The US system is a special case that goes beyond partisan politics, framing it as a lack of solidarity misses the point.
The real issue is that healthcare in the US has no functioning market and no effective regulation: prices are arbitrary, patients only see costs after the fact (even if you insist cash on something simple, the itemized bill takes forever), and insurers mostly exist to extract value. Both major parties keep allowing this to exist.
In other countries (even with hybrid social systems, multi-payer, etc) there’s at least transparency and accountability. You know what you owe upfront, and regulators monitor excessive price disparities. Differentiation is allowed, but it’s still regulated.
Do you really believe UHG's 6% profit margin? US Insurance is basically private equity draining cash through inflated bills, with providers and insurers passing the buck while fleecing patients.
> The US system is a special case that goes beyond partisan politics, framing it as a lack of solidarity misses the point.
The last time someone tried to improve things he was Adolf Stalin for trying to recreate Nazi Communist Germany. Or something. Something similar (albeit less extreme) happened in the 90s.
Fixing any of this does start with politics and there is a huge political elephant standing in the way here. It's really not a "both sides" issue when one side uses every bad faith trick in the book to obstruct anything the other side does while proposing nothing of their own.
I surmise that you are referring to "universal healthcare". The President does not get to choose a model of healthcare for the nation, so no, my vote was not cast against whatever you're talking about.
Here are a few aspects of the Affordable Care Act:
- In the before times, health insurance was strongly tied to American employers. Their group purchasing power made it affordable, and it is counted in the benefits package. A quitting employee, or a firing employer, would have the understanding that, barring COBRA and other mitigations, the separated employee would lose their group insurance benefit.
- Many hospital systems have offered financial assistance, and self-pay plans, to uninsured patients. Qualify for Medicaid/Medicare, or avail yourself of one of these plans.
- The Affordable Care Act is a tax on the uninsured. Purchase insurance with the tax, or pay the tax directly. "Uninsured" is now the worst situation to be in, financially.
- The ACA signaled to employers, "fire at will." If an employee needs to be fired then they can scoop up insurance on the marketplace. The employer no longer needs to worry about the separated employee's well-being.
- Meanwhile, the employees have received the message "quit all you want." If you can live without the salary then you can scoop up an ACA plan on the Marketplace. Your risk of crippling medical debt is thereby somewhat mitigated.
- Various groups have been setting up Health Sharing plans which affirm that the Health Insurance model is irreparably broken. A Christian Health Sharing Ministry is a mutual-aid fund where members pool their funds and then expenses are paid according to their needs, per the Book of Acts, and mostly conforming to quasi-insurance regulations.
We're all limping towards Universal Healthcare and Single-Payer Insurance. That's the eventual end-game for most pundits. It may go back and forth for a while. But nobody can deny that we're aiming to replicate models in the UK and Canada.
you are on the right way if using HAL feels like cheating! i always recommend starting with implementing a UART bare metal, since you will need a UART for debugging / talking with the chip all the time.
I am a young developer (22y) but find me almost all the time using "old" frameworks / programs form the unix world. i find most of the modern tools just overwhelming and hard to debug due to the increased complexity. or me, Unix is like a construction kit made up of individual components that simply work, Do One Thing and Do It Well - this always ensure that you can just clue that stuff together.
I am always amazed that many of these things (Unix, C, IP, Ethernet) were developed in the 70s/80s and are still relevant, useful and today. At that time, people also had a technical interest in developing software and had to deal with very limited resources, maybe this is no longer the case in many cases today
i am helping maintain a big automation system for a customer which is generates several million in sales per year and is built just with simple unix tools, perl, mqtt, nginx - a very low tech stack - running on a small 2 core machine.
the cloud-based solution that existed before had enormous performance problems, ran unreliably, was difficult to debug and was several times more expensive in terms of both development and running costs
How much bandwidth do you suppose DockerHub uses? I can't see it being any less than 10gigabit, probably more like 100gigabit. Just the cost of that transit is likely in the $600-6,000/mo range. Then you need to factor in the additional costs for storage and compute to serve it, switching gear, and management and maintenance. That's probably at least as much as transit.
They aren't likely able to go for peering arrangements ("free" bandwidth) because their traffic is likely very asymmetric, and that doesn't save the management/storage/compute costs.
I don't know what Docker's financials are, but I can imagine, as a business owner myself, situations where it was lean enough that that sort of cost could mean the difference between running the service and not.
The bigger the service, the more financial incentive they have to be smart and not pay absurd prices for things, since they can give themselves higher profit margins by controlling their costs.
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