Obamacare seems to have only helped a little under 3% of the people who did not have coverage previously.

The NBC News article says that 5 million people had insurance who did not have it before. If that's only 3% of the people who didn't have insurance, it would require that approximately 166 million people--half of the country--not have insurance before.

What happened was there was a drop in the uninsured rate of about 3% from around 15% to around 12%. That's about 20% of the people who did not have insurance before now having it. As the penalties go up, the uninsured rate is expected to go down even further.

ERs generally cannot turn away emergency patients or deny them care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). Even if it appears that they have shown up in a non-emergency state, they still have to be assessed, and they are sometimes turned away for minor things, or at least given prescriptions that they have to pay for and which the hospital is not required to provide. The goal was to combat patient dumping that hospitals were doing for patients that couldn't pay even though they had been severely wounded or were in the midst of labor.

The issue the AC was talking about it a bit different, though. People with insurance (or some other means to pay) can generally go to a doctor when symptoms start to arise instead of only going to the ER when it becomes an emergency situation. This isn't someone who has a sore throat for a few days, but people who have cancer or other illnesses, and by the time the ER becomes a viable option, they're often too far along to treat, and can't pay for the emergency care they do get to stabilize them, which can require ICU or CCU. That cost then gets absorbed by the hospital and passed on to everyone else instead of a much lower cost being covered earlier on when early access might have saved the patient at lower cost.

Well to be fair the deep-red state Kentucky had a very successful rollout of Obamacare (rebranded as "Kynect"), including it's own health insurance exchange AND medicaid expansion -- the whole Obamacare enchilada.

Under Obamacare, the federal insurance exchange was never intended to serve the entire country. In fact ideally nobody would have to use it, because states were supposed to set up their own exchanges that would better reflect the needs of their citizens than a federal one would. If you are forced to use the federal exhange, it's because politicians who run your state made that choice for you.

Of course some states have had their own exchange rollout disasters -- including blue states like Maryland and Oregon. If you're experienced with this kind of project you'd expect that. But others have had very successful rollouts, including a handful of red states like Kentucky.

I'm looking at your 'roids. Happy now?

"Send in the drones!" Why not fight drones with drones?

I feel like a way better attack vector would be a computer controlled kite. Between a string reaching all the way to the ground almost invisible to see, and a bunch of long streaming tails from the kite to foul rotors - you could do pretty well, if you can find the drone.

I would think though it would be more effective to hire goons to hang around anywhere open and with a line of sight to the area over the filming. Kind of a different take on the XKCD $5 wrench encryption cracking strategy.

These aren't the drones you're looking for.

This makes me wonder how the White House and other high-profile government locations' security staffs deal with this issue. It's got to be a problem there as well, probably moreso as a drone could be armed, not just doing movie set recon. I have to think that there must have been recent incidents, but I've not seen any news accounts.

Well, except for the bump at "100 bpm or greater". I didn't realize so many squirrels read slashdot.

Really? Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0. Yeah, it was a while ago and some things have improved, but most of the issues remain and I doubt another focus group study would find significantly different results.

The problem is that designing a UI that makes it easy for people who don't know anything about cryptography or security to achieve useful cryptographic security is really, really hard. Almost as hard as educating everyone about cryptography and security enough that they can achieve useful cryptographic security with PGP.

Java did that years ago. Notice how it destroyed Microsoft?

Hmmm, thats a long way from Finland.

Not according to iMaps

Go into the bankruptcy paper-work business. If you ever have to file bankruptcy, you'll be ready.

<spooky music> That's what the NSA wants you to think </spooky music>

2075: "A tab? How quaint"

BSOD DNA=TMNJ