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It's all different when you are eitehr on a company plan or on a Medicare plan. It's when you have a regular plan where you get socked with co-pays.

That's bad for our country's long term technological lead position because most true innovation originates at start-ups, small companies and one-person operations.

Yep. Else you are on the Obamacare exchange and then either the income has to be pushed below 400% FPL or you pay through the nose. There are some legal maneuvers though, like IRA, HSA, solo 401(k) that can help some achieve that goal. Larger families with kids that need to be brought through college and who thus can't sock away money that way got the short end of the stick.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Here is the other salient detail:

Quote "Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, "40 to 67 percent" of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, "the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.""

They knew it and then lied.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Incentivising on survival rates also tends to discourage taking on difficult/risky procedures/patients.

Yet another unintended consequence :)

More like every car has to have an engine, four wheels and tyres, and none of them fall off if you press the accelerator pedal.

Tom Gardner - quite a while ago - went into the scams that the "pre-existing condition" constraint allowed medical insurance companies to pull.

Obamacare killed that off, amongst other problems.

Most of the problem is with the less-than-obvious consequences. The "pre-existing condition clause is perfectly reasonable, but the way it lets medical insurance companies over-charge and shed customers after they get sick is entirely unreasonable.

Some other plans.

At the time, rather than after they got sick, which may have been a blessing in disguise.

Wrong. It was the well-known pre-exisitng condition scam.

Seems unlikely, unless they are the kind of people who are self-employed because they are too rabid to work in nay kind of team (like Jim Thompson - but he seems to be good enough in his narrow specialty to keep on getting work most of the time).

Numbers? Not that you expect the self-employed to be a big majority in any group. The 15% of Americans who didn't have health insurance before Obamacare weren't all that well-off.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

le

remarkable.

He certainly didn't say as much as he should have done. What I was thinking about was the lying on the anti-Obamacare side, where the UK National Heal th Service came in for serious abuse (which was kind of odd since nothing i n Obamacare is aimed at setting up that kind of system).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

y

What makes you think that?

The innovations mostly happen in research environments, which aren't small.

The people who have the bright idea do try to commercialise it on their own , sometimes - as in spin-offs - with the help and blessings of their previo us employers. The one-person operation is mostly a stage in that process, r ather than the environment that create the innovation.

Bell Labs was called the idea factory, and EMI Central Research in the UK h ad the same kind of reputation.

In Australia, many innovations come out of CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientif ic and Industrial Research Organisation

which got under way in 1916, and got it's present name (and quite a bit mor e money in 1946). My father's 25 patents mostly dated from his time as Research Manager at th e Associated Pulp and Paper Mills in Burnie in Tasmania, who made fine (wri ting) paper from short-fibre eucalyptus wood (with about 5% long-fibre pulp added for strength) whose setting up owed quite a bit to CSIR work in the

1920's.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

That's the usual leftist bunk. Before repeating such nonsense go to the trouble and actually look through a private insurance agreement. There you typically find that they will not cancel you when you get really sick _while_ in the plan. That would be breach of contract and thus actionable in court.

It makes so sense do discuss this further until you get the facts first.

[...]

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Decades of exprerience.

They don't. With innovation I mean all gthe way to a saleable product, not just a publication.

The days of Bell Labs are long gone. Very long.

Come into the 21st century :-)

Look at how Microsoft started, and Apple, and Tesla, and ...

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

It was nothing but lies.

A system we most definitely do not want in America. We had already discussed that ad nauseam, no need to warm all that up again.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

With particular sorts of innovation.

The commercialisation of the innovation doesn't happen in the research environment, as I did go on to point out.

Even the most academic of researchers can tell the difference between an idea which is merely publishable - if perhaps as a step towards an actual product - and the kind of innovation that can be turned into a marketable product.

And EMI Central Research is equally dead. Universities see themselves as the modern equivalents. Around Cambridge, Silicon Fen is sometimes touted as university driven, though Cambridge Consultants seemed to me to have played an equally significant role.

Innovations come from active communities, and always have - people have a weird habit of independently coming up with much the same innovation at much the same time.

Microsoft and Bill Gates were effectively an IBM spin-off. MS/DOS was just as buggy as everybody else's operating system until the IBM software quality control team went through it.

Steve Jobs and Apple is a bizarre story, with enough twists and turns to make a soap opera. Wozniak developed the first Apple Computer while working at HP, and did offer it to them several times.

He wasn't working in isolation.

Elon Musk's history is equally interesting but doesn't fit your idea of where innovations come from either.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Be fair. The Democrats did go to the trouble of making sure that health car e policies existing in 2010 were grand-fathered in the legislation, if they hadn't been changed since 2010. The fact that more than half them did get changed and thus weren't grandfathered was not immediately obvious.

In an ideal world, Obama would have dropped the snappy slogan and replaced it with a paragraph that made it clear that not every policy was grandfathe red, but politics doesn't work like that.

You may not want it, but it works better than what you have got (for the po pulation as a whole) , and costs half as much per head. The Dutch, French, and German systems are less Spartan, and cost two thirds of the price per h ead, but gave the anti-Obama campaigners less opportunities to lie about "s ocialised medicine".

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

He certainly didn't say as much as he should have done.

Sure it was obvious. As I quoted in a reference the assumption that people would lose their existing plans was part of the paperwork on this legislative effort. It was brazenly budgeted in to make the financial math jibe. You increase one little line item because medical cost inflation requires it -> poof, plan now illegal -> objective accomplished. It's the same as prescribing fleet fuel efficiency requirements not in miles per gallon but miles per Dollar.

A lie is a lie is a lie.

[...]

It does not. Or as one Canadian (!) judge put it: "Access to a waiting list is not access to good health care".

[...]

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

If that were a correct statement then 100% of the existing policies would h ave been invalidated, not 67%.

You've been reading too much Tea Party propaganda with your scepticism turn ed way down.

Ask any poltiician - they will lie to you about it.

The statistics say otherwise.

ationally-30886

All health systems have waiting lists, unless you need treatment urgently, and then even the UK NHS will bump you to the top of the queue.

Under Thatcher the UK NHS was starved of funds in an effort to force people to buy private health insurance - I was there at the time - and it took Bl air's Labour administration a few years to undo the damage.

The UK NHS is Spartan - there isn't much spare capacity - which is why it i s cheap - and the waiting lists are longer than in less carefully optimised systems, but you do get dealt with, and the lengths of the waiting lists a re monitored, as are the sneaky tricks hospital administrators have been kn own to use to make them look shorter.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

That's never been claimed by me.

OTOH people (that have been bitten) have pointed out that their premiums have gone up tenfold when all the healthy people left a scheme - and they couldn't because they were no longer healthy.

They also pointed out the individual steps and rationalisations leading to that, and why the corporations made use of them.

Yes, I agree. Over to you...

Ah, "The Cambridge Phenomenon". CCL was a fun, zany place to work. A couple of non-technical examples: - there was a monthly photocopied newsletter containing (attributed) quotes that people /really/ wished they hadn't said - the salary-vs-age scattergram was pinned on the wall. You could have a good guess about who the outliers were - and I never heard any complaints. Nor did I ever hear any complaints about the salaries, because you could see how you compared with everybody else. - every project had internal names, e.g "Puff and Pant", "Big Bad Wolf", "Whoosh", "Mince". Whoosh was a large high pressure vessel that was discharged rapidly; Mince referred to the client's gait.

No pun intended by me, Bill wrote that.

That's the death spiral of a plan. Which was part of the purpose behind Obamacare. Lots of people in lower income groups leaving because they can now get health care on Uncle Sam's dime. Those are usually younger people earlier in their careers, with more kids they can claim as dependents.

Well, now we've got to live with this mess because the Reps failed to can it, or at least mostly.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

What does that have to do with anything? Large medical costs are *always* a problem regardless of being able to pay a portion of them from pre-tax mo ney. Much better to not have to pay them.

I don't know about that, I've never looked into it because I don't swing th at way. Maybe this is something you are more interested in. I care about

*my* potential medical issues being covered and getting the care I need. M y surgery a couple years ago went very smoothly and I'm very happy to no lo nger be walking with a limp. :) Thanks to every one of you who made it po ssible. :)

Why are you constructing irrelevant comparisons? All cars do have to have pollution controls, adequate breaks, steering and other safety features by US law. Yeah, it's like that.

Yes, it should be up to the people if they drive dangerous wrecks of cars t oo, but somehow we have agreed that they shouldn't.

No, you've said little that makes sense.

Sounds absurdly expensive. I had insurance with my company because a frien d joined me just for the insurance as he plan through the IEEE got to be to o expensive. The only thing good about it was that you couldn't be denied or dropped at the end of your term because it was a "group" plan. Individu al insurance is worthless for conditions needing long term care as you woul d be canceled at the end of you policy. Or if you had too many claims they would jack up your rates. So you didn't really have cheap coverage, unles s you never needed it.

Yes, if you never need insurance it could be very cheap to get, but then it would be very cheap to not have as well.

I've explained this to you before as well, but you seem to be in denial.

If you say so. I've not met any people like this. I know one who keeps be low the income radar so she can stay on Medicaid, but she is lying about h er income. That's not the same thing as not making the money.

So they only had coverage until the end of their policy. If they had a rea l condition that cost the insurance company a lot they would be dropped or their premiums would hugely increase. I think 60 minutes documented this w ith a small company. They had to let go a worker who had been treated for cancer to keep the rates affordable. So she was sent back into the "no ins urance" pool we had before the ACA... just like you would have been had you any real claims... in other words, no real insurance.

Lol! If you are buying insurance on the open market you are asked many que stions about your preexisting conditions. There's a reason for that... If you are in denial that's your problem. I can't help you with everything. I can only explain the truth to you.

You are arguing my point. You were the one who talked about "almost no co- pays". I've never seen a plan with no deductible and no co-pays.

Ok, if you are going to call facts lies, then there is no point in discussi ng this with you. One of the TV investigative shows had an hour long progr am about it. It was common. How else could they keep the rates low???

"Many of them" is a huge exaggeration. You live in your own little world w here you believe everyone you talk to and don't believe real facts. Whatev er. I have insurance which I couldn't get before. I'm happy as are millio ns of others which was the goal of the ACA. Mission Accomplished!

Now we need to work on the other few millions left.

Rick C.

Obamacare killed the "pre-existing condition" constraint, killing the scam. You've got the "purpose" exactly wrong.

It's not universal health care, but it is a step in the right direction, to wards the schemes in place in every other advanced industrial country, ever y last one of which costs less per head than the US system, typically two-t hirds of the cost per head. They also deliver better health care for the co untry as a whole, which is what "universal" is all about.

t.

All of the alternatives mooted looked like getting negative reactions from enough voters to lose people their seats. The Republican Party is currently a total mess, but even they can recognise an election-losing issue when it affects each individual legislator's seat.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney