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Can we discuss health care without the science fiction and doomsday scenarios?

only if you travel back to 1981 before these costs started their long-term snowball


NO ONE WANTS A FREE MARKET SOLUTION FOR HEALTHCARE.

get over it.

a free market solution means dying baby gets turned away when parent has no money. otherwise it is not a market solution. no one wants this. no one. move to somalia, you can implement your plan there, life is cheap.

healthcare is not a business. no civil society is going to let you decline cusomters who cannot pay when it comes to keeping the baby alive.


I would think that not killing babies would be the kind of publicity advantage that really sets a business apart from its competition.


Reputation-based consumer feedback isn't a desirable mechanism in an industry where unsatisfied customers are dead customers (as opposed to e.g. dead batteries).


Only when it's a paid customer's baby.


some points:

- healthcare is not a business. get over it. the law says you cannot decline emergency care. there is no business model here, any more than there is in running the navy. its a cost.

- you care about public health. meaning, you care if other people are healthy. do you go to the mall or restaurants? if you do, you care if the person next to you has TB. infectous diseases doesn't care about your fully-paid premiums...it matters if other people are also healthy. this once again goes to the fact that healthcare is not a business.

- single payer is the only model that works. or would you prefer to spend another century experimenting with craptastic half-baked business/public hybrids? all health insurance companies must go. the government itself chooses single payer when it needs to run large healthcare plans. the VA, military, federal govt...they all go through single-payer.

- healthcare will be rationed. deal with it. water is rationed. the carpool lane is rationed. bandwidth is rationed. why would healthcare not be rationed?


Thanks for banging the drum on this! You're absolutely right. I'm an American who has lived in Germany, Switzerland and now the Czech Republic, and I'm astonished how much better healthcare is over here.

We need to keep banging the drum. America deserves better than this.


> water is rationed. ... bandwidth is rationed.

Nope.

I'm pretty sure that I can buy as much water as I want and I know that I can buy as much bandwidth as I want.


I can buy as much water as I want

Try saying that in... Colorado and see how far you get before you get your lights punched out.

Water rights and rationing are serious business.


> Try saying that in... Colorado and see how far you get before you get your lights punched out.

I said "buy". Even Coloradans have mastered the fine art of saying "no thanks" when someone offers to buy something for a price that they don't like. And, when the price is acceptable, they sell.

Yes, Water rights are for sale in Colorado.

And, most people don't live in Colorado (or the Mojave).


On points 2 & 3: True.

But more and more of the country (and world) are having the same issues that Colorado (or the Mojave) have.


I didn't mention that the fight is over cheap water.

The Mojave isn't that far from an absurdly large source of expensive water.


viva *bsd. and the linux kernel is progressing nicely as well. its a great time for free OSs.


i don't know anything about cal's departure, but i can say that any large co like yahoo, google, msft, apple etc is more or less impervious against the loss of one or a few technical individuals. his departure may have symbolic value but the machine that is chugging there will keep chugging, for better or for worse


Don't confuse continuing to operate with continuing to innovate.

A few technical individuals can move the needle more than you'd imagine, even at a big co.


raw io? facebook better go ipo soon, they're running out of abstraction layers to code through


Even if Facebook end up not making any money, it contribution to the next generation of software engineering will be important. Solving major scaling issues, make Facebook a full scale lab for tomorrow. They will set standards for how to approach some unique problems.


where was thiel bitching about the Fed and its liquidity binge when it was goosing his facebook stake into the billions? haha it will be amusing watching this guy circle the drain with all of the rest of the lauded paypal mafia, whose paper-tiger web2 "empires" are individually going nowhere fast


i wonder if amazon will stay on the "wholesale" side of this equation or eventually move into the retail side...seems gdrive or whatever it is google is planning might upset the amazon/N-front-ends racket


i thought 3des was still used in ATMs? my (limited) understanding was that its weakness was balanced by its otherwise maturity...and that a potential hacker had very little time in which to make the crack and make use of it


it doesn't matter. employees only become rich if the stock goes crazy. lots of profitable companies have craptastic stocks.


It matters completely, if Facebook can't get a plan together to make tons of money there won't be an IPO to bring in the fuck-you money. Right now they are unprofitable and have no great outlook that would lead to an IPO.


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