nathaniel

An accident that a medical service professional cannot avoid is one he should not be liable for. If a patient wants to reduce this risk, he should purchase insurance directly. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I'm not proposing to prevent them from purchasing insurance, just against mandating that they do so. In addition to fixing/pre-empting the justice system with more specialized arbitration outfits, as is done in most other major industries. edit to add The complaint is that insurance costs are too high for doctors. What makes insurance costs too high? Artificial excess demand will do that. Will reducing artificial excess demand bring down the price of insurance? Yes. All the way to reasonable levels? Can't say, but probably not on its own. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

No, it does not. Insurance distributes risk among a pool. It does not change the level of risk one bit. You're standing against economic theory on this one, pal. Purchasing insurance does not change how a car handles, true. But in aggregate it changes how people drive their cars. Insurance addresses financial risk, and most assuredly it does reduce financial risk, exactly by the economic definition of risk. Hell they'll even send you a rental car if you crash yours now. Insurance reduces risk, doesn't eliminate it. Presumably no payment is good enough for a dead man. What's it to you? Your question is offensive. How much money do you have in your bank account? If they don't want to wait, they can sell their future payments for a fee, or take out a loan and use the payments to pay down the loan. It's none of my business, really. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Now you're arguing against risk homeostasis. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Not suddenly, but they would have an increased incentive to reduce their mistakes. And if they needed help, the incentive could drive new markets in medical optimization. Both in terms of reducing errors and by precisely defining what constitutes an error or a reasonable precaution. I assert I drive safer than the average person with more insurance that me. If I crash, I pay more. I've got a greater incentive by having less insurance. But like I said, it's irrelevant to the discussion of insurance, because an individual's stated intent is lip service. Well, they are forced to have a artificially high budget for carelessness. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That is a mistaken assumption. That the market has not optimized due to introduced market defects does not prove that the market could not be optimized (esp, if the defects could be resolved). State minimums. Would have none if I had the choice. I am willing to bear the risk. For a person to have insurance effectively diminishes the cost of smashing into someone. It gets back to the risk homeostasis idea. Insurance reduces risk, so by purchasing insurance a population that maintains risk homeostasis is expected re-increase its risk correspondingly. The stated intent of individual participants is irrelevant. I'd prefer it that way. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

When the doctor pays for insurance, he has to pay for every patient, including the patients that are prepared to go without insurance. The money has to come from somewhere, and the places where it seems to be coming from are both doctors pockets and exorbitant medical fees for patients. When the patient pays, only the patients that are willing to pay have to pay. No-one ever says they intend to be negligent, that is inviting litigation. But the actions a person decides to take constitute negligence. What people say they intend to do is mostly irrelevant for insurance, because it's generally the actions that move the bottom line. Car insurance and medical insurance are similar in that both are royally f*cked up by gov't regulations causing excess demand. The difference is that car insurance is affordable to the tune that the gov't regulation hasn't yet broken the market. If the gov't mandated millions (dollars, GBP, Euros, whatever) in auto insurance for everybody, and such sums were claimable, you can bet that the market would collapse. Medical insurance is extraordinarily expensive to start off with due to the nature of the beast, and forcing everybody to have it just drives the price up further. Demand exists only in the context of a price. At price X the market demands Y quantity of insurance. The price and the demand are inter-dependent. Artificially pushing the demand one way with gov't regulation takes the price along with it. Eventually you get to a point where the consumer or the supplier no longer wishes to participate in the market. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Not unless you start operating on yourself... In various US States the doctor buys the insurance to help pay out the patient in case the doctor is negligent. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Clinton! nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Accountability for negligence yes. Insurance against no. Negligence is not a random event, obtaining insurance against doing it yourself is demonstrating that you expect with reasonable probability that it may happen--in a way it's like a fraud. Negligence doesn't "just happen", you will it or not yourself. [for you == doctor] edit to add (and this is important): Insurance against negligence is the opposite of accountability for negligence. The facilities for accountability are around already: certification programs and variously public, semi-private, and private standards bodies. They just need to perk up a bit. It's quite plausible they'd pick up the slack pretty quickly to become like trade associations in just about every other major industry, and if not then incenting it to happen is a role the gov't could legitimately play. story time: Imagine if the FDIC were privatized, and then the gubmint mandated that all investments be insured through a private FDIC-wannabe, and you could sue your investment manager when your investment lost money. It would be ludicrous, the financial markets would collapse. We are seeing right now tremors running through the markets for medical service. nathaniel nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Quite the opposite, in my opinion. In principle. any doctor that willingly pays for insurance is demonstrating an appalling lack of confidence in his own skills (or, in the real world, an appalling but altogether understandable lack of confidence in the justice system). Patients should self-insure buy insurance directly, or bear the risk of their procedures. They're the ones willingly entering into risky situations, after all. Effectively that's what's happening as the costs of insurance are shifted from practitioner to patient. The most screwed up part is the government forces it to happen even to patients who would be willing to bear the risk of their procedures, by mandating that the other participants purchase insurance. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

So would you follow through on that and assert then that insurance requirements as they exist today ought to be abolished? nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Amen. And sometimes settlements deliver more justice than can reasonably be expected of Justice system in the states. Case in point is the financial industry, where the technicalities of investments & markets are beyond the average judge or jury. The NASD, a non-profit company, does a brisk business in issuing "fines" to businesses and people who break a set of voluntary rules, without any real jurisdiction. And people typically pay them. The current Justice system is simply not prepared to deal with the volume & complexity of the issues...taking someone to court in the finance business is a bit akin to using nuclear weapons due to the costs & bad publicity generated for all parties involved. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I picked up elder scrolls 3: morrowind recently. It's not particularly exciting, but the depth of immersion in this game is unrivalled. Not to mention that the game world is both intricately detailed and freakin huge. It's a generation or so old, so the gfx don't compete with half-life 2, doom 3, etc, but there are community-developed mods to address the biggest eyesores. The screenies from Elder scrolls 4: Oblivion (eta my guess is 2005 or 2006, but officially still TBA) already look fantastic. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I'm inclined to think it's more of a culture thing than a species thing. Witness: other societies have lived for centuries without tort reform. To hazard a guess, I'd offer egalitarianism run amok, and/ or a failure to grasp elementary probability theory. "I'm a normal person, why haven't all these other normal persons suffered my ill fate?" nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Dec04/Muslim.Poll.bpf.html I suppose it's time to brush up on civics. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Well, there's the Climax motel at 66th & King (no joke) but I think they charge by the hour nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

so umm, where does the database come in? Seems like massive overkill where a couple flat files & SSI or CGI would suffice. If you need to update it, use a second cgi. edit: come to think of it, you could probably do almost all of it with client-side javascript... $0.02 nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The Triathlon is a 7-cell, and it flies rather differently from the Sabre-2. Basically it flies down . I've flown them each at the sizes you're considering, and I weigh just a tad less than you. What it sounds like you need to do is decide what you want out of a canopy. Since you're not set on either a rocket or a feather, or something in between, you probably need to jump more & demo canopies until you have a better idea of what you want. It would suck to get stuck with a canopy you don't like anymore after 50 jumps. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

If you really want the answer to your question, I think a little google searching will suit your fancy. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Monopoly isn't quite the right word because the government, ostensibly, isn't in it to make profits. Not saying it's the epitome of efficiency either. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Pick and choose the quality of the password you use based on how sensitive the access it gives you is. eg ebay gets a strong password bank account gets a strong password dz.com gets a medium (or strong, if you post in speakers corner) random stupid newspaper website gets "password" Strong password means random generator, like Aggiedave gave links for. Your system works for medium passwords. Putting your passwords in an encrypted file is OK, as long as you use strong encryption. PGP is one of the better products on the market and happens to be free for personal use, and you can get it here . Just remember the password on your password file and you're in better shape that 95% of the people out there. If you write your passwords down on paper, keep the paper somewhere safe, like in a safe. Not on the bottom of your keyboard or on the side of your monitor. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

On the sci-fi front, consider Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and anything by Philip K Dick. PKD wrote the stories that got turned into Blade Runner - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Total Recall - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale & Minority Report - The Minority Report My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Exactly. Neither is. I don't endorse either position; they're both partisan. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

In the terms more typical to "liberals", A liberal would propose the government offer training programs to help the dude help himself, and a conservative would give the dude a dollar out of his pocket and hope he goes away. These are not constructive ways of describing the situation, imo. Just partisanship. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?