This is literally one the most infantilizing and simultaneously insulting analogies I've ever come across on this site. Do you really think consumers of the latest AI tools have no ability to forecast? The parents in this analogy have every incentive to lie
In theory, if a program is written in a high-level language and you have a correct implementation (interpreter, compiler, runtime) of that language on a new system, then the program should be able to run there.
In practice, this is not always so straightforward, especially as you move closer to machine-level details or consider compiled binaries.
Many compiled programs are built for a specific architecture (x86, ARM, etc.). They won’t run on a different architecture unless you provide either: A cross-compiler (to generate new native code for that architecture), or an emulator (which mimics the old architecture on the new one)
I think your LLM temperature analogy is interesting in this deprecated dichotomy between autism and schizophrenia.
One Youtuber Jreg used a breadth-first search (schizophrenia) vs depth-first search (autism) analogy when comparing the the two, but I think your temperature analogy is more apt. Higher temperature results in more disorganized thoughts like schizophrenia. And if you buy into the idea that the root of most schizophrenia is thought disorders, then this analogy implies that dialing up temperature corresponds to more signs of psychosis through speech
My experience with many friends on the autism spectrum is that their speech tends to be more scripted, but I certainly don't think autism and psychosis are mutually exclusive.
Sediments including lead tend to accumulate at the bottom of water heaters, so you'd be measuring the accumulated lead and not the locality's with this assumption.
Indeed, the insurance companies deserve a ton of blame too. They rightly have death panels but use scare tactics to keep people away from gov health insurance that does the same. Still, theyre playing by the rules the gov came up with. Fee for service is a horrible healthcare strategy and insurance is forced into it.
The "Death panel" thing was the primary boogeyman when the ACA was being discussed. But like the comment says, that already exists, just in private form instead of government.
Insurance companies funded the vast majority of advertising using that term to attack the ACA, and their lobbyists meet with politicians often enough that it's entirely plausible they coined the initial term as well (though harder to prove)
The simpler explanation is that political Party A proposed legislation, and political Party B attacks it because a win for Party A is a loss for Party B.
And digging into just slightly further makes the claim make even less sense:
> Palin's spokesperson pointed to Section 1233 of bill HR 3200 which would have paid physicians for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life care options. Palin's claim was reported as false and criticized by the press, fact-checkers, academics, physicians, Democrats, and some Republicans.
Why would managed care organizations (aka health insurance companies) oppose the government paying for more healthcare services?
MCOs earn 2% to 3% of the premiums that flow through them. The higher the healthcare spend, the higher the premiums, the higher the profit for MCOs.
"No evidence" - if you can't avoid misinterpreting every sentence to go off on a rant, this thread is not worth continuing.
Insurance companies spent billions of dollars on advertisements against the ACA. This is public record. They did it because they opposed all of the good things the act required - such as prohibiting discrimination base on pre-existing conditions or demographics (other than age), requiring many basic procedures to be covered, bans on lifetime/annual coverage maximums, bans on dropping policy holders when they get sick, prohibiting copays on various services such as vaccines, requiring that insurers spend at least 80% of their premiums on health costs, a wide array of reforms to constrain costs, and so on.
Someone claimed health insurance companies came up with “death panels”, I provided evidence and logic to the contrary.
No one is ranting, but there does seem to be a lot of “I feel like this could have happened, so I am going to choose to believe this happened because it confirms my priors”.
Why do we need a government program. Continue with the medicare/medicaid and child healthcare programs as always. Outlaw regular health insurance. The problem will solve itself. "Free market".
And insurance companies want us to need more or pay more for health care, not less. Insurance is regulated and the companies can only hold on to a certain percentage of the premiums.
They would rather hold on to 20% of a huge number than 20% of a big number.
Agreed, the incentives are horribly misaligned throughout the entire healthcare market. We desperately need legislative overhaul but again congress is completely broken.
My insurance denied me a MRI and physical therapy because having 2 working arms was a luxury. Had to pay out of pocket to be able to lift my arm above my head. Private insurance can go shove it.
"Americans consume too much healthcare"? I'm afraid to guess the logical conclusion to this, but I will counter with "Americans are offered two little preventative healthcare", because in more advanced countries where that is an option, the costs are lower.
The conclusion is that we need to get rid of fee for service so that doctors stop prescribing things that dont work. Getting rid of fee for service also increases the amount of preventative healthcare people receive as providers realize its cheaper to do preventative than massive surgery down the line.
The primary reason for the cost difference is the massive network of middlemen injected into the system, and rampant profiteering by for-profit healthcare companies.
Average cost of 1 vial of insulin in France: $9.08
Average cost of 1 vial of insulin in the US: $98.70
HDThoreaun: huffing some libertarian shit "The people are using too much insulin."
It’s not middlemen. The middlemen (managed care organizations, aka health insurance companies) earn low single digit profit margins.
In the US healthcare chain, the ranking of profit margins goes (and this is public info from public financials):
Pharmaceutical companies
Healthcare software companies (based on other software company margins)
Healthcare providers (doctor groups)
Hospitals (HCA, tenet, etc)
Managed care organizations and retail pharmacies at the very bottom.
The big one I don’t know is legal, which I assume slots between hospitals and healthcare providers, but could be higher. Those millions and tens of millions of dollar judgments don’t come from thin air.
Go ahead and get rid of MCOs, and at best you will reduce costs by 5%. That’s an objective fact. They are just allocating the very limited resources among more and more demand.
> Go ahead and get rid of MCOs, and at best you will reduce costs by 5%. That’s an objective fact.
That doesn't make any sense. Profit margin is meaningless if you are spending billions on a bunch of useless administrative staff pushing paperwork for no reason.
Obviously some of that is necessary, but certainly not nearly all of it. I don't care about a company making 5% on top of a $150k/yr admin salary. I care about the $150k/yr salary which is the true cost added to the system.
Having watched from afar my friends in healthcare who actually provide bedside care vs. the administrative bloat - it's going much like education. Tons of admin staff added that don't ever touch patients that seemingly just get in the way of the folks doing the actual work.
Margin is a meaningless number if you can just pump your expenses to increase the total dollar amount.
> Margin is a meaningless number if you can just pump your expenses to increase the total dollar amount.
That doesn’t make any sense. If one MCO were to pump their expenses, there are 4 to 6 others waiting to take their customers with lower premiums.
Currently, medical loss ratios are around 85% to 90%, which means MCO administrative costs are 8% or maybe 10%, at most.
However, getting rid of the MCO doesn’t mean those costs go away. Government employees will have to do the prior authorizations rather than MCO employees. So I split the difference, and you end up with a net savings of 5%. Make it 10% if you want to be super optimistic and think the government will streamline paperwork for healthcare providers.
The other 90% of healthcare costs are still there.
>there are 4 to 6 others waiting to take their customers with lower premiums
Why do people believe this?
Healthcare isn't widgets and factories in an ECON-101 class.
The chances of anything short of an extremely large and well-funded consortium of investment bankers and private equity firms starting a new MCO is exactly and precisely 0.0%.
And those groups have the same incentives to maximize the payouts to all parties involved that the incumbents do.
Of course, they would never do that because increased competition would threaten their already-extensive investments in the sector.
The problem isn't regulation, or regulatory capture, or any other buzzword a podcast full of morons bandies about.
The problem is that you need at least $10 billion just to open the doors.
UNH/Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humana/Centene/Molina are just the biggest publicly listed ones. They might not all offer plans in all states on the exchange, but there’s a decent amount of competition for employer subsidized plans.
The low single digit profit margin proves the competition exists such that the sellers don’t have pricing power to earn a higher profit margin.
I think you left out several layers. At least one of which in the news lately is the PBM, which sit between hospitals/providers and pharmaceutical companies, and are able to exert monopoly power on that market. They have agreements with hospitals that hospitals are only allowed to purchase through them, and then their suppliers are permitted to purchase exclusive access. This results in things like the saline shortage last year, and pushing small local pharmacies out of business. The PBMs also have incredible profit margins, upwards of 80%.
> the massive network of middlemen injected into the system
Does anyone have a good reference for this? It's something that I inherently assume exists but would love to see a flowchart of how rampant it is and where different layers are siphoning their penny.
It doesn't have to be 17%, it can be an arbitrary number because the ones who decide on the nominal pricing are the ones who make money on them being extremely high. These same procedures can in some cases cost even 2-3 orders of magnitude less - and not in another country but in the same hospital but with a patient willing to pay in cash.
list prices are high to scare Americans into buying [more expensive] insurance plan.
they want Americans be scared of going bankrupt from medical bills.
on the backend, between insurance and hospital, these giant list prices are automatically lowered by factor of 10 to the actual cost of procedure
the business model is:
1. insurance scares people with huge prices
2. healthy americans buy a lot of expensive insurance
3. money is injected into healthcare system from healthy patients
4. money is split among insurance/pbm/providers/pharma
>The main reason for that is because Americans consume too much health care.
No, come on man, this is easily googleable. Americans go to the doctor less than other countries, they stay in the hospital less than other countries, they have lower life expectancy, infant and mother mortality than other countries. If you want to know why we spend so damned much, it's because we're billed 2-3x as much for the same care as other countries.
A more apt statement might be that we spend more, even if our quality of care is not better. And the reason we spend more is because of profit-maximizing companies in the middle.
When we ripped out the carpet to install luxury vinyl flooring it was off-gassing for weeks. Had to go over the vinyl with dozens of microfiber clothes before the outside coating stopped wiping off.
Imagine all of the people cutting into that inexpensive wood without air filtration is terrifying
What is luxury vinyl like? I can’t imagine vinyl being luxurious, but my personal taste is fairly hippy slanted so I tend to just ignore synthetic materials for anything pricey.
It's not "actually luxurious" so much as "it looks a lot less bad than old linoleum rolls" while still having high durability. Like how every new apartment is "luxury."
Depends on how much you spend in it. And especially how much you spend in the underlayment for how it feels under your feet.
Even in expensive homes in my area it's common because it has a lot of nice properties. Homeowners will pay $15/sq ft, which at that price you could get a real wood floor installed, for LVP that looks pretty realistic, is easy on your joints due to the nice underlayment, and is basically as indestructible as a tile floor.
It's bonkers to me how well my LVP flooring has held up to the abuse my dog gives it. It still looks brand new 5 years later, while the solid wood used for the steps between levels began showing visible wear only a few months after installation.
> while the solid wood used for the steps between levels began showing visible wear only a few months after installation.
The wood used matters, and the way it's finished matters a lot, with hardwood floors. You can get anything between amazingly-resilient and scratches-badly-if-you-look-at-it-funny, depending on how it's finished.
Lots of contractors cheap out on the finish, and pre-finished hardwood is pretty much always bad.
I would never use anything else in a kitchen or bathroom - it looks pretty good, feels nice on the feet, doesn't care about a few spills, and if you drop a plate you have a chance it won't break. However for other rooms give me real hardwood.
