It’s the difference between single-payer systems run by the government and private, for-profit commercial plans. I’m happy to see this carried out on an executive level since an actual law regulating private insurance would be a shit storm in congress. Remove the profit motive from insurers and the shift quickly moves towards real-world evidence and health outcomes rather than profit margins.
Your body and mind is just a bag of chemical soup, undergoing a constant reaction. Your tangle of nerves and synapses feed a mess of neurons that are wired in a circuit that gives you that spark of consciousness. But none of this is a fixed system, and your body goes through constant change. As one neural pathway dies, another one is rewired and the circuitry is now different.
You can play the game of debating the Ship of Theseus, but who you “are” or “were” is just an illusion. Our memories are just the old circuits powering up, but even those change over time. Your memories are a false representation of the past because they only ever exist in the present and you’re at the mercy of your own perceptions.
You “are” until you are not. So do what feels good —Kiss your loved ones, hug a tree, and be kind to yourself and others while your bag of soup ain’t leaking.
I can also attest to hearing “eggs in a basket” and “toad in a hole” growing up. My son has just dubbed the dish “egg bread” and requested it almost daily. He also calls fried eggs “dip eggs” and boiled eggs “shape eggs.” He was probably 3 when he solidified these terms, but they have all stuck, 6 years later.
Meh, I opened Reddit just to lurk on the only subreddit I would post on. Recap for that community reminded me it was all one big circle jerk… but now with more advertisements.
Yep, I spent a month refactoring a few thousand lines of code using GPT4 and I felt like I was working with the best senior developer with infinite patience and availability.
I could vaguely describe what I was after and it would identify the established programming patterns and provide examples based on all the code snippets I fed it. It was amazing and a little terrifying what an LLM is capable of. It didn’t write the code for me but it increased my productivity 2 fold… I’m a developer now a getting rusty being 5 years into management rather than delivering functional code, so just having that copilot was invaluable.
Then one day it just stopped. It lost all context for my project. I asked what it thought what we were working on and it replied with something to do with TCP relays instead of my little Lua pet project dealing with music sequencing and MIDI processing… not even close to the fucking ballpark’s overflow lot.
It’s like my trusty senior developer got smashed in the head with a brick. And as described, would just give me nonsense hand wavy answers.
Joe Pera Talks To You
I work as hired hands for satan himself (not directly for insurance companies but a consulting company specializing intelling pharma companies how to market themselves to insurance companies) and the industry is a shit show across the board.
The entire system is for-profit. Hospital systems make money by getting as much from insurance companies as possible. Pharmaceutical companies make money by selling drugs to insurance companies for as much money as they can. And the companies that hold the purse strings are the insurance companies of course (definitely the most evil).
Why is everything so damn expensive? Well, pharmaceutical company creates drug X and in order to recoup years of R&D and the strict rigor of government regulation, they need to charge a LOT of money—high skilled/high salaries positions to develop the drugs, many years clinical trials (most of which fail), government regulation, market strategy/assessment etc. You can’t get to the finish line without dumping a shit ton of money into development. So yeah, new drugs cost a lot. This doesn’t excuse corporate greed or all the schemes to keep exclusivity on a drug in order to maintain a monopoly, which is rampant and makes the situations worse.
New groundbreaking rare cancer treatment comes out—$1 million per patient. All the diseases that are easily treated with a pill are gone. So you’re left with rare disorders or ones requiring cutting edge treatment with a much much smaller market. So they have to charge an extraordinary amount to be profitable. Pharma companies don’t price drugs based on who can’t afford it, so they price it based on well insured patients that can. Insurance companies also can’t pay for everyone, so they come up with limits and preexisting conditions.
Meanwhile hospital systems, like any other corporation, seek profits by cutting costs, consolidating expenses (your treatment) and charging as much as they can for your treatment. What the public isn’t aware of is that when negotiating prices, hospital systems come up with an inflated menu of costs as a bargaining chip. So that MRI that is listed as $5,000 a pop doesn’t is negotiated down behind closed door’s with insurance companies (in-network vs out-of-network). But what price do you pay when you don’t have insurance or your insurance company doesn’t want to pay it? You guessed it!
Insurance companies pay for the whole lot and they too are out there to make money by NOT paying so they can hold onto your insurance premiums.
Oh and let us not forget that manufacturers operate at a global scale and all those countries that have single payer systems do the reasonable thing (this does include Medicare and Medicaid too) and tell everyone that they will only pay a fair price based on Real World Evidence. Guess who picks up the slack? USA! Greatest country in the fucking world, with congress paid for by everyone of these corporations.
Speaking as a designer, it’s important to separate the style/trend of a UI from its function. I think what you’re looking for is actually UX design.
As a discipline, User Experience uses evidence-based research to understand how and why users behave they do. This leads to specific design patterns and principles that underlie all the good UI design seen from the giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. It gives you the language to evaluate designs. This is the foundation of your UI and the rest is just style — fonts, colors, imagery and icons which is subjective and less important. I lost ambition to be a trendy UI designer, so every design looks the same, but usability will shines through. Clean, simple and accessible is timeless.
Study the articles from nngroup.com. They pretty much established the field of UX Design, with content talking about user behavior in the 1990s. https://lawsofux.com is a more attractive and consumable option, also heavily influenced by NN Group. Finally, accessible design is good design for all, not just those with disabilities. Understand the guidelines set by the W3C for accessibility, like minimum font sizes or contrast ratios for colors.