When Republicans start talking about voter ID, they will *immediately* bring up election fraud that ID wouldn’t do a damn thing about.
Because those are the biggest, most blatant examples, and Dems often squeak about how there's no evidence of fraud, just like they're trying to claim right now that there are no problems with the IRS.
Voter ID stops exactly one thing: Voter impersonation. That’s it. If you are talking about voter ID and mention *any sort of election fraud besides voter impersonation* as being a rational for it, you are a deliberate liar.
My stated problem was dead people voting. And yes, in order to have dead people voting you need to have lists of the dead supplied by (presumably high level) election officials.
All of the other examples are to show that we know darn well that election fraud has been done in the past and there is (presumably) interest in having it done now. Any internet search of "dead people voting" results in recent issues, which may or may not have been intentional (dead people signing registration forms is probably the work of low level organizers paid by the signature, but it still smells).
http://www.progressivestoday.com/clinton-campaign-lawyer-charged-with-registering-dead-people-to-vote/
To the best of my knowledge, we have no evidence that IDs prevents, or even suppresses, legit voters from voting. If that's true, then what exactly is the issue here?
You’re talking about cross-referencing public records on millions of votes cast and it is entirely expected that you will run into clerical mismatches.
It is also expected that the bottom of a barrel is slimy. I'd expect it to be more an issue in the South than California but whatever.
Can you re-state this in a way that applies to other constitutional rights? For example: “It should be at least as difficult to purchase a used gun as to get on an airplane” or “It should be at least as difficult to worship in public as it is to buy alcohol”.
You're claiming it's easier to buy a gun than get on a plane? And as long as we're talking about firearms, are you claiming we should let people buy/use/store firearms without any sort of ID or check because it's a constitutional right?
Voter identification has been discussed for decades, there has been plenty of resources and time to make the case that the law is both necessary and narrow. So why does that case continue to rely on such shoddy evidence?
:Shrug: We spend roughly zero money investigating it, and anyone in power who benefited from it won't want evidence or investigations to happen (witness the 1960 election). Further the opposite argument also applies even more so, in the places which do check ids, does this in practice prevent anyone from voting?
Big picture is it's probably a good thing to pay more attention to the ballot box and maintaining the integrity of the same.
InMD: I’ve also never seen convincing evidence that we have a voter fraud problem, which again, raises questions to me about the true intentions.
1) We have Chicago, home of "Vote early and vote often", which probably stole the 1960 Presidential election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960#Controversies
2) Bush v. Gore was close enough that any fraud would have been magnified. And that's at a Presidential level where this would be really hard and (normally) pointless.
3) IDs at the ballot are to prevent dead people from voting.
4) It stands out as odd that we insist on more ID to buy alcohol or get on an airplane than to vote.
And yes, I expect everyone involved has ulterior motives. Witness one side claims need to allow anyone to vote unless they're using the IRS to suppress the vote.
I’d say this situation exists because individuals expectations have outrun the market’s ability to realize them. Or not, depending on which part of the market you focus on.
I think it's appropriate to hold an organization responsible for situations which it helped create. An organization does what is best for itself, be it the church, or the university, or a used car dealership. We get into trouble when we lose sight of that.
Assume you're thinking about getting into a high level PhD program.
Is your so-called "advisor" going to tell you there's no job for you and it's a waste of time/money? Is the college? Are the job placement stats openly published and easy to understand? If a professor does tell his minions that they shouldn't be there, what happens to "his" job and status?
I think today there is a greater degree of scorn and dismissal of college and its worth which is reflected in our policy preferences.
1) Colleges have increased their prices a lot since the 1960's. It's possible to think a $15k car is great while thinking the same car at $75k is a rip off. Return the cost of college back to what it was in the 1960's and public funding instantly goes to back to close to 100%.
2) The extra price of these colleges isn't backed up by an increase in value, more like an increase in administration.
3) Various wings of colleges swing really hard to the left, political indoctrination isn't a "public good". Nor is funding various leftist professors' agendas. The right wing isn't going to fund groups whose entire purpose is to support the left.
4) There is a lot more demand for the public dollar. Some of the trade offs are going to be ugly. A dollar spent on college is a dollar not spent on pensions.
5) Various wings of Colleges are terrible at having jobs available for their grads after they leave, this is especially true for the "academic track".
So yeah, there's a "greater degree of scorn and dismissal", but there's a lot of room for improvement on behalf of the colleges themselves.
What does it say about society that we can produce an over-supply of people who have the intelligence, interest/passion and determination to receive advanced degrees in numerous subjects from History to Biology but not enough well-paying jobs for that level of educational obtainment?
This situation exists because it's in the best interest of the University to have lots of PhD students working as slightly paid labor, doing research for their professor. That's great while it lasts, but long term there's no academic job there, and maybe no job at all.
Self interest is part of every level of society, understand that and move on.
A friend of mine worked in industry with her PhD in chem, decided to switch to academics. She could not get a tenure track position and ended up as an adjunct and working for Kaplan as an SAT and SAT II tutor. She is back in Industry.
Simplified to a sentence, Hitler's rise shouldn't mention hyper-inflation. Ditto simplified to a paragraph.
But at 5 minutes where they go over economic problems it's odd to skip the whole 'oops, we destroyed the economy and everyone's life savings' aspect to it.
What separates a successful CEO or successful entrepreneur from a failed one? Mastery of spreadsheets? Skill at logic? Grasp of monetary policy? How does one learn the art of capturing what people dream of, to inspire them and handle the tricky waters of interpersonal relationships?
Intuitively I'd guess there are a lot more successful CEOs who know a lot about (Econ and/or Engineering and/or Math) and little about (Art and/or Philosophy and/or Literature) than the reverse. Looking up the actual answer... we find that's exactly true.
Percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs with...
An engineering degree: 33%
An undergrad degree in business: 11%
Actually you should learn the foreign language in High School.
I tend to agree with this... but there are a limit to how many "must have" subjects there can be, and this tends to hit the radar as 2nd teer. It would be nice, it's not actually necessary if they know English.
I notice that the subjects relating to how to deal with other people are not in your list. You don’t think that philosophy and literature and art have useful applications for a business and political environment in which people from vastly different cultures and experiences need to cooperate voluntarily on complex projects?
Econ had a class which detailed how other cultures' basic assumptions about time/law/money/relations/religion were different, how to deal with them, and what all that meant in a practical sense in terms of making multi-national project work.
The case studies had some real howlers. The auto company which sold the 'Nova' in Mexico... and 'Va' in spanish means 'go' so No-Va means "No-Go". The oil company which presented to Saudi officials it's proposal in an expensive pig-leather folder... which resulted in both the binder and the proposal being burned and the company officials ordered out of the country.
How many classes in philosophy/literature/art do you need to have to get the same thing?
I also never understood the libertarian sneer against a mass educated class. I agree that there are problems now but a well educated society should be a goal for advanced society.
Agreed, but some letters on a piece of paper and a $100k debt doesn't make you "educated". Education is supposed to let you know more about how the world at large works and how to make good choices in society.
That should include:
1) Reading and Writing... although one *hopes* the high schools do this.
2) Physics (the very definition of 'how the world works').
3) Statistics (it's very hard to make sensible choices without this).
4) Logic (ditto, lots of bad ideas are out there, knowing why they're bad is pretty key).
5) Economics (ditto, and yes, money is important)
Some of these are on how-to-evaluate-information and some of them are backbone on how the world works. But as far as I can tell it's possible to go through college, get your degree in 'being-indoctrinated', skip most everything I just mentioned, and after that you can parrot whatever you 'learned'... and then be totally shocked that the world doesn't actually care and you've got $100k in debt for a min-wage job.
The original college degrees were measurements of wealth, intelligence, and social status. The new college degrees need some underlying value to have value, and all to often they don't.
We stay out of WW2 and Hitler takes over Europe.
We stay out of the Cold War and Stalin takes over Europe and various other countries.
South Korea loses to North Korea and the Kims rule both.
We skip Gulf War One and Saddam takes over various Middle East countries and dominates oil.
Various other regional conflicts are taken to their natural conclusions, these conclusions are often ugly.
Partly this depends on what the "average" voter looks like and where he's running, but more importantly, this puts his name out in front of the average person.
This is a PR stunt, which isn't to say he doesn't believe in what he's doing or he'd be unlikely to be a Public Defender to begin with.
Agreed. Not Cruz. Rubio, Jeb, maybe John Kasich.... so call it two of the three, no clue who is VP... probably Rubio since he's the least experienced but whatever.
:sigh: I can't disagree with any of that. For the GOP this election was stunningly winnable... which I suppose is why we had 15(ish) people run. Looks like there's a lot to be said for smoke filled back rooms.
This is because insurance networks need *medical professionals*. No insurance company could sell insurance here when they don’t have a network here! And they’re not going to try to set one up from another state.
First, the bigger insurance companies already function in multiple states, and thus already have networks in multiple states. What's going on is every state wants to have the insurance company's administration (i.e. jobs) in their own state.
2nd, needing "networks", at all, is a rotten side effect coming from using insurance companies for cost control. When my car crashed they wrote me a check and let me deal with it rather than insist every bolt come from the supplier with whom they'd made a deal.
nothing was stopping, say, Oklahoma and Texas from creating a joint market and centralizing all their regulation.
So the solution to too much central planning and political interference is more political interference? State level politicians don't want to compete with other states. Consumers would benefit from larger markets and more competition.
The ACA divides allows insurance companies to divide ages into three ranges, and requires the price be even inside that range. Additionally, the high end can be no more than three times the low end.
A young and invincible can only have a policy one third the price of the elderly? :Ouch: And of course the young are largely poor and the old are largely rich.
That’s not to say there are points in health care where people *do* make decisions, but *that* decision-making process shouldn’t involve costs, only various risks and recovery times and stuff.
Shear nonsense. Try applying that logic to anything else, say buying a car, or a college education. Should the decision-making process really not involve costs for either of those?
Dark Matter: And that world class surgeon’s $10k ... in theory I could saved a lot of money by flying to a different state… assuming I could find someone like that who isn’t attached to a massive bureaucracy.
I have no idea what a different state has to do with anything.
The other docs I found of his caliber weren't in my state.
I don’t understand why you think a HSA plus insurance to cover major expenses is any different than currently existing high-deductible plans. Because that’s basically what you’re suggesting….a large deductible
I think there's an emotional difference, an HSA is money in hand, it's yours, if you reduce medical spending.
So someone like me, who was born with a heart defect, should never be able to get insurance?
I don't know whether a heart defect is an "increases risk" thing or a "treat every day" thing or both. If it's just risk, then you should be paying for the risk you bring into the pool, which might be large enough that you can't afford it. If it's a "treat every day" thing then that's not something "insurance" should be dealing with, meaning in theory they'd just add it to the cost of your insurance.
And you should be able to get insurance as cheap as anyone else for issues that are unrelated to the heart defect.
It’s incredibly easy to point to people who do not have insurance, get some major disease, and then try to get insurance, and say ‘Those people should not be able to do that’.
Sure, just like you shouldn't be able to buy home insurance after your place burns down.
And the other problem, of course, is the fact that those people who didn’t have insurance until they got sick *are still sick and still need medical treatment*.
This is a problem, and a big one, but it really shouldn't be handled via insurance. Tax dollars probably are appropriate, but forcing it onto insurance companies is just politicians *literally* spending other people's money.
The solution is to get rid of free riders by having everyone pay to start with. The way we *normally* do that in society, the way we make everyone pay for the police and roads, is taxes. For some reason the right wasn’t in favor of that, so demanded the mandate instead, which they also are not in favor of apparently.
The mandate was proposed by a right-wing think tank and then got shot down when it was pointed out just how intrusive it'd be. Given that the left voted in lockstep to implement it, the left owns it. They didn't have the votes for a single payer or we'd have that instead.
The history of single payer in this country has been the left wanting to implement it but flinching away from how much it would cost.
You want public money for healthcare (and we're already spending a lot)... but what is the limit on this? *That* is the reason single payer (or whatever) keeps failing. What exactly is the line here which prevents this from breaking the budget? Do we spend a million dollars so a premature baby can grow up with various problems? Do we spend a million dollars to give a 90 year old man another few months? Is it realistic to expect Congress to make decisions which kill little old ladies?
The death rate in this country holds steady at 100%. Whatever we do, people are going to die, whatever line we draw, people are going to die, and yes, some of them on the street. As far as I can tell, your solution is to draw no lines.
"Word on the street" turned out to be outright lies spread by his political opponents, i.e. that he hadn't paid any tax at all.
Keep in mind if we're going to put finances under a microscope, Trump is running against Hillary... and that foundation looks a lot like a money laundering scheme.
they actually ran a big study because a very large company –10k+ employees– (possibly even mine, it was the right time frame) switched to all HSA plans one year. And indeed, people put off necessary care and ended up costing both themselves and the company more money.
I think you're talking about the Commonwealth Fund study. The thing is that although consumer satisfaction went down (compared to 'more comprehensive' insurance, i.e. more expensive), health didn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account#Consumer_satisfaction
You don’t NEED financial disincentives, because the mere fact that going is an unpleasant chore is plenty to prevent most overuse.
So the next time you buy a car, just give the salesman a blank check and tell him to use his own judgement on what you need.
That was sufficient to make me uninsurable.
I'm sorry to hear that, and I don't understand the medical/actuarial ins and outs to even begin to justify this nor to know whether or not it is justifiable. This sort of thing hits the radar as exceptionally poor consumer service.
The reason the costs aren’t being controlled is that the patients are getting the correct amount of health care, but they’re getting it with absolutely no concern, or even knowledge, of the cost. There is no price comparison.
Very, very close... although I’d quibble with “the correct amount of health care” because there are multiple factors which inflate that. I don’t regret the $10k I paid for a surgeon, but I do regret the $200 I paid for a test which probably wasn’t going to reveal anything and didn’t. If you go to a used car lot and let the salesman decide how much car you “need”, the answer is probably “a lot”. The benefits of the system flow to both the patient and the health system itself, the costs do not.
And that world class surgeon’s $10k had a huge administrative overhead baked into it which is also a problem. If we take our ‘college administration’ example and assume three quarters of that isn’t value added (:massive handwave:), in theory I could saved a lot of money by flying to a different state... assuming I could find someone like that who isn’t attached to a massive bureaucracy.
If we had competition then a guy like that could set up his own shop, with thin administration, and he’d personally get a massive pay increase while at the same time charging less. The ACA supposedly strongly encourages the opposite.
And the weird thing is, it’s perfectly possible to have cost controls with reimbursement just by having a *fixed* reimbursement for most things.
You’re totally correct in that the solution is for consumers to have skin in the game. But why not go whole hog?
Get the insurance company totally out of the picture for small items, force consumers to have HSAs, if they save money then they keep it. There are multiple other things which need to happen, the big one being prices need to be clear and easily available.
Insurance companies are this massive impediment to competition and letting them stay in there ‘helping’ people by ‘negotiating’ is just making things way more complex for no good reason. Keep in mind how college costs have zoomed up to support their bureaucracy.
Now, in medicine, *sometimes* this is hard to figure out, especially in surgeries, where dozens of different variables exist. I know that. But there are a lot of places it could work. All labs, for one.
All labs. What a “typical” labor costs. I think we’d be really surprised at what could be compared (especially in the age of smart phones) if there weren’t so many road blocks set up to prevent it. When my kid sliced her head open, I went to her local doctor because I figured (correctly) that he’d be much more skilled and a lot cheaper than some emergency room intern (and that’s without waiting the multiple hours).
This means if different ages/races/genders/classes have different risks, they should be paying different amounts.
Down to what specificity, and what difference in amounts?
Those are political questions to what really should be a market decision.
The current rules are: Smokers can be charged more, and ages are allowed to be divided into three groups and internally each group is charged the same amount.
The current rules have heavy political pandering and so forth. You’re not allowed to sell across state lines so some/many state insurance industries are micro managed by their state regulators and there’s no competition between different states. So the result is a heavily shielded industry which doesn’t need to serve it’s consumers very well.
OTOH, you *didn’t* list pre-existing conditions there, so that solves a lot of that. Health insurance companies really really shouldn’t be allowed to vary their prices based on *that*.
I'm taking "Pre-existing" to mean "before you got insurance". The moment a pre-existing condition (say, cancer) becomes a ‘regular’ part of you then you’re not spreading risk anymore, you’re trying to cover costs. If a disease has a million dollar cure and effects one-in-a-million, then insurance should be able to cover everyone for a dollar each. That’s spreading risk. If someone goes without insurance thinking that it can’t happen to him but does, then we’re not dealing with risk any more.
To address multiple other comments you made, the insurance companies aren’t serving their customers well, they’re acting like a heavily shielded near-monopoly who has corrupted it’s regulators.
And I am not sure how you think insurance companies can judge what class, or even what race, someone is.
The amount of publicly available information is scary, but the issue is whether different groups have different risks which should be insured differently. Anything which gets in the way of pricing risk correctly is a problem, that includes lack of competition and political meddling.
For example one of the flaws of the ACA was it wanted to pander to the elderly, so there are rate caps (don’t remember the mechanics). So the young are risk-priced incorrectly too-high. Which in turn contributes to the difficulty in getting the young to sign up.
If you could somehow magically divide the bills of those two things between the actual involved parties, if we billed father’s insurance for half the cost of sonograms and childbirth, if the cost of every other birth-control pill was on the boyfriend’s insurance, it would basically equalized the amount of medical care the genders needed, and thus the cost of their insurance.
We already have this, it’s called ‘family insurance’. It’s an interesting idea to split medical costs in this situation, but you’re raising a ton of other issues, 3rd party pays, proving paternity, etc.
Because competition exists, or people might not even buy insurance at all, it is in the best interest of insurance companies to have as low rates as possible…which means they do, indeed, have a strong incentive to reduce the amount of illness of their customers, as long as *that* is cheaper than dealing with the illnesses.
In theory, reducing the risk of a customer *should* result in reducing the cost of that customer’s insurance and not profit for the insurance company itself. Where it doesn’t we’re probably looking at market distortions, poor service, gov mandates, and so on (which admittedly we already know we’re looking at). But we’re trying to look at insurance as it’s supposed to function, not as it does.
Let’s look at “perfect” risk sharing, say a company hires an insurance company to administer insurance for their employee pool. All medical costs are distributed to the employees, the insurance company itself has *zero* exposure to anything. If someone gets cancer, all that happens is those costs are distributed to the pool via rates. Co-pays, HSAs, health of the employees, risk profile of the employees, none of those things matter (or increase/decrease profit) to the insurance company. As a matter of public health they matter to the employees, but that’s a different issue.
This is the theory of insurance, and in practice, with a sufficiently large pool with competition, it gets close to this ideal.
Multiple issues:
1) Pool size (that 1-in-a-million, million dollar disease needs a pool measured in many multiple millions). A small and unlucky pool can just fall apart, say a thousand people who need to cover one of their members who gets our ‘million’ disease. Their risk is $1 but their cost that year is $1000, or it can be spread over a thousand years which is nonsense.
Being unable to sell across state lines is a huge problem because ideally you’d be matched up with others in your risk pool, and if that pool is small (per state) then no sane insurer would want to touch it.
2) As both you and I have pointed out, this works for spreading risk, it sucks for controlling cost.
3) Pre-existing conditions which don’t add to risk should be covered normally other than the condition itself. If it’s not then that’s either a competition issue or a regulation issue.
4) Medical insurance, as a construct, is poorly suited to be linked to a job. The average job lasts perhaps 3 years, losing your job (perhaps even because you’re ill) shouldn’t also require you to seek re-insurance.
5) There are people who are too sick to get insurance. This is an issue of cost, not risk, so it really should be outside the bounds of insurance-working-as-it-should. That it does is mostly an accident of history and politicians looking to spend other people’s money.
Note that any fiscally sane answer on what to do is also going to be ugly. The left’s answer is typically ‘write a blank check and spend until society goes bankrupt’ (which is nuts), the market’s answer is ‘let them seek charity or failing that, be untreated’. Note there’s also an element of personal responsibility here, assuming health insurance is cheap (which it should be aka life/house insurance), widely available, and not connected to a job, lack of insurance becomes a result of personal choice.
6) There are going to be problems with an insurance company takes, or is forced to take, people at rates different from their risk. This isn’t all that different from the homeowners on the coast of Florida being unwilling to pay for flood insurance and insisting that the gov step in. Sooner or later a really nasty hurricane will move down the coast and break the bank.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “What the Trump/Khan Debate Really Says About America”
Because those are the biggest, most blatant examples, and Dems often squeak about how there's no evidence of fraud, just like they're trying to claim right now that there are no problems with the IRS.
My stated problem was dead people voting. And yes, in order to have dead people voting you need to have lists of the dead supplied by (presumably high level) election officials.
All of the other examples are to show that we know darn well that election fraud has been done in the past and there is (presumably) interest in having it done now. Any internet search of "dead people voting" results in recent issues, which may or may not have been intentional (dead people signing registration forms is probably the work of low level organizers paid by the signature, but it still smells).
http://www.progressivestoday.com/clinton-campaign-lawyer-charged-with-registering-dead-people-to-vote/
To the best of my knowledge, we have no evidence that IDs prevents, or even suppresses, legit voters from voting. If that's true, then what exactly is the issue here?
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It is also expected that the bottom of a barrel is slimy. I'd expect it to be more an issue in the South than California but whatever.
You're claiming it's easier to buy a gun than get on a plane? And as long as we're talking about firearms, are you claiming we should let people buy/use/store firearms without any sort of ID or check because it's a constitutional right?
:Shrug: We spend roughly zero money investigating it, and anyone in power who benefited from it won't want evidence or investigations to happen (witness the 1960 election). Further the opposite argument also applies even more so, in the places which do check ids, does this in practice prevent anyone from voting?
Big picture is it's probably a good thing to pay more attention to the ballot box and maintaining the integrity of the same.
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1) We have Chicago, home of "Vote early and vote often", which probably stole the 1960 Presidential election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1960#Controversies
2) Bush v. Gore was close enough that any fraud would have been magnified. And that's at a Presidential level where this would be really hard and (normally) pointless.
3) IDs at the ballot are to prevent dead people from voting.
https://ballotpedia.org/Dead_people_voting
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/05/23/cbs2-investigation-uncovers-votes-being-cast-from-grave-year-after-year/
4) It stands out as odd that we insist on more ID to buy alcohol or get on an airplane than to vote.
And yes, I expect everyone involved has ulterior motives. Witness one side claims need to allow anyone to vote unless they're using the IRS to suppress the vote.
On “University reform: Demand driven system has devalued degrees and made some feel like failures”
I think it's appropriate to hold an organization responsible for situations which it helped create. An organization does what is best for itself, be it the church, or the university, or a used car dealership. We get into trouble when we lose sight of that.
Assume you're thinking about getting into a high level PhD program.
Is your so-called "advisor" going to tell you there's no job for you and it's a waste of time/money? Is the college? Are the job placement stats openly published and easy to understand? If a professor does tell his minions that they shouldn't be there, what happens to "his" job and status?
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1) Colleges have increased their prices a lot since the 1960's. It's possible to think a $15k car is great while thinking the same car at $75k is a rip off. Return the cost of college back to what it was in the 1960's and public funding instantly goes to back to close to 100%.
2) The extra price of these colleges isn't backed up by an increase in value, more like an increase in administration.
3) Various wings of colleges swing really hard to the left, political indoctrination isn't a "public good". Nor is funding various leftist professors' agendas. The right wing isn't going to fund groups whose entire purpose is to support the left.
4) There is a lot more demand for the public dollar. Some of the trade offs are going to be ugly. A dollar spent on college is a dollar not spent on pensions.
5) Various wings of Colleges are terrible at having jobs available for their grads after they leave, this is especially true for the "academic track".
So yeah, there's a "greater degree of scorn and dismissal", but there's a lot of room for improvement on behalf of the colleges themselves.
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This situation exists because it's in the best interest of the University to have lots of PhD students working as slightly paid labor, doing research for their professor. That's great while it lasts, but long term there's no academic job there, and maybe no job at all.
Self interest is part of every level of society, understand that and move on.
Industry loves chemists. Academics loves itself.
On “New TED-ED Animation Provides a Case Study in How Fascists Get Democratically Elected”
Simplified to a sentence, Hitler's rise shouldn't mention hyper-inflation. Ditto simplified to a paragraph.
But at 5 minutes where they go over economic problems it's odd to skip the whole 'oops, we destroyed the economy and everyone's life savings' aspect to it.
On “University reform: Demand driven system has devalued degrees and made some feel like failures”
Intuitively I'd guess there are a lot more successful CEOs who know a lot about (Econ and/or Engineering and/or Math) and little about (Art and/or Philosophy and/or Literature) than the reverse. Looking up the actual answer... we find that's exactly true.
Percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs with...
An engineering degree: 33%
An undergrad degree in business: 11%
http://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-majored-in-engineering-2011-3#33-of-the-sp-500-ceos-undergraduate-degrees-are-in-engineering-and-only-11-are-in-business-administration-1
Looking at just the top 15...
8 engineering, two econ, two business, one political science, one TV&Radio, one Liberal Arts.
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/professionals/102015/americas-top-ceos-and-their-college-degrees.asp
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I tend to agree with this... but there are a limit to how many "must have" subjects there can be, and this tends to hit the radar as 2nd teer. It would be nice, it's not actually necessary if they know English.
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If you mean reading/writing, then agreed, if you mean foreign-language, then which one?
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Econ had a class which detailed how other cultures' basic assumptions about time/law/money/relations/religion were different, how to deal with them, and what all that meant in a practical sense in terms of making multi-national project work.
The case studies had some real howlers. The auto company which sold the 'Nova' in Mexico... and 'Va' in spanish means 'go' so No-Va means "No-Go". The oil company which presented to Saudi officials it's proposal in an expensive pig-leather folder... which resulted in both the binder and the proposal being burned and the company officials ordered out of the country.
How many classes in philosophy/literature/art do you need to have to get the same thing?
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Agreed, but some letters on a piece of paper and a $100k debt doesn't make you "educated". Education is supposed to let you know more about how the world at large works and how to make good choices in society.
That should include:
1) Reading and Writing... although one *hopes* the high schools do this.
2) Physics (the very definition of 'how the world works').
3) Statistics (it's very hard to make sensible choices without this).
4) Logic (ditto, lots of bad ideas are out there, knowing why they're bad is pretty key).
5) Economics (ditto, and yes, money is important)
Some of these are on how-to-evaluate-information and some of them are backbone on how the world works. But as far as I can tell it's possible to go through college, get your degree in 'being-indoctrinated', skip most everything I just mentioned, and after that you can parrot whatever you 'learned'... and then be totally shocked that the world doesn't actually care and you've got $100k in debt for a min-wage job.
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The original college degrees were measurements of wealth, intelligence, and social status. The new college degrees need some underlying value to have value, and all to often they don't.
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Math is shockingly useful and versatile in modern society in terms of building a career. The others, not so much.
On “What Would a Parliamentary System Look Like in the US?”
We stay out of WW2 and Hitler takes over Europe.
We stay out of the Cold War and Stalin takes over Europe and various other countries.
South Korea loses to North Korea and the Kims rule both.
We skip Gulf War One and Saddam takes over various Middle East countries and dominates oil.
Various other regional conflicts are taken to their natural conclusions, these conclusions are often ugly.
On “Missouri’s Lead Public Defender Assigns Governor to Case in Protest of Budget Cuts – Hit & Run : Reason.com”
Partly this depends on what the "average" voter looks like and where he's running, but more importantly, this puts his name out in front of the average person.
This is a PR stunt, which isn't to say he doesn't believe in what he's doing or he'd be unlikely to be a Public Defender to begin with.
On “Does It Really Matter That Trump Won’t Release His Tax Returns?”
Agreed. Not Cruz. Rubio, Jeb, maybe John Kasich.... so call it two of the three, no clue who is VP... probably Rubio since he's the least experienced but whatever.
On “New TED-ED Animation Provides a Case Study in How Fascists Get Democratically Elected”
They skipped the hyper inflation. Everyone lost all of their savings. Economic wrath of god.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
On “Missouri’s Lead Public Defender Assigns Governor to Case in Protest of Budget Cuts – Hit & Run : Reason.com”
Let me guess, he's running for office soon?
On “Does It Really Matter That Trump Won’t Release His Tax Returns?”
:sigh: I can't disagree with any of that. For the GOP this election was stunningly winnable... which I suppose is why we had 15(ish) people run. Looks like there's a lot to be said for smoke filled back rooms.
On “This Party Cannot Be Saved”
First, the bigger insurance companies already function in multiple states, and thus already have networks in multiple states. What's going on is every state wants to have the insurance company's administration (i.e. jobs) in their own state.
2nd, needing "networks", at all, is a rotten side effect coming from using insurance companies for cost control. When my car crashed they wrote me a check and let me deal with it rather than insist every bolt come from the supplier with whom they'd made a deal.
So the solution to too much central planning and political interference is more political interference? State level politicians don't want to compete with other states. Consumers would benefit from larger markets and more competition.
A young and invincible can only have a policy one third the price of the elderly? :Ouch: And of course the young are largely poor and the old are largely rich.
Shear nonsense. Try applying that logic to anything else, say buying a car, or a college education. Should the decision-making process really not involve costs for either of those?
The other docs I found of his caliber weren't in my state.
I think there's an emotional difference, an HSA is money in hand, it's yours, if you reduce medical spending.
I don't know whether a heart defect is an "increases risk" thing or a "treat every day" thing or both. If it's just risk, then you should be paying for the risk you bring into the pool, which might be large enough that you can't afford it. If it's a "treat every day" thing then that's not something "insurance" should be dealing with, meaning in theory they'd just add it to the cost of your insurance.
And you should be able to get insurance as cheap as anyone else for issues that are unrelated to the heart defect.
Sure, just like you shouldn't be able to buy home insurance after your place burns down.
This is a problem, and a big one, but it really shouldn't be handled via insurance. Tax dollars probably are appropriate, but forcing it onto insurance companies is just politicians *literally* spending other people's money.
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The mandate was proposed by a right-wing think tank and then got shot down when it was pointed out just how intrusive it'd be. Given that the left voted in lockstep to implement it, the left owns it. They didn't have the votes for a single payer or we'd have that instead.
The history of single payer in this country has been the left wanting to implement it but flinching away from how much it would cost.
You want public money for healthcare (and we're already spending a lot)... but what is the limit on this? *That* is the reason single payer (or whatever) keeps failing. What exactly is the line here which prevents this from breaking the budget? Do we spend a million dollars so a premature baby can grow up with various problems? Do we spend a million dollars to give a 90 year old man another few months? Is it realistic to expect Congress to make decisions which kill little old ladies?
The death rate in this country holds steady at 100%. Whatever we do, people are going to die, whatever line we draw, people are going to die, and yes, some of them on the street. As far as I can tell, your solution is to draw no lines.
On “Does It Really Matter That Trump Won’t Release His Tax Returns?”
"Word on the street" turned out to be outright lies spread by his political opponents, i.e. that he hadn't paid any tax at all.
Keep in mind if we're going to put finances under a microscope, Trump is running against Hillary... and that foundation looks a lot like a money laundering scheme.
On “This Party Cannot Be Saved”
I think you're talking about the Commonwealth Fund study. The thing is that although consumer satisfaction went down (compared to 'more comprehensive' insurance, i.e. more expensive), health didn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account#Consumer_satisfaction
So the next time you buy a car, just give the salesman a blank check and tell him to use his own judgement on what you need.
I'm sorry to hear that, and I don't understand the medical/actuarial ins and outs to even begin to justify this nor to know whether or not it is justifiable. This sort of thing hits the radar as exceptionally poor consumer service.
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@davidtc
Very, very close... although I’d quibble with “the correct amount of health care” because there are multiple factors which inflate that. I don’t regret the $10k I paid for a surgeon, but I do regret the $200 I paid for a test which probably wasn’t going to reveal anything and didn’t. If you go to a used car lot and let the salesman decide how much car you “need”, the answer is probably “a lot”. The benefits of the system flow to both the patient and the health system itself, the costs do not.
And that world class surgeon’s $10k had a huge administrative overhead baked into it which is also a problem. If we take our ‘college administration’ example and assume three quarters of that isn’t value added (:massive handwave:), in theory I could saved a lot of money by flying to a different state... assuming I could find someone like that who isn’t attached to a massive bureaucracy.
If we had competition then a guy like that could set up his own shop, with thin administration, and he’d personally get a massive pay increase while at the same time charging less. The ACA supposedly strongly encourages the opposite.
You’re totally correct in that the solution is for consumers to have skin in the game. But why not go whole hog?
Get the insurance company totally out of the picture for small items, force consumers to have HSAs, if they save money then they keep it. There are multiple other things which need to happen, the big one being prices need to be clear and easily available.
Insurance companies are this massive impediment to competition and letting them stay in there ‘helping’ people by ‘negotiating’ is just making things way more complex for no good reason. Keep in mind how college costs have zoomed up to support their bureaucracy.
All labs. What a “typical” labor costs. I think we’d be really surprised at what could be compared (especially in the age of smart phones) if there weren’t so many road blocks set up to prevent it. When my kid sliced her head open, I went to her local doctor because I figured (correctly) that he’d be much more skilled and a lot cheaper than some emergency room intern (and that’s without waiting the multiple hours).
Those are political questions to what really should be a market decision.
The current rules have heavy political pandering and so forth. You’re not allowed to sell across state lines so some/many state insurance industries are micro managed by their state regulators and there’s no competition between different states. So the result is a heavily shielded industry which doesn’t need to serve it’s consumers very well.
I'm taking "Pre-existing" to mean "before you got insurance". The moment a pre-existing condition (say, cancer) becomes a ‘regular’ part of you then you’re not spreading risk anymore, you’re trying to cover costs. If a disease has a million dollar cure and effects one-in-a-million, then insurance should be able to cover everyone for a dollar each. That’s spreading risk. If someone goes without insurance thinking that it can’t happen to him but does, then we’re not dealing with risk any more.
To address multiple other comments you made, the insurance companies aren’t serving their customers well, they’re acting like a heavily shielded near-monopoly who has corrupted it’s regulators.
The amount of publicly available information is scary, but the issue is whether different groups have different risks which should be insured differently. Anything which gets in the way of pricing risk correctly is a problem, that includes lack of competition and political meddling.
For example one of the flaws of the ACA was it wanted to pander to the elderly, so there are rate caps (don’t remember the mechanics). So the young are risk-priced incorrectly too-high. Which in turn contributes to the difficulty in getting the young to sign up.
We already have this, it’s called ‘family insurance’. It’s an interesting idea to split medical costs in this situation, but you’re raising a ton of other issues, 3rd party pays, proving paternity, etc.
In theory, reducing the risk of a customer *should* result in reducing the cost of that customer’s insurance and not profit for the insurance company itself. Where it doesn’t we’re probably looking at market distortions, poor service, gov mandates, and so on (which admittedly we already know we’re looking at). But we’re trying to look at insurance as it’s supposed to function, not as it does.
Let’s look at “perfect” risk sharing, say a company hires an insurance company to administer insurance for their employee pool. All medical costs are distributed to the employees, the insurance company itself has *zero* exposure to anything. If someone gets cancer, all that happens is those costs are distributed to the pool via rates. Co-pays, HSAs, health of the employees, risk profile of the employees, none of those things matter (or increase/decrease profit) to the insurance company. As a matter of public health they matter to the employees, but that’s a different issue.
This is the theory of insurance, and in practice, with a sufficiently large pool with competition, it gets close to this ideal.
Multiple issues:
1) Pool size (that 1-in-a-million, million dollar disease needs a pool measured in many multiple millions). A small and unlucky pool can just fall apart, say a thousand people who need to cover one of their members who gets our ‘million’ disease. Their risk is $1 but their cost that year is $1000, or it can be spread over a thousand years which is nonsense.
Being unable to sell across state lines is a huge problem because ideally you’d be matched up with others in your risk pool, and if that pool is small (per state) then no sane insurer would want to touch it.
2) As both you and I have pointed out, this works for spreading risk, it sucks for controlling cost.
3) Pre-existing conditions which don’t add to risk should be covered normally other than the condition itself. If it’s not then that’s either a competition issue or a regulation issue.
4) Medical insurance, as a construct, is poorly suited to be linked to a job. The average job lasts perhaps 3 years, losing your job (perhaps even because you’re ill) shouldn’t also require you to seek re-insurance.
5) There are people who are too sick to get insurance. This is an issue of cost, not risk, so it really should be outside the bounds of insurance-working-as-it-should. That it does is mostly an accident of history and politicians looking to spend other people’s money.
Note that any fiscally sane answer on what to do is also going to be ugly. The left’s answer is typically ‘write a blank check and spend until society goes bankrupt’ (which is nuts), the market’s answer is ‘let them seek charity or failing that, be untreated’. Note there’s also an element of personal responsibility here, assuming health insurance is cheap (which it should be aka life/house insurance), widely available, and not connected to a job, lack of insurance becomes a result of personal choice.
6) There are going to be problems with an insurance company takes, or is forced to take, people at rates different from their risk. This isn’t all that different from the homeowners on the coast of Florida being unwilling to pay for flood insurance and insisting that the gov step in. Sooner or later a really nasty hurricane will move down the coast and break the bank.
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