skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn’t actually happen. When you get a bill, you can see clearly how much hospital charged, how much insurance negotiated down, and how much is your share. If insurance sent you this, but then secretly conspired with hospital to pay even less than what they told you they pay, that would be criminal fraud. Suffice to say, this almost never happens.
The billing system is a complete farce. Here’s a large made up number for the total bill, ok here’s another large number because we like your insurance, and finally here’s what your insurance actually paid.

My wife had complications the first time and the total bill was like $35k, insurance paid $9k, and our cost was $0. We actually got our $250 admission back.

Nobody pays the made of number from the first bill not even the uninsured.
Manitou have had great success with the green and natural angle to tobacco selling.
My depersonalisation disorder started after an LSD trip. Was it really that drug that did it to me or was it always going to happen? I don't know but even so I've never gotten any of the benefits that psychedelics advocates talk about. For me it was just fun and that's it. I still absolutely hate what the drug did to me and I wish I had never taken it but comments like yours convinced me. I feel like the constant advocating and laying out the benefits like they are a guarantee is really dangerous for a chemical this powerful.
agree on that front -

but giving mediocre vs high quality results on the other hand forces you to use a particular search result page more and increases the likelyhood that you'll click through a paid search link in your frustration ...
Final Fantasy VII radicalized a generation of climate warriors
TLDR - China is more western than you think, but it inherited the interwar totalitarianism rather than it’s liberalism
Takk mann. Det er ok, jeg er Hindu.
So I'm having a look at that cost breakdown...

How does a pharmacy charge someone more than $5000 for things such as sodium chloride? Actually pretty much everything on that list is complete bullshit.

This is fraud and taking advantage of people in distress. These criminals should be behind bars.
I did this twice this year at my current job. Each time I made a case for introducing something new and interesting (Typescript, and Elixir). It took some convincing, and finding the right projects to introduce these technologies, but it happened. The result is that I've shipped four projects with Typescript, and am in the middle of delivering a greenfield Phoenix (with LiveView) app.
> he was a million dollar baby

Imagine the life you could setup for a child, with a million dollars to start off with. Instead, it just lines the pockets of the corrupt healthcare industry.
But not as much as completely without patent system. Because current patent system is not perfect you are advocating something worse.

How would you know that the patent system works better than nothing?

Maybe you have to consider that an idea is fundamentally flawed in the first place.

Without patents, you can't small or medium sized R&D companies that file patents would go extinct.

Not exactly true. SpaceX deliberately didn't patent their technologies, and yet they succeeded brilliantly. They are now the Goliath of the industry.
And the US elected Trump, why do you think the same thing wouldn't happen in the US within a decade?
dunno how you would measure it, for example if humans have an extra chromosome with a bunch of novel genes, how does that count? Or if the genes are identical but scrambled in order?

It's sort of not even a really useful metric unless defined carefully.
Wow. My daughter was born at 25 weeks and spend 4 months and 1 day in NICU, just over 10 years ago. This was in the UK. If my memory serves me correctly (which it may not, my brain was pretty fried throughout that time), we were told that the total cost to the NHS was roughly 150,000 GBP.
What would be even more informative is (1) what does the hospital/doctors actually receive from the insurance company (2) what would the hospital/doctors get if the parents had zero insurance (3) what would a hospital in each of the 99%+ other countries' hospital/doctors with a national system get for the same issue and timeframe. That's essentially the argument of the US getting some kind of single payer system that works (Medicare atm is only semi-working as it doesn't completely function due to political interference and bureaucratic inertia).

In the US the system is designed to ensure profits are higher than the cost of treating patients who have no insurance, and patients on Medicare/Medicaid/VA where negotiated pricing is limiting to profits. So the major task for healthcare companies is to do everything to maximize the profits and minimize costs that don't support higher profits, and for the insurance companies to collect more from companies and individuals to cover the healthcare companies need for profits, while maximizing their profits as well.

While healthcare in other countries may also wish to keep costs under control, if there is no profit requirement, they have much more flexibility. Of course there is no universal solution to healthcare, but the incentive outside the US is different as long as profit is not the only thing that matters.
Almost all of Alaska feels very "unamerican", but not in the way you describe.

Alaskans are generally immensely friendly, community minded, happy and energetic. They give warm handshakes, look you in the eye and really mean the things they say. They don't say things that are hollow, and most of them know from first hand experience the American Dream is a crock.

Often people say Alaska feels a lot more like Northern Canada than it feels like the lower 48 of the US.

I miss my time there immensely.

(I lived in the Yukon, ~2hours from the border. I've been all over Alaska, have probably crossed the border ~50 times, summer and winter.)
I'm sorry for your loss OP.

We had premature twins who both stayed in the NICU for around three months. Our total hospital bills came out to just under five million dollars. Fortunately we also had great insurance and received great care.

We fought with the insurance/hospital/vendors for over a year and was on the phone with them every single week for hours to get the covered procedures included. An annoyance, but we were able to navigate it. Our twins are thriving today.

Other families were not so lucky. We watched under or uninsured parents have to make decisions between the health of their sick children and their own financial livelihood. As educated privileged workers, the system worked for us. But it fails many. There has got to be a better way
I also found this remarkable. The Seychelles, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth had a huge spike. It also looks like countries with strict lockdowns (UK, Belgium) are doing worse than countries with much looser restrictions like Sweden.
Of course this is cherry picking countries to fit my narrative, but at the very least it shows things aren't as black and white as often presented. Maybe thinking one is 100% protected after vaccination is what creates this issue ? Maybe vaccinated people still spread the virus like wildfire yet somehow do not require to show a negative test to board a plane or visit events?
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Whenever I want to make a purchase online, I search for "best _____" and add reddit as a keyword. Reading through a few threads on reddit will typically give me a pretty good idea of where to start.
Artificial intelligence vs. neurophysiology: Why the difference matters
Most important parts of human existence have been colonized. I don’t know how we will be able to recover our freedom. Who would have thought 50 years ago that drinking water is something we would pay for. Healthcare which citizens need most has also been colonized. I read a sad story where a devout husband had to divorce his very sick wife so that she could get medicaid payment to pay her bills.
I feel a lot of empathy for OP, but there are some choices I find very difficult to understand.

> our child, with life-saving intervention, surgeries, and therapy, could, and should live a happy, healthy, fulfilled life, at least until adulthood

Sorry, but I can't grasp why you would condemn a 24 weeks old fetus to a life of a) possibly not suffering and b) only living until you're 20 or so years old, when you have the choice of termination. Even if (and that's a big if) you try your best and your child lives until she's a young adult, all of that will be taken from her in her young age because you made the decision to give birth to her regardless, even if you knew all the hardships that would be coming for her.

I am very sorry for her death, but a lot of suffering could have been avoided if they had listened to their medical professionals.
Do you mean diversity in race and gender? I thought the argument was that there's no differences between races and gender? I actually genuinely believe that everyone should be treated equally but your line of thinking seems to suggest race and gender matter in decision making, its contradictory.
And, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, the ammonia + lithium eutectic has a melting point below 90K!
The countries I have direct experience with, France and Germany, don't have any issues with people dying while waiting for procedures. Experts are usually readily available, so there are exceptions.

I don't know of any public health care system in developed countries that have really these issues. I do know so, that a lot of that comes from a PR campaign run by US insurances against the Canadian system.
Can you take snapshots more often than hourly? For example can you take a snapshot every 15 minutes?
From a certain perspective, you can argue Amazon has a monopoly on sales coming from search engines.
HN is probably run on a Lisp Machine under dang's desk. And that was previously under pg's desk.

Who am I kidding? As far as I remember Lisp Machines were the size of refrigerators :-D
> I've heard a lot of negative stories about the British health system including people waiting 6+ months to see doctors...

The wait time for an American at the poverty line seeking care for an expensive but non-emergency chronic condition can be effectively infinite.

My wife receives treatment for chronic pain. Getting treatment at a pain clinic started required five visits (including being able to physically get there in the first place), lab work, etc. Each of those required a hefty co-pay, and someone on a Bronze ACA plan will have a multi-thousand dollar deductible to meet before even those kick in.

If you're working minimum wage and have a pain condition, treatment is likely inaccessible, even if you technically have fully subsidized health insurance.
> and you let them fail a few times, and you wait until they come back with a readjusted attitude - that's evil.

What, no?

Letting ignorant people fall on their knives is /doing good/. It's the best way of learning.

Letting ignorant people harm others - that's evil.
Applies only for read-only data?

Or for data that changes infrequently enough (and not in reaction to user input) that you are OK with changing it via a deploy.
Do you plan to retire? What will happen then?

Do your family and friends have the same insurance plan? What will happen to them if they don’t?

Seems short-sighted, yet telling, to talk only about the present time, and only about yourself.
PSA:

If you think you have been the victim of medical overbilling or claims fraud, talk to Adam Russo at Phia Group

https://www.phiagroup.com/About-Us/Leadership/Executive-Team

He compensates his staff AND PATIENTS accordingly to the level of fraud that they can detect on hospital bills. So they will leave no stone unturned.

DISCLAIMER: I don't know or have ever talked to Adam Russo. I don't work, have any relationship, or financial connection with their firm. I have only heard they do good work and I am only an admirer of what they do.
The problem is the anti-single payer faction in the US is large, powerful and well funded. They would do their level best to cripple any such system as badly as possible, so they could say "I told you so", as they did with Obamacare. Therefore it is quite possible a single payer system in the US would not work out anywhere near as good a deal as it has almost everywhere else.

It's hard to believe it could possibly still end up worse than the current system, but I worry that it would be a 'hold my beer' moment.
I had it as a ringtone for a while (not the PC speaker version mind you)...
How about some citations? At least a few of these claims are wrong. 2,3 I’ve definitely seen at least one study demonstrating the effectiveness of cloth masks in limiting the projectile spread of the disease. Like, recorded video exploring different masks (not all were effective).

5. China’s lockdown was effective, what are you talking about?

To your last point, Brazil is a good example of a complete failure of individual level solutions.
In Israel we have public healthcare. I was born at week 32 and spent about 6 weeks in the NICU - everything was free.

It's not always great and I do pay for private insurance in case I need something urgent - but everything emergency is absolutely covered.

I believe it's this state in most developed places that are not the US?
Healthcare is scarce and i prefer market allocation to a wait list for allocation. Nation with government health care is also having scarcity problem, some things on waitlist. With a market i can throw more money at health problems, waitlist i am at the mercy of bureaucrat. This is better for me since I have worked very hard on making money and these days i have some extra i can spend for this.

I am healthy also, young somewhat, and wanting to be in healthy young risk pool to lower my costs not be in giant all-nation pool where I am accepting more financial burden.
Since SO exists for the readers and not just the asker, I think that makes it even more important to highlight all the reasons not to do X if it really is unlikely to be the best solution.

Maybe the asker really would be best suited with X due to some contrived circumstance, but is that true of everyone else who finds the thread too? Probably not.
Does anyone have a patent on using an AI to generate patents? Because these guys might owe those guys some money!
Big ups to full throttle, cinematic and fun, beautiful art & animation & voice acting, a game for kids that felt like it was made for grown ups - and vice versa.
Accelerando

> In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps.
FDA allows automatic ‘generic’ swap for brand-name insulin
"...elaborate on...polarization as a service"? Here's an example of how they seem to filter everything through an ideological view: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/nyt_opini...

"...unique to NYT"? Not unique to them but they seem to be one of the worst cases, in part because of how far they've fallen but also they seem to be an extreme case.

"include social media"? FB and Twitter definitely also have echo chambers, but they don't really pretend to be otherwise, whereas news sources should be.

"Where do you get your news?" The email newsletter 1440 seems to do a decent job of curating; even if the sources they use are polarized, they are picking out the more informative ones for me so I don't have to dredge through a bunch of ideological preaching.
There is another market, it’s called higher education. The vast majority of college students are not paying “sticker price” for their education
> 5,000 USD for sildenafil

Without insurance, it goes for about $20 for a batch of 30 in the US. You need to go to goodrx to get a coupon, but there's no cost or signin to that. Sure, it's stupid, but the cost is most definitively _NOT_ $5,000.

If the hospital is saying it's charging 5,000 for it, then it's an example of "we'll put a huge number here, then bring it way down when it's time to pay". Which is also stupid. But once again, nobody is paying that amount. The two arguments "the system is stupid" and "the price is insane" are different arguments.
The question was why people don't like universal health care and not an objective measurement of its value to society as a while. Around 10% of the US population is uninsured so 90% does have insurance. So 90% of the population isn't comparing it to a system with no-insurance.
I prefer to frame it as a trade-off between one's individual rights (freedom of movement) with another's individual rights (freedom to not get infected with a dangerous contagious disease). If we do it this way, we can bypass some people's inbuilt defensive reactions, as well as really get to the core of whether it makes sense to have lockdowns.

The flu is a rather deadly contagious disease (much less so than COVID) that we don't have lockdowns for. Where is the exact point in terms of disease-deadliness + lockdown-effectiveness where lockdowns are morally justified, versus where they aren't? Presumably it's some point between the flu's deadliness and COVID's deadliness. Where is that point? This is a public conversation that hasn't happened.

> Australians did not protest against lockdowns; selfish idiots who happen to be Australian did.

There's nothing inherently wrong with protesting against lockdowns. Australia is a democracy and not everyone is going to agree that lockdowns are justified policy. The problem was the way that people are protesting lockdowns - grouping up with no mask, which entails a massive negative externality. If they want to stand alone on a sidewalk with a sign and a mask, such protest should be fine by everyone in a healthy democracy. I think you probably accept this already, I just wanted to clarify.
Probably because it’s not a real bill?
These numbers bear no relation to money and nobody cares about them.
The actual bill will be sent to insurance company, it will be 25-35% of this number, which is realistic given the cost of ultra modern equipment and high salaries for doctors.
You will pay up to your maximum out of pocket, which is the real number you look at when shopping for a plan.
Insurance for people who know they need lots of care is a bit more per month but has very low max out of pocket per year: $3-4k, super cheap plans for young people who never go to the hospital offer about $7k per year per person max.
So this bill was never intended for the patient and there is no reason for this guy posting it except to grab some clicks and pity.
It is interesting as you cannot see the content which is being indexed. Suspect only bot does. If I understand correctly this is the sequence of events from the bot's perspective:

## read robots.txt `curl 'https://havfruen4220.dk/robots.txt'`

## use pointer to a sitemap.xml

curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no.xml' > sitemap.xml

## read more sitemaps

curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no-1.xml' > sitemap1.xml

Other sitemaps contain a pointer to a "webpage" eg: https://havfruen4220.dk/no/7a28855e4714dd14

## read web pages

Each location in a sitemap has a "lastmod" of today/yesterday so bot returns there everyday. In addition each webpage has a "<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">"

But if you visit each of those pages then it shows you a cartoon image. It seems the actual indexed content is visible only to the bot.

## But how is actual content being rendered?

The question is, what conditions (request params/headers) result in the actual content being rendered? The bot needs to evaluate it. Suspect it is some combo of checking if the requester is an actual google bot, maybe by looking up the IP https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
I know it makes me a terrible asshole, but reading this makes me seethe about the infant who was brought into existence without her consent only to suffer and die (like all of us, but this is a terrible compression of that sequence with little to distract her from it-- what did this tiny suffering animal know about the beauty of sunsets? Fuckall is what)just as much as it makes me exhausted about the medical insurance system in America.

What a perfect example of gambling on the credit of the unborn. And then to be further punished by the absurd healthcare system in this country.

Christ what a depressing post to start the day.
Give me one of your kidneys.
I believe ACA was originally meant to be even stronger, with a universal option and that was opposed.

I agree with you that we should revisit and strengthen ACA and add that component back in.
They look pretty simple: unless I’m missing something, it’s just ‘stack install’, plus a couple more commands for each language you want to use with morloc.
> In the end, the poor will benefit greatly, the rich will carry on as usual, and people in the middle will get squeezed to death.

While I disagree with nearly all of your post, I can find reason in the closing statement.

I feel like this logic often evades the people asking for higher taxes to support their causes. It’s always the middle class that ends up paying for it. It creates a lot of resentment which is exactly what fuels the rest of your post.

I wish there was a way this could be avoided, but obviously, it’s by design.
The obligatory comment about how crazy this is on many levels.

1. You are being charged prices that you are not expected to pay, but need to negotiate on

2. When you go to a doctor to have a procedure or have an emergency then you don't know what you are paying.

In normal countries there is A price list, which is THE price list for all hospitals that are part of the national health care system. If they want to have a contract with the national health insurance, then they need to agree to these prices for all the possible procedures. So when someone is saying "but we can't be sure of the price, maybe there are complications and additional costs" then this is bs, many-many other countries manage to have fixed price lists. Or maybe there is an item there for exceptional cases, when something addtional needs to be done in addition to the original procedure? Either way, it's already handled, the patient doesn't need to worry about this stuff. And the same goes for private clinics, they also have a fixed price list, nobody would go to them if you could get a surprise bill that would be 2-3-10x the amount originally agreed upon, that would be insane and.. very bad PR for the clinic.
Social security nets in Europe date back to time we used to have Emperors and Kings, before WW1. They are thus older than the USSR.
Agreed on both points. The UK system is far from perfect but for balance we should also say that it is not normal or expected for something as bad as that to happen here. Even in recent times, with the extra pressures of COVID, critical care has mostly kept up and the emergency overflow facilities that were built very quickly in case of overwhelming demand mostly went unused.

Obviously there will always be limits and the available resources will run out if one of them is reached. In the aftermath of a major incident or an unusually busy period it can happen. I expect a lot of us from the UK might agree that the limits need to be raised further by investing more into the NHS. But I would still choose this type of system over a US-style one every time. I've never heard of anyone here dying because they couldn't afford tens of thousands for routine medication to treat a common condition.