I would mod you up if I hand't posted elsewhere in this thread. The provision requiring large employees to provide health insurance is one of the few (actually pretty much the only), provision I wish weren't in there, for the reasons you just describe. I understand the political necessities of it, but it doesn't' mean I have to like it.

I'm not even convinced that this would bring down total health costs, much less improve the "added health value" we get per healthcare dollar. The problem with covering catastrophic care, but not routine expenses is that you substantially distort health care economic decisions for the consumer.

Consider an individual striving to maximize their utility by adjusting their healthcare purchases as they try to decide whether to go in for a routine physical at the doctor. Now there are two main factors affecting their utility, the monetary cost of something, and the health outcome. In other words, getting advanced cancer is bad both because you get sick and possibly die and because the treatment costs money.

Now, there are good reasons to believe that the dollar value of health increases as one gets richer. After all, it's a lot easier to justify a $50k operation/medicine course if you're just giving up your fifth car than it is if you're giving up four years salary. And this effect should apply to pretty much all health-money trade-offs.

Now back to the matter at hand. For the rich, it probably doesn't really matter if routine medical care is covered, as they are willing to pay a lot of money for a single unit of health, so they will pretty much do more or less whatever gives them optimal health.

The poor make a more interesting case. They will tend to value money much higher relative to health than do the rich. Now in the fully insured case money will not be an issue, so they will behave in the same way as the rich. The fully uninsured case is also fairly uninteresting, they will attempt to maximize their utility for whatever health-money trade-off they have. In the limiting case, they will begin to go in for routine checkups only insofar as it prevents health expenditures later. (We assume here that individuals will do everything in their power to stay alive.)

Now suppose one of these individuals has a policy that covers only catastrophic care. Suddenly, the monetary loss associated with diseases such as cancer disappears (or is reduced depending on the specifics of the policy, it doesn't really matter). The point is that they will reduce their consumption of routine checkups, not only in comparision to the level which is associated with optimal health, but also the level which is associated with the minimum expected expenditure necessary to stay alive. These individuals will actually have increased total health expenditures compared to the fully insured case.

And this isn't just a hypothetical case, doing health screenings at local grocery stores, I've found plenty of people with blood sugars of 600 (meaning they had massively uncontrolled diabetes). Who didn't even know they had it. And these are people who DON'T have catastrophic insurance. If you give them only catastrophic insurance, economic incentives to be in that condition will only increase.

This is a false choice. We are fully capable of providing chemo to the 25 year olds and to grandma. Now yes, there is a cost-years of life ratio beyond which it just doesn't make sense to pay for the treatment. But chemo is, IMHO, squarely on the "worth it" side for just about anyone who would benefit from it. The ONLY possible exception are the $50k/year still on patent biologics. And even then, $50,000 is well worth an additional year of life. So I'm happy to chip in for others in that situation with the understanding that they'll have my back if I ever need it.

Yes, but all statements of that nature were made by YouTube founders/employees prior to Google's purchase. The emails establish that Google was aware of the copyrighted content prior to purchase, but no where is there any proof or even strong evidence that Google encouraged this material in any way after their purchase. The closest they come is some weak email where some Google executive instructs the people in charge of YouTube (now owned by Google) to increase traffic, with a completely unfounded assertion that this included laxness on copyright issues. Now was it evil for Google to buy Youtube, knowing that their current size was based on copyright infringement? I wouldn't say so, though I suppose an argument could be made. Though, the net effect of the YouTube acquisition was to DECREASE copyright violations. Really, this is all irrelevant though. YouTube is most likely liable for the copyright infringements due to their policy of willfully ignoring them and such liability was transferred to Google at the time of purchase, which is all Viacom really cares about anyway.

Not only are vaccines not 100% effective, vaccinated children in low vaccine penetration are more likely to contract one of these diseases than vaccinated children in a high vaccine penetration area.

Tolls on highways are actually one of the more economically efficient forms of tax, at least if the highways are crowded and you can do it in a way that doesn't impede traffic too much (which EZpass more or less accomplishes.) This is because when an additional car gets onto a busy road, it imposes an economic cost on every other car on that road by increasing congestion, having to merge onto the highway, etc. A toll set at the proper level can alleviate this effect by ensuring that cars do not enter the highway unless it the value they gain from being on the highway is greater than the cost they impose on the other cars.

It's not like the IRS doesn't get address updates every single year.

So you're saying that Obama somehow managed to run a deficit of 166% of GDP in 2009. That aside, yes, the deficits have been far higher in 2009 and 2010. Do you know what else has been higher in those years? Unemployment. Also, wages are far down. Without taking legislative action of any kind the deficits would have blown up from increased unemployment payouts and decreased income tax revenue. The stimulus bill that all conservatives love to hate so much is not all that much of a long term contributer to debt because it phases out after 2 years. Hell, at $100 billion/year the Iraq War alone has added as much to the debt already as the stimulus bill ever will.

I'm a beaver, you're a beaver, we are beavers all
And when we get together we do the beaver call

I'm not so sure about that. These interns were all there specifically for January term. Yeah maybe they wanted a summer job also, but even today it's not all that difficult to find an internship as a CS major from MIT.

It seems more likely we'll end up with the majority of people purchasing faster service through a wired provider just like most people pay for cable/satelitte now. Besides, there's only a limited amount of spectrum available. That may be fine for some place out in rural Montana, but can you imagine trying to provide the entire Internet bandwidth of a place like New York City with wireless alone?

You could, as described by TubeSreak, replace the patient's immune system with another which is not susceptible to HIV. Sadly, this is not possible in the majority of cases because you need a fairly good match to do successful bone marrow transplant, and HIV-proof people are rare. Maybe if we ever get the theraputic cloning and genetic engineering down we might be able to make a clone of an individuals immune system with an appropriately modified CD4 receptor (the point of entry for HIV), but a treatment like that is a long way off if its even possible at all.

Oops, I messed up on moderating this too. That's what I get for not browsing at -1.