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> people aren't total idiots.

You clearly haven't met that many people.


Reminds me of that Terry Pratchett quote:

"You know how dumb the average person is? Well, statistically, 50% of people are even dumber than that."


I thought that was George Carlin.

Well, one might have stolen it from the other. Or they may have both come up with it independently.

It was definitely a quote in Discworld Noir though.


He probably still lives there

Sounds like the solution to crime is therefore to mitigate the factors that precipitate it. If people steal in order to meet their basic needs, then providing basic housing and medical care to all should see a reduction in crime.

I can agree. Now who will do the building and who will pay them to do it?

It sounds like you're saying we should generate more bullshit to justify bullshit.


They said "could", not "should".

I believe the point is that it's much easier to create a plausible justification than an accurate justification. So simply requiring that the system produce some kind of explanation doesn't help, unless there are rigorous controls to make sure it's accurate.


At that rate, I would already be there if I had just walked.


Divide inches by 25.4 for millimeters


Times inches by 25.4 for mm, there is 25.4mm in every inch.


Derp

I'd rather have those smelling of alcohol be passengers than drivers.


Guess he never met Tom Lehrer


A fair point but still, Tim Minchin is the GOAT.


He absolutely is—but without any disrespect—it feels as though Tim Minchin has already given society all of his overlapping talents in music, comedy, and storytelling. Perhaps he has more to offer, but his recent work seems increasingly self-referential and less genuinely novel. He could retire now with undisputed GOAT honours within his niche, and I wouldn’t feel a sense of loss over what went unrealised. The symphonic tours and Matilda would stand as his magnum opii. For the talents of one man, it is more than enough.

(That being said, to be proven wrong would be the greatest delight.)


I was late to learning about him, and got to see him on tour a year or two ago, which was awesome.

Yes, it was quite rich in self-reference and I can see how he could be considered complete. I'd still see him again just because I crave live events that I feel connected to.

Lehrer exited at the top of his game and deserves solid respect for that, perhaps Minchin could take note of that?


Teens are kids.


We could just lower it once, to zero, and be done with it.


The US healthcare system is like the Titanic: it turns slowly, and you don't want to fuck around with hitting icebergs.


So fucking sink it. All heath "insurers" do is just delay and deny coverage anyway.


> So fucking sink it

Let's think through the implications of that.

The US healthcare system is non-functional for a month: what happens?

Hospitals and providers start running into cash flow problems and begin having difficulties providing service.

Fraud skyrockets because everything is getting blanket-approved because none of the data used for verification is available.

And about a month after that, people start dying from lack of care, after the last financial reserves of the system are exhausted.

Because that's the path the system was on when Change went down for several weeks, only averted by HHS/CMS saying 'Here's money, just do procedures, we'll worry about it later.'


You say this as if people aren't already dying of lack of care. And it's already disintegrating. Check back up in your estimated month as the realities of ACA subsidy drops start to kick in.


I can't tell if you're being intentionally obtuse, or you really don't understand orders of magnitude.

Are you okay with 1000x as many people dying to make a point?


Maintaining the status quo just keeps killing people at an increasing rate. The sooner the system is unfucked, the fewer senseless deaths there will be overall.


We could. Who is going to pay that bill?


Well you see it would free up a huge amount of money that employers are currently paying to insurers. If you take that money (by raising the Medicare premium on employees), plus the existing medicaid budget, existing medicare tax and payroll tax contributions America's healthcare system would receive over 40% more money to cover care per capita than the next leading contestant. Almost 2X the OECD average. In PPP dollars no less.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

"But where would the money come from" is one of the wildest questions to ask about a system that already costs double the average. I'd say, give or take, the same place its coming from now, but like, less.


I pay $2k a month through work for a plan. I could pay that plus the payroll deduction plus the pittance my employer kicks in. I’d make that trade all day every day.


would it actually be that different of a bill?

i imagine its already doing the most expensive part, treating people who are almost dead who have lots of procedures that could be done.

picking up people that need basically no care sounds pretty cheap by comparison


Estimates of Medicare errors, fraud and abuse are around $60 billion. Greatly increasing the scope of it will, inevitably, increase that figure.


Estimates of health insurance fraud is also around $30 billion, so same order of magnitude, and considering the margins of error and the fact that they are estimates, by definition, it makes it hard to say public health insurance is more fraud ridden then private. Plus due to the inherent differences there are probably differing avenues of research and estimating possible between private and public insurance, and heck whole different forms of draining money that might affect ease of uncovering the level of fraud between private and public, which would make it have an even larger margin of error.


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