.
7% of the population doesn't tell you what population fraction is covered by such policies.
36% coverage is even harder—every child in the US is eligible for Medicaid, and such children may not always need it, or may move states after using Medicaid, in a way that makes them doubly counted.
80% of the working population is also less clear; is that 80% of policy-holders get their own policy through their own job? Or 80% of working-age people have a policy through some workplace, even if they are not working?
Catastrophic health insurance for most those things is very inexpensive, relatively, but you have to re-buy it every 3 months and then "pre-existing" conditions reset. The expensive insurance is for covering ongoing expenses, as predictable expenses or at least those known 3+ months in advance are the vast vast majority of health care costs.
Realistically catastrophic revolving temporary insurance plus managing what you can in Mexico, plus occasionally paying out of pocket would mitigate the vast majority of yours risks while keeping expense relatively low.
Sure, those things can happen. A lot of younger people will decide to just accept the risk, and then if they get hit by a bad and expensive health issue then they'll go to the ER anyway. Due to EMTALA, most hospitals have to treat them regardless of ability to pay. This is one of the factors causing the US healthcare financing system to collapse.
> Due to EMTALA, most hospitals have to treat them regardless of ability to pay. This is one of the factors causing the US healthcare financing system to collapse.
They'll only treat you until you're stabilized, though. They won't give you chemo or routine care. If you need to be admitted you're also not covered by the EMTALA.
All emergency medicine, not just that triggered by the EMTALA, is 5-6% of all healthcare spending in the US, so while it contributes, it's not collapsing the healthcare system.
The real problems with it are that it's an unfunded mandate by Congress, just adding to the financial tangling of the healthcare system, and that it's way too often used to treat things that could have been much more cheaply treated in a clinic, but then there are no clinics nearby that take Medicaid and are actually open, so instead, like with so much of our health care system, we choose to solve it the stupid way instead.
Hospital costs attributed to EMTALA are relatively low today. My point is we should expect those costs to grow as more consumers become uninsured. This is one of several factors that will eventually wreck the current healthcare financing system.
Can you document the hard architectural requirements of your codebase? And keep it up to date? If you can do that, you can force your coworkers to always use those requirements during their prompting /planning for their implementations and you can feed that to an agent and have that review the code.
But more proactively, if people aren't going to write their own code, I think there needs to be a review process around their prompts, before they generate any code at all. Make this a formal process, generate the task list you're going to feed to your LLM, write a spec, and that should be reviewed. This is not a substitute for code reviews, but it tends to ensure that there are only nitpick issues left, not major violations of how the system is intended to be architected.
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
I'd really like to get stats on how many evangelicals believe in this "dual covenant" vs how many follow scripture and legitimately believe that Jesus will send all Jews to hell to be tortured forever when he comes back.
I'd point out again, that most dispensationalists don't actually follow their interpretation to it's logical conclusion. And further, the view is not that all Jews will go to hell. It is that a large portion of Jews will suffer through the tribulation period, with most of them dying, but that the "remnant" will survive, all the remaining Jews will turn to follow Jesus, then rule the world under Jesus for 1000 years. And everyone will serve Israel.
I'm annoyed that I spent so much time growing up learning this tbh. But I still find it crazy to call all of your average misguided adherents to this ideology antisemites. The death cult running things, sure.
It's even more ridiculous to call the prosetylizers anti semites for trying to convert Jews, bc based on their world view, if they don't save as many Jews as they can, those Jews are going to suffer terribly instead of being raptured before the tribulation.
Im employed by two semi-technical cofounders that vibe coded the MVP until they couldn't maintain the technical complexity. I expect scenarios like this to continue. There is a subset of companies that eventually will those engineers.
I have a friend that got a call/notification that her card was being used suspiciously. It may not have been from the bank. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but then very shortly after, someone else got her newly issued debit card and then used it at an atm in her area. The bank didn't believe that she wasn't involved. And despite filing a police report and giving them all the information that she could, she was out 2.5 grand, which was a big deal for her. BofA if anyone is wondering.
They got her new card and activated it, so they set the pin. I wish I had details because it seemed very sophisticated. So she couldn't have been the only one hit by the scam.
Yikes... That's an interesting angle. Not sure how you would intercept both, I would assume/hope they would be sent separately preferably using different methods
People were being unknowingly registered to vote, even if they weren't eligible to vote when they would get IDs. People move. They get sent ballots. Now you have tons of ballots that aren't really valid, but they're out there and usable. It makes illegal ballot harvesting a lot easier as well if there's no active step where the ballot must be requested. I have to request my ballot every election. it takes 5 minutes, I can do it online and I assert that I'm a citizen and am eligible to vote. I can also do that by mail and I get a mailer to do so. There's no reason to not implement that safeguard.
it depends on the state and how thorough their verification system is. I can only speak for IL, but in order to request a mail in ballot, you must be registered to vote first. Even if you register online, you must at minimum provide a DL number or SSN, and the state will associate a signature with your registration. Which is then cross referenced to the signature on your ballot envelope. If you don't have a signature and you try to vote by mail, and in the slim chance your registration is actually approved, you are now a first time non signatures voter, and your mail in ballot will be provisional at best.
This is why many of the election fraud claims focused on lax signature verification of ballots as well as the lax mail in ballot address locations. I feel that IL elections are probably more secure, but only because the state is solidly one party and comically gerrymandered anyways.
But technically, yes, a ballot harvester could send ballots on your behalf if they have enough information about you.
Claims of voter fraud have shifted to mass voter registration occuring for people that are not eligible to vote, then ballots being sent out without being requested. How is this concern addressed?
Yeah, and those claims are made up to scare people who don't know how it works.
The government knows who is a citizen and who isn't lol, they literally have the records.
Voter rolls are very closely scrutinized. Dead people are, in fact, taken off the rolls. There is essentially ~no voter fraud and ~no instance of non-citizens voting in this country. Yes, it's audited and studied. Yes, they keep the data and you can audit it.
You're literally complaining about it being easier for people to participate in democracy, and you should stop.
Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.
From the mail-in ballots from 2024 alone, tens of thousands were returned because somebody had already voted. If you're generous that is 'accidental attempts at voter fraud'. If you're realistic those are going to largely compose a small percent of all successful efforts at voting on behalf of other individuals.
And this for elections which are increasingly decided (in terms of flipping the electoral college one way or the other) by votes in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands. So the scale of fraud in US elections is likely greater than the minimum margin of electoral college victory in them.
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You also are substantially overstating the degree of organization of voter rolls. Voting in the US is heavily decentralized by design, which is what enables various states to have completely different electoral systems. But more specifically voter rolls are maintained by the states themselves and that, in turn, is typically further decentralized down to counties themselves.
This leaves a significant degree of inconsistency. In general I do not think that double voting or completely ineligible voting is a significant factor - nowhere near as much as voting on the behalf of others, but it certainly happens. For instance thousands of mail in votes were rejected because they came from dead people, and it is highly unlikely that 100% of these attempts were caught.
on a similar vein, I have recurring back issues due to a spinal issue. I gave the issue to ChatGpT and it gave me almost all of the exercise I had been given years ago by a chiropractor. It's nowhere near a replacement for having someone coach me through movements though.
Android got really annoying recently, I think in the past few months, almost 30 percent of the time some random menu will pop up. They added a new top layer menu and I keep fat fingering it.
I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,
Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.
Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.
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