We are building a pretty long BRT in Oakland and San Leandro, California. Yeah it’s costing a billion dollars. It does not have a true dedicated right of way since cars can theoretically block the box in front of the bus. But it does have all-door boarding, proof-of-payment with off-vehicle fare terminals, and signal priority.
Legislation requiring up-front presented costs to be honored and any additional procedures/costs to be cleared with patient consent as they happen (or a consent waiver obtained from the patient with a promised limit or incentive such as overall discount) might be an improvement. Or it may increase costs for the worse. Who knows.
Careful there though. If a surgeon is operating on cancer and discovers that the tumor is much larger than expected the operation will take longer - be more expensive - or the surgeon does the operation as planned and then charges even more for the second surgery to remove the rest. Or maybe all operations are estimated as the worst case and so you end up with no more clue about what you will pay than today - in some imaginable worst case this could be a five million dollar operations, so even though 99% are only fifty thousand you get that high estimate.
Which is to say don't propose something until you understand the unintended side effects. You can get your desired result but while making everything worse. (this paragraph applies to everything in politics)
I mean, I guess, but that's kinda a worst case. My vet, for instance, quoted me up front, made me sign to say that I was willing to pay (I think) up to $x000 and notified me that they might contact me if they need to do extra work, and then did the surgery with an up front payment. They ended up refunding me money after the fact.
No reason we can't have something similar that in US health care as far as I'm aware, at least for the happy path where the patient is lucid and in a reasonable state of mind up front. But then again, why do we have to worry about this when plenty of countries have a basically-zero-fee system in place?
That’s not really the problem we face, though. Our problem is you ask how much it costs to give birth at a hospital and then everything goes according to plan and later you get endless bills for much more than they said, often from providers who weren’t even in attendance, for materials that weren’t even used, and so forth.
> Which is to say don't propose something until you understand the unintended side effects. You can get your desired result but while making everything worse.
I think the American experiment in trying to provide market health care has demonstrated that you can, in fact, have a 'free' market for healthcare, while making almost everything about that healthcare worse.
A constant 30% discount on employer insurance via tax breaks does not explain the ludicrous growth in hospital bills over the last 4 decades.
Your vision benefits enjoy similar tax breaks, but I've yet to see an optometrist try to bill someone without benefits $800 for a vision exam, or $4,000 for a pair of glasses.
Insurance companies benefit from all those tricks: medical care billing is too complex to understand unless you have a full time team of people to understand it. Insurance companies have this team and you don't.
Vision doesn't work that way because enough people don't have basic vision care that they won't stand for the complexity.
NO, the problem is medical billing was allowed to become too complicated, and it is very hard to unwind that situation.
I'll contend (though of course there is no way to prove this) that if we hadn't had the advantage to company provided insurance the complex billing wouldn't have developed in the first place.
They have literally no limitations. The reason that an advil at the hospital costs $200 is because they were afraid if they made it cost $20000 people would burn down the hospital.
To give _you_ some context on this, attacks by protesters on returning troops from Vietnam is a myth. The reason people venerate "the troops" today is 50 years of concerted right-wing militaristic propaganda which serves to deflect legitimate debate by classifying any kind of criticism as being "against the troops".
There is no thermodynamically possible way to generate power from burning coal while also removing the primary product of the reaction from the effluent. Clean coal is, necessarily, 100% bullshit.
I think the idea is not to turn the CO2 back into carbon and oxygen, but to store it somewhere other than the atmosphere. That is not thermodynamically impossible.
GRPC offers server reflection so your tools can interrogate the protocol at runtime, so your tool doesn’t need to compile in all the protocol descriptions.
I just checked my OnHub. It is the original, now over 3 years old. It got five updates this year, none of which I noticed. It's too bad that it's nearly guaranteed that they will kill this product line at some point in the future.
For employees this is a real roller coaster ride. If you had a industry-standard $500k RSU component over four years, four years ago, you were recently walking around with 7 million dollars, depending on your sell or hold preferences. Whereas now you merely have 4 million. On the other hand if you started a month ago with the same deal, now you have much less than the industry standard deal.
Anybody with the number can join your Zoom meeting and since there's very little indication of their presence you might not even notice. You can also command other people's rooms to join your meeting, if you can figure out how to contact them, and you can force their microphones to turn on, which in my opinion is pretty disturbing.
