If you have so few choices in that state, I'll bet the problem is government-based cronyism.

I think it's called laissez-faire capitalism. Too little regulation means that the market will concentrate on the most profitable customers and not necessarily provide any service at all to others.

The point of insurance is that it's a risk pool that lowers the cost of saving to pay for a catastrophe for every participant, based on the probability that most folks won't need it. But it doesn't work for the folks who aren't allowed in the pool. And the reality is that everyone will need it sometime, and that it is normal for a society for some proportion of its people to be sick.

We have actually had some good insurance regulators in California. I don't know much about the current one but he seems to have achieved a pro-citizen rather than pro-company record.

I did not check with the state before I rejected the trash plan, perhaps it wasn't legal.

Valerie has insurance which covers the three of us, but it's her insurance. If she lost her job or if other things happened that I decline to contemplate, we would not have been able to obtain that sort of insurance or indeed anything that wasn't a fraud or a rip-off.

Are you able to show us the terms of your plan? The reason I ask is that I was offered what turned out to be a "trash plan", and the sort of things that aren't being grandfathered are rejected because they don't meet a minimum standard of care. In my case, a catastrophic injury such as in an auto wreck would not have been covered significantly.

The lady who famously confronted Obama on this issue had a plan that limited its payout to a few hundred dollars.

There were two sorts of plans available: There was a company that sold a "trash plan" and sent a sales person to my home. This plan was not written to provide useful medical coverage for a catastrophic condition such as an auto accident with severe injury. Basically, it was a "feel good about being insured until you try to use it" plan which had the main purpose of producing income for a fraudster. I am very glad that such things are being prohibited now because I know there are lots of people who are not as careful readers of terms as I am.

The second was priced so prohibitively high that it seemed to be intended to deter the customer from purchase.

California's exchange is well capable of providing a mere 7 Million registrations and was not ever having problems while the Federal site was the subject of so much news controversy.

I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage! I operate my own company and have previously only had access to insurance through my wife's employer. All of my family, my wife, my son, and I, have each individually been rejected by private insurers for what was esentially medical trivia. In my son's case, it was because he took a test they didn't like even though he passed it.

Not everyone understands the B.S. that private insurers were permitted to put people through.

Of course not. You'd have to prove the existence of a soul scientifically before you could even start to answer such a question.

It would be no different than asking a zoologist about the mating patterns of the one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater. All research is built upon the foundations of prior research; as there is no scientific evidence for a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater, there is no logical place to start in trying to deterring what it's mating patterns might be like.

You have to be careful with such statements, as they're the sorts of arguments people of faith like to try to use against science (i.e.: "But science can't prove/disprove X", where X is some construct for which there is no scientific basis in the first place, but which the speaker treats as a given). This is a fallacious line of argument, one which nobody can ever actually learn anything from.

Yaz

This is just a mountain made out of a molehill by leftists who are fans of the government of Cuba ...

False dichotomy. Rejecting A does not mean accepting B.

... and don't like when Western governments try to undermine it.

See above.

I have news for them: doing things like this is the intelligence agencies' *job*.

Just because someone is paid to do something does not mean that anyone has to support that.

They're supposed to spy; that's why they're called spy agencies, and Cuba couldn't be a more deserving target.

Since Cuba is not a threat to the USofA in any way that statement is incorrect. There are many ways Cuba could be "a more deserving target".

If Cuba doesn't do such things itself, it's only because of lack of budget in these post-Soviet days, not lcak of scruples.

Circular reasoning. And you even admit that Cuba is not doing the same to the USofA.

But I wouldn't like it if Cuba dropped bombs on us either, yet I'm not foolish enough to say that it's immoral to drop bombs on another country.

That entirely depends upon how YOU define YOUR "morality".

Interesting thanks.

strings says I have the user-space component on my system, but it's been a long time since I used it so I didn't realize the kernel-support might have gone away.

Actually iptables does have support for matching based on the process. You might have run commands that include "-m recent", or similar. The "-m" is used to specify a module-name, and there are many matching modules available and included by default.

For example on a CentOS system you might allow your webserver to make outgoing SMTP connections via something fun like this: "iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --cmd-owner httpd --dest-port 25 -j ACCEPT". (Why CentOS? Because it matches the command against HTTPD. On Debian systems the webserver process is more typically called 'apache2'.)

Hope that helps.

It's up to the editor when they run the replies. But I promise to answer mine.

Yes, I will answer the interview questions as soon as the editor gets them together.

If you have a specific question, you can always reach me via email to bruce at perens dot com or phone 510-4PERENS. Email usually works better.