Are you talking about Medicare, or something else?
I’m 73 and have been on Medicare (Advantage) for several years. My opinion of it isn’t great. I’m not blaming government or private healthcare or insurance companies, and I’m not ready to join Bernie and call for single payer, but the system is broken. I think the problem is the combination of government paying but private companies getting the money and dictating the care. My experience is at least half the time patient care is not the objective, it’s maximizing the money from Medicare. (Private health insurance also has a similar problem.) You as the patient are not the customer, you are a means to an end. If Medicare will pay for something, you are getting it whether you want or need it or not. And if Medicare doesn’t pay for it, you’re not getting it. If the doctor or hospital has a new machine or treatment and Medicare (or insurance) can be billed for it, they will figure out a way for you to get that procedure or treatment. If there are multiple treatments for something you’ve got (like surgery, chemo, radiation), expect the various specialists to fight over who gets the money, and you can be left feeling nobody cares what’s best for you. When you are discharged, they will try to order things like wheelchairs to your house from medical supply places that charge the maximum Medicare will pay, even if you can get them yourself for half the price, even if you don’t need one, the only question is whether the govt will pay for it (and don’t tell me they aren’t getting kickbacks from the medical supply place). And god forbid the best treatment is a lifestyle change because they don’t get paid for that. Nope, order a procedure or write a prescription. You’ll also find that anything like surgery is an opportunity to run a bunch of blood tests and other tests so they can refer you to other specialists in their practice so they can bill for more things. I have a more positive opinion of doctors that fix specific things, like orthopedic surgeons. You have a problem, they fix it. I had hernia surgery about 10 years ago, no complaints, other than the pre surgery tests were an opportunity to find other things that Medicare might pay for. Can’t blame the surgeon for that, he just doesn’t want you croaking on the operating table because you have a heart condition. And the surgery was at a surgery center instead of a hospital. Given a choice I’ll always pick an urgent care facility or a surgery center, rather than a hospital or even worse an emergency room. If you need stitches, go to urgent care not the emergency room. You’ll get stitched up quicker and the emergency room will just have a med tech do it anyway while the doctor on call sits at the nurses station filling out paperwork on the computer. (Am I being naïve assuming the doctor is doing paperwork not playing games?) From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of ch...@go-mtc.com Sent: Monday, July 8, 2024 11:10 AM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <af@af.afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT Happy Holidays I am all for nationalized health care. But I am old enough that it is right around the corner for me. My wife just about croaked in Barcelona last summer. Spent a week in a hospital there until I arranged a jail break. Paid absolutely nothing. From: dmmoff...@gmail.com <mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com> Sent: Monday, July 8, 2024 8:16 AM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT Happy Holidays To the original post: People hung up on college degrees might not be if they saw what some of the trades are making. I’ve been in communications & IT for 24 years, but if I’d started as an electrical linesman instead then I’d be only a few years from retirement. They are doing hard--and sometimes dangerous—work, but they are getting paid big bucks to do it. People in master mechanics programs are also cleaning house right now. I have a CIS degree. My experience is that college teaches you about things, but not how to do things. Sometimes you do need that background about the topic to be good at doing it, and other times it really didn’t matter. It’s also clear to me that what you get out of college is proportional to what you put into it (and I suppose that’s true of life in general), so if someone is going to college because it’s expected of them and not because of a real interest in the subject then their outcome will be less optimal than if they did something they actually liked or at least found engaging. To Steve regarding funding STEM degrees: I agree whole heartedly with that, and it’s something I’ve said in other forums. Someone told me that funding only STEM degrees is equivalent to the government telling people what jobs they can have. Au contraire, the economy is telling people what jobs they can have, and this would just be allocating funding according to economic reality. You can get a degree in chemical engineering and still become an English teacher if you happen to be good at that subject, and that’s what you really want to do, but you’d also have another marketable set of knowledge you can use in other contexts. I’ll take you one step further: I consider myself a conservative (a moderate one; a New York conservative), and I’m on board with universal healthcare. Let’s do it. Forget the bleeding heart arguments about it, just look at the economic realities. 1) The systems in other countries result in less health care spending per capita. 2) In countries with universal healthcare their small businesses and startups are not handicapped with trying to pay for employees’ health insurance. Here they have to offer insurance to be competitive in the labor market, and it’s a major hurdle for having success with a business. 3) We already put about as much public money per capita into covering people’s medical bills as other countries do, and we’re only covering a portion of people with specific circumstances. Either get all meddling fingers out of it and let the market figure out what to do, or go all in and rebuild the system so it works. We’re one foot in and one foot out right now and it’s brutally expensive and by many metrics it’s not all that effective. I know some would argue more in favor of letting the market handle it, but recall that we’ve done that before and we had quacks calling themselves doctors and selling all kinds of bullshit to people. I’m thinking back when Coca-Cola contained cocaine and was sold as a medicine. If you let the market run the show completely then you have to accept bad outcomes along with the good ones. Civil court didn’t fix it all then, and I don’t see why it would now either. -Adam From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com <mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com> > On Behalf Of Steve Jones Sent: Friday, July 05, 2024 7:24 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com <mailto:af@af.afmug.com> > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT Happy Holidays I think im one of the only conservatives that is pro free higher education. More as an investment than as an expense remove all liberal arts, STEM, not STEAM only (you want an art history degree, you can pay for it), 1:1 community service requirement per classroom instruction hour, manual labor or degree related community service only, 90% mandatory score, 95% mandatory attendance, 100 percent drug and alcohol abstinence during the school year, tested biweekly. Zero criminal tolerance. You pay on the loan until youve completed the mandatory community service and repay all deferments from that time period. Then each year you maintain full time employment, 10 percent is waived for 10 years. but that would actually require something, so of course it would be too unfair. On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 12:52 PM Forrest Christian (List Account) <li...@packetflux.com <mailto:li...@packetflux.com> > wrote: I feel that it's time for college to go through a major revision. First, I lean quite strongly toward the Mike Rowe worldview in that we need to quit telling our kids that they need a college education to make it in this world. Right now if you're in one of the blue collar trades you're far better off than a lot of the people who have ms or bs degrees. There will always be a demand for plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and so on. On the college side, we need to adjust what we teach to provide for a condensed program where you cut out most (but not all) of the non-relevant programs. Yes, it's hard to learn certain trades without college, but a degree in computer science shouldn't need a lot of the liberal arts classes. Finally, we need to reform the student loan program so that we quit graduating students with degrees in underwater basketweaving with 6 figure loan balances. Right now, lenders are able to loan to anyone without risk and as such there is no incentive for lenders or schools to ensure that the students will be able to repay their loans from a typical job in the student's chosen degree program. This has led to ballooning tuition and overall school costs since there is no pressure to keep costs low. On Thu, Jul 4, 2024, 10:36 AM <ch...@go-mtc.com <mailto:ch...@go-mtc.com> > wrote: With the risk of starting something, I thought I would inject some observations: I do watch Charley Kirk on YouTube for a quick fix of watching him dissolve some of the woke ideology being spouted by young college kids. For me it is like junk food for my worldview. Can only take so much of it, like eating too many sweets. And he can get a bit too alt-right for me at times. Yesterday he was preaching something that I think he was partially, perhaps mostly wrong about. He is a college dropout and preaches that college is a scam and you would be better off just learning to code and find an internship that does not require a degree. I think he is only partially right. By and large, most BA programs are probably not worth the money unless they go onto grad school. A BA in art history doesn’t have much value when searching Indeed for a job. It can however get you into law school. And we all know that if you start and successfully run a WISP you absolutely must be an autodidact. An autodidact with ambition. Cannot pick up either of those at a college. And do not need college to be a superior ISP or WISP. It does however take a special type of person. But there are a couple of areas where I know, from personal experience, that you really benefit from formal education: 1) Computer Science – the part where you learn hardware theory, operating system design, compiler design, advanced data structures, OO methods etc. Really hard to pick up this stuff by watching youtube videos. And really hard to get any good at it unless you are forced to do homework and labs. Understanding what happens with the hardware, the stack and OS during a hardware interrupt is important and not so easy to learn on your own. Try to write some DSP functions from scratch on your own... or perhaps some machine code to hand optimize a MCU routine. Much easier if you had a class on assembly. 2) RF and antennas. Reflection coefficients and the mastery of Smith charts. EM simulation software and optimization. S11 and PCB stripline and microstrip layout. Etc etc. Again, a good autodidact can teach themselves anything. But I tried for years to master Smith charts and it was not until college that I finally got to where I could use them. Now-a-days the software does it all for you but you still need to know. 3) To understand some of this stuff, like DSP etc, you also need some upper level math, calculus and trig. Hard to do on your own. I also imagine that if you want to get into medical school, classes on chemistry, biology etc are essential. All PE programs will always need degreed engineers. So yeah Charley, if you get a liberal arts degree, I would tend to agree with you that your fathers money was probably wasted. But many of the BS degrees are not a scam or waste. -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com <mailto:AF@af.afmug.com> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com <mailto:AF@af.afmug.com> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com _____ -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com <mailto:AF@af.afmug.com> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
-- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
