One of the reasons I have basically given up my fantasy of moving to the USA is the russian roulette that you seem to have to play with your health and its insurance.
The article seems to be saying that in some cases the insurer assesses what the hospital is charging, decides it's too high, doesn't pay it all, and then you owe the hospital thousands of dollars despite being fully insured.
That was a travel insurance, "completely" different from the US healthcare insurance providers, where the issue is in-network and out-network providers, etc.
What happens if you get fired from your job suddenly? And if you happen to have pre-existing conditions, such as a type 1 diabetes, that is known for being very expensive to treat?
My mom lost her job with benefits, and a month later fell down some stairs and broke her arm. Eventually she was able to get an insurance plan (after getting a new job) for something like $200 or $300 per month (there are in fact cheaper ones depending on your need of coverage and state), while paying off the bills from the broken arm event.
Personally speaking, I have no fear of a similar event happening to me. If it happened, I'd figure something out, or die. Generally speaking, "what we think is unbearable proves to be bearable."
You left out a very important contraction from that quote, namely "I'd". The subject of the sentence changes its meaning entirely. As you quoted, it reads as an imperative, something I did not say.
I'm not defending the idiotic system that is US healthcare, but you can opt in to COBRA until you find something else. 2 main disadvantages are that it is time bound (i think max 12 months) and it is expensive, you have to pay both the employer contribution and your own.
Which makes me quite happy to just be in Germany. I will get all the required equipment to treat my diabetes, even if I lose my job. The insurance I have is going to be quite a lot cheaper when I have a lower income. I very much like the safety it provides and sadly it means I have to give my talent to the European markets.
Insurance won't cover everything... Sometimes there'll be an experimental thing that the insurance doesn't cover.
I tried this, when I lived in the US, even though it was a planned test nobody could give me a quote on what it would cost.
I had great insurance that covered everything. People next to me in the waiting room was paying extra fees to rent the facilities and stuff... Yet, even for a planned procedure neither my doctor or my insurance company would give me a quote or promise that the procedure was covered.
You can't know what the bill will be even for a planned procedure. Even if you ask 3-5 different entities multiple times.
For comparison, for your proportion of NHS costs to approach the lower end of that in the UK, you need to earn 2x-3x the national average salary. At $66k, in 2012, your and your employers contributions to the NHS over tax were around $300/month combined.
Its pretty easy: The law says, that you always have to set a willing action to opt in. There can be check-boxes, but they need to be unchecked by default ("privacy by default"). Simple. I have already received multiple communications from Banks and credit card companies, and they are all very explicit about it and it was very easy to see the choices and the effect of the law.
I guess I can't go forward without reiterating the argument, so I guess I'll stop. But, I think considering it easy is naive, considering the mountain of experience to the contrary.
At least in Italy, this has been the way it works for years. When I sign something privacy-related I get at least two boxes: one for the treatment of my information for functional purpose (that is, "we can't even take this paper back if you don't give us permission"), the other for research and marketing purposes (that is stuff not essential to the performance of the service). It's working quite well, in my case at least.
1. Your background image previews on my "Hover Zoom" chrome extension (opens in overlay like a link to a image [1]).
2. Your star display breaks on my second monitor (19" 1280x1024) at 100% Zoom in Chrome and every setting above that[2] This is in my opinion not acceptable.
3. In "Preview Mode" you can not add anything, but you can still remove parts. Is this intended?
4. Speaking of preview mode... it is not obvious what it does. If you are looking at the button when you click it you don't automatically realize what it does.
Agreed. At least XBMC had "media" in there. If they are going to use such meaningless names, they should just always stick "media software" after the name in all posts or something.
To me XBMC has always sounded more about XBOX than MediaCenter and it feels weird running it on the pi on pc when it has nothing anymore to do with XBox.
The toolbars popup has a fixed position, so if you open a "toolbar" and then scroll with it still open it just hovers in the middle of the screen like this: http://i.imgur.com/vdoHhMr.png
I'd argue that SMEs are the backbone of every successful economy.
If you look at big business, say the Fortune 500 for example, these organisations are typically much more high profile than their smaller brethren, but there are still... well, only 500 of them. And while the list includes giant individual employers like Walmart, those businesses collectively still only employ something like 20M-30M people depending on how you count. Similarly, while your revenues are probably $5B+ if you made the 500 this year, plenty of the businesses towards the lower end of the list only made perhaps $20M-30M in profit, and one or two didn't even land a profit at all.
Depending on whose definition you take for the maximum number of employees, companies of up to 100-300 people might be considered SMEs. At that point, you could certainly be earning profits that compete with the lower end of the Fortune 500, and there are a lot more SMEs out there than industry giants.
And that's just the most basic, raw economic data about business performance and employment, without even considering cultural differences and efficiencies and innovation and numerous other factors that make smaller businesses important to the wider economy.
There are only 500 F500's because the F500 is the top 500 companies. It feels weird to have to point out that there is in fact a 501th company. You probably haven't heard of #500, but #499 --- second from the bottom of the list --- is KeyCorp, one of the country's largest regional bank chains.
Sorry, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
I was just trying to demonstrate that although "big" businesses tend to get a lot of attention, they don't actually employ a large proportion of the working population, nor do they necessarily make much more profit than a large SME. In other words, really big business isn't the driver behind a successful economy, something else is. I contend that the "something else" is SMEs.
Those charts are abysmally bad [1]; they also don't seem to agree with what other branches of the government are saying. From the SBA [2]:
"Small firms represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms; employ half of all private sector employees; pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll; create more than half of the non-farm private GDP; hire 43 percent of high tech workers..."
I think Silhouette has got the details pretty wrong, but if he had said that SMEs were as important to the U.S. economy as BigCos, and especially the Fortune 500, then it looks like the SBA agrees with him.
[1]: The data between businesses with no employees and businesses with less than 500 employees is mutually exclusive; you can't use those carts to make any points about the contributions to the economy of businesses with less than 500 employees, including those without employees, because that data is missing. "Annual Payroll" is a pretty bad data point to use for judgements about contributions to the economy; "sales or receipts" would be better, but that's only available for all employer firms, with no further breakdown, for some reason. All in all, pretty useless here.
I think Silhouette has got the details pretty wrong
How so? All the specific figures I quoted were lifted directly from mainstream reporting of the Fortune 500 for 2012, starting with Fortune's own web site.
This doesn't make much difference to my argument anyway. Whoever's figures you take, it's clear that in raw numbers SMEs are a significant contributor, at least on par with big business. But if we're talking about what really drives an economy and keeps it developing, I would argue that a disproportionate amount of the innovation and a lot more flexibility is found in SMEs. BigCos are good at industrialising and achieving economies of scale, but they aren't particularly good at innovating or creating new markets. All I'm saying in this thread is that SMEs don't sacrifice their own direct contribution to the economy at the same time.
The only point I'm trying to make is that it's misleading to characterize the median or modal size of US employers by using the Fortune 500.
Census offers statistics on which employer size brackets employ how many people. ~41MM people in the US are employed by firms with fewer than 100 employees, ~72MM people are employed by those with more than 100 employees. In the smaller company bracket, more people are employed by companies with between 20 and 100 employees than at smaller companies.
All the Fortune 500 tells you is the size of the 500 most profitable companies. And my earlier point was simply this: the "501th company", which just missed being included on the F500, is presumably gigantic; KeyCorp just barely got onto the list.
