Microblog Memes

Please don‘t extrapolate from the US healthcare system to insurances in general. Insurances collect money from many so in the case something happens to an individual that individual doesn‘t need take the full financial loss. This makes a lot of sense, because it would very inefficient if everyone would save money in order to pay for a potential cancer treatment. Cancer is rare, but in aggregate it is just small amount each month.

The job of the insurance is to define that monthly amount (which is not trivial to do), collect it, store it and eventually pay it out.

On another note, unless an insurance is mandatory you can usually opt to pay yourself.

Health insurance is a decent solution to no universal healthcare...on paper. But the way the US executed it is poor

This is unironically Nixon's fault.

It’s wild how much this contrasts with Australia’s Medicare, like here you can literally just walk into the ER with any issue, show them your Medicare card and get your entire treatment covered for free unless you need any private healthcare, which even then there are rebates and private healthcare competes with public so it’s also moderately affordable.

There were 2 instances where my dad needed to be in hospital for multiple days at a time, once for a broken wrist after slipping at the boat ramp after a fishing trip, and the other was a stingray attack on his leg at that same boat ramp. Both instances didn’t require a single cent exchanged, we just walked in and described the issue, and boom, after a few days he was treated to the extent he could go home and not really worry at all anymore.

When the US was having actual discussions of single-payer health care (i.e. the "public option" during Obama's first term), one major argument against it was "do you really want the government between you and your doctor?!"

Even though insurance companies are literally already between you and your doctor, and they exist purely to extract money from that interaction.

It's never made sense.

Yeah, I wish health insurance was just "you'll never pay more than 20k a year on medical bills" or something like that. Let me find my own damn doctor

Here in Argentina that we have free healthcare, insurance is a signal of wealth so you get attended in the private hospital away from the common folk. And even in the private hospital everything is relatively cheap because they have to compete with the free option.

You are the product

You are the product. When your liability outpaces your premium is when they decide to stop covering you.

Remember pryimid schemes are illegal. Because they dont sell a product.

Look at finance! They don't make anything of actual value, they just bet what's going to happen to the people that do

The US should adopt the Dutch healthcare system. You could have medical treatment as an average Joe and also not be bankrupt or up to your tits in debt.

Crack open a history book or read a brief history. The product is risk pooling

a strategy where individuals, businesses, or governments combine their risks into a large group to share the financial burden of unexpected losses, making costs more predictable and manageable.

Post needs text alternative.

Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:

• usability
  • we can't quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
  • text search is unavailable
  • the system can't
    • reflow text to varied screen sizes
    • vary presentation (size, contrast)
    • vary modality (audio, braille)
• accessibility
  • lacks semantic structure (tags for titles, heading levels, sections, paragraphs, lists, emphasis, code, links, accessibility features, etc)
  • some users can't read the image due to lack of alt text (markdown image description)
  • users can't adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
  • systems can't read the text to them or send it to braille devices
• web connectivity
  • we have to do failure-prone bullshit to find the original source
  • we can't explore wider context of the original message
• authenticity: we don't know the image hasn't been tampered
• searchability: the "text" isn't indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
• fault tolerance: no text fallback if
  • image breaks
  • image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.

Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.