And notice how we have those two different words - mother and woman? You can have words that describe relationships, in fact that is really good! You can even compound words or create whole new ones to encompass multiple types of attributes! What we should avoid is taking widely used words and changing the definition to add a criterion that is of a whole other type of attribute.
Your mother and woman example is perfect! It would not be appropriate to most people to change the definition of woman to a female that had or has an offspring. You are taking a definition that describes an attribute of the subject (gender) and throwing in criteria that is based on a relationship. That makes no sense!
If it is important for you to make a distinction on whether an astronomical body has cleared its neighborhood then you can create a new word or compound word.
For anyone else that might be curios, the definition of a planet you will often see quoted online applies to bodies in our Solar System. It comes from the International Astronomical Union in 2006. This is the famous definition that dropped Pluto as a planet. While the criteria are widely quoted, that actual resolution isn't. The resolution:
The IAU...resolves that planets and other bodies, except satellites, in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:
(1) A planet [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects [3], except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".
The definition here only applies to bodies in the Solar System.
Still a bad definition IMO. According to the definition if a catastrophic event were to occur that cluttered the neighborhood of a planet it would cease to be a planet until it was cleaned up. The definition of a planet should be based in the physical attributes of the celestial body itself, not in its role or relationship with other bodies. I'm a bit of an extremist on this front. Even our Moon would be a planet in my opinion. Seems silly when you think about our barren moon but there are for sure habitable moons out there. I can't imagine asking an alien "What planet are you from?" and them responding "erm, actually we are from a moon/planetary satellite".
RE medical debt sale - if you have the ability to just sell debt easily instead of having to go through the process of trying to collect it you are not incentivized to charge reasonable prices as you can overcharge and then be perfectly fine collecting much less (but still above your costs) via selling it to a third party. Any debt that is incurred forcibly or as a matter of health of the debtor should not be able to be moved around. The hospital should have some skin in the game.
Bill forgiveness doesn't necessarily target the for-profit hospitals. Not talking about debt discharge. It actually probably isn't even the right term. Essentially what shouldn't be allowed is non-profit hospitals counting discounts for low-income individuals as charity performed by hospital. The value of the charity shouldn't be sticker price but actual cost of services. Maybe that is already the case, but what I hear from randoms suggest that is why some hospitals are happy to "work" with you on your bill. I shouldn't have included "tax-deductible" in there, this is more about maintaining non-profit status.
RE ER. I don't see how keeping the ER and Urgent Care separate matters. In a combined system you would still have two sets of doctors, two sets of CAT scan machines and operators and radiologists, okay maybe not separate but the capacity for both (an appropriately reserved). In the current system you actually have more overhead from having a whole separate billing system, HR, building, landscaping, etc. Yes, the ER still needs to stabilize a patient whether they can pay or not but that becomes *cheaper* when you have a whole other pipeline to send them to. You aren't engaging a highly paid ER doctor and set of ER nurses to prescribe antibiotics to the homeless person that just came in. You can have the RN, or an internal medicine doctor do it instead in the area down the hall. If at any point that homeless person starts to code or the RN/Internal Med doc identifies something concerning, they can get them over to the ER. But again, if you are the hospital why would you do this? You can take in that homeless patient and charge them big money for some antibiotics and hopefully get reimbursed by the government. It's not like the hospital would even lose money on it, you would still charge for the urgent care services, just at the reduced reasonable price it takes to provide them plus a little more. Heck, I'm sure that an urgent care wing incorporated into an ER would beat any standalone urgent care in the business sense, you've generally got a whole waiting room full of prospective customers.. but alas.. you would cannibalize your ER "sales".
And if that cannibalization of ER sales would leave the ER unprofitable, then raise your prices! I don't think any reasonable person would be mad if you charged what it actually costs to provide lifesaving care. Insurance companies would be okay with paying real costs for the fewer cases of legitimate emergencies if they know that the much more common cases of people going to the ER for more minor things would be much cheaper. I would posit that with urgent care support you would need less ER capacity as you wouldn't have it filled up with non-emergent cases.
And yeah, it would be ideal to have them in the same building close together. Retrofitting would be hard or impossible. It would mostly be for new hospitals going forward. It all boils down to designing hospitals to be the most efficient as possible at providing care to patients, not efficiency on generating the most profits.
> so why don't i just raise the cost to $100+$10000 where $10000 is the maximum the insurance will pay?
Theoretically because you are not the sole provider offering that service and the patient could go elsewhere, or in this case, the insurance company would require the patient to go elsewhere. Obviously, this sucks absolute donkey balls and health care will always involve a healthy dose of "I can't just shop around for where to get help for a heart attack".
In my naive opinion banning discriminatory pricing (no special negotiated insurance pricing), the sale of medical debt, and counting bill forgiveness as tax deductible charity would be a good start. With the absolute technical and capital-intensive marvel that is modern health care I just don't see anyone being able to reasonably get away with no insurance. Maybe there is a mandated co-insurance for all plans that could be covered by HSA accounts that everyone would get access to. That way there is a cost that is transparent to the patient that scales. At that point though I would just go to single payer.
(Rant incoming) Another thing that might need to happen is billing caps based off of certain outcomes. Especially in the emergency medicine realm. If you go to the emergency room and rack up a huge bill for something simple there should be a cap on the amount the hospital can actually recover. All I see is (rightfully) constant bitching and moaning from ER staff that people should be going to primary care or urgent care for issues which are less resource intensive and cheaper. The issue is the ER could provide those same services for just as cheap. Build out those same capabilities in or near the ER. The triage nurse can then send those low priority patients to the facility right down the hall. The issue is hospital admins have no incentive to do that, because as you said, why bill $200 when you can bill a minimum of $2,000 when you have your patient captive.
I also think it is silly we ask people to self-triage. It externalizes a lot of the costs to other parts of society. I can attest to this from the constant Volunteer Fire Department air-raid sirens I hear followed by a "EMS to Well Now Urgent Care for Patient in Distress". I'm sure the volleys love having their evening interrupted when it could have been a simple walk down an aisle.
No, I am not being dense. From your continued lack of citations I am starting to assume there is no law stopping the RoK from enriching uranium (though I have been trying to find one). Uranium enrichment facilities are expensive. If you have a partner nation who is willing to sell you the enriched uranium that just makes sense. Again, it being the property of another nation, they have the right to judge who should have access it it and what they might do with it. If RoK wanted to spend a percentage of their GDP on enrichment facilities they could. They don't have an urgent reason to. Further they don't have any deposits of any uranium to begin with so they would still need to partner with another nation anyways, so I ask you - Why would RoK want their own enrichment facilities?
I don't think any country has the right to demand that another country hands over enriched uranium and allow them to move into a shipyard so that they could build a nuclear sub. Of course you need permission from a seller to buy products and use their facilities. I would recommend going beyond simply reading the headline.
I am fascinated by the extent to which people can mentalize their different senses. I can visualize most of my primary senses. Sight would probably be my weakest one. I am definitely not aphantasic, but the images seem much more ephemeral than what other people experience. I can conjure up an image at will but if I focus too much it will become fuzzier.
Fuzzy isn't even the best word to use though. It's not fuzzy but lacking detail while at the same time my brain isn't comprehending that it is lacking detail. It is almost as if my brain can only focus on a few aspects of the picture at once with the most striking characteristics being rendered while the other parts are inferred or filled in with the most perfect placeholder - something that perfectly represents the idea of what is missing, but which it is not.
None of my other senses suffer from this. I can smell pumpkin pie or treated lumber on command. I can conjure music in my head all day (and often do without trying). I can metalize the feeling of cold or warmth. I too can taste spaghetti and meatballs. When I read that my mind immediately went to those cheap pre-made meatballs in the frozen section, my teeth cutting through those dense almost hard meatballs that are somehow so bland yet over spiced.
I also wonder how much of our differences are often our inability to communicate our experiences in a sufficient manner.
I enjoyed walking through some of their docs which documented decisions and deliverables. Thought for sure it would have just been a dump of source code with little to no context.
As an aside, I've always thought of this when listening to discussions of technological advancement. I often hear the argument that in the early 20th century many people thought we were near the apex of technology. That often gets brought up when people claim the same today. I don't think we are quite there, but I get a feeling that the limit we are approaching is more a limit, not of knowledge, but of resources and engineering.
We have literal alchemy, but we don't have the capability to make useful amounts of gold. It is not that we don't know how to, but that it is not practical. How much more will material science, chemistry, and maybe even physics give us in practical (technology-wise) knowledge? Plenty for sure, but I don't think our rate of technological advancement will continue in these fields. That said, we have so much to learn even if it is not immediately applicable to technology.
Where I think there is an absolute abundance of applicable and practical knowledge to be collected is in the fields of biochemistry and biology. We haven't even scratched the surface there. We may never find a way to travel faster than light but if we can adapt our bodies to last for hundreds or thousands of years in stasis it may not matter. To me, being able to easily manipulate biology is so much more dangerous than nuclear proliferation. Anyways, not an expert of any of these fields.
Honestly, none of those sound like blockers for the use case I and many other diabetics would like - monitoring for general blood sugar responses (rough curve) after eating. Sure, you wouldn't be able to use the measurements to dose insulin or even measure your actual (numeric) glucose level, but measuring my A1C every three months is good enough to do that in mine and many other cases. I've had my blood sugar controlled through diet and metformin with it being in the range of 5.9 - 6.2. I could do so much better if I had a better understanding of how my body, specifically, reacts to certain foods, mealtimes, routines (exercise after eating), etc.
It would be super helpful to know (relative to other foods) how my body reacts to claimed low-carb foods. Is there a large spike (don't need to know the number) or is it a much more flat curve? How long in general does it take for the line to return to pre-meal levels? What does that trend look like over many months? Heck, I could even run a rudimentary and simple test to do comparative insulin response to a known amount of carbs to see if my insulin response is improving over time (using the period of the curve). I would love to get an alert that hey, we think your glucose level shot up a lot (don't care how much) so that I can remediate it through exercise then and there and avoid that food or timing going forward.
Really hoping the people in Medtech don't make perfect the enemy of good in this case. Although maybe what you listed would still be blockers for even getting general glucose curves. I've been planning on getting a CGM for at least a few months to achieve all of this, but it would be great to just have it in a watch or other simple wearable.
I see another misunderstanding then. With this method the actual probe would use nuclear material to melt its way through the ice. In addition, the heat of the nuclear probe on one side and the ice on another (or melting ice) would make for the ideal conditions of a peltier (or just use a traditional RTG) device to power onboard sensors and electronics. The fiber optic cable is only for communication.
I think our breakdown in understanding here is our concept of cables. When I say cable (and many others here) I mean fiber optic cable. Even with 25km of fiber optic cable it is rather small and light. Drones, missiles, and torpedoes are already doing this with many miles of cable in a tight space. The issue with this which I am not sure about is the dynamic of the ice on the fiber optic cable and how well it would hold up to refreezing of the ice.
I think indirectly it does. When your launch vehicle costs hundreds of millions of dollars to use once on a scientific mission you try to put as much engineering into the scientific payload to (1) make damn sure it works when you are paying $200 million for a launch and (2) make sure you can do as much science as possible.
With something like Starship I wouldn't be surprised to see SpaceX cheaply provide a starship approaching end of life to a scientific mission. With cheaper and readily available launch opportunities we could see deep space missions that utilize larger amounts of probes manufactured more cheaply that have much less longevity (die after a year of data collecting) but can do a greater amount of science over their shorter lives. Essentially, using a large launch vehicle like starship as a mothership until they get to their destination. Reducing the need for RTGs.
Correct, hence the need for the probe to unroll the cable as it goes down. If you had the roll on the surface, you would need to heat the whole cable to allow it to slip down.
Your mother and woman example is perfect! It would not be appropriate to most people to change the definition of woman to a female that had or has an offspring. You are taking a definition that describes an attribute of the subject (gender) and throwing in criteria that is based on a relationship. That makes no sense!
If it is important for you to make a distinction on whether an astronomical body has cleared its neighborhood then you can create a new word or compound word.