Comcast isn't quite a monopoly, and won't be even if they've merged with Time Warner. That said, the number of choices for cable/internet/phone to a specific person tend to be pretty small ... and sometimes the number of choices is one, but often it's two or three. For example, I live in the suburbs of Austin, and can get service from Time Warner, AT&T, Direct TV and Dish Network. Now, the last two are really only good options for cable and not phone/internet, but even so, there's still two choices for that. And Grande is available in some parts of town (but not where I live), and Google is coming too.

And that said, if enough people get pissed off at a true monopoly, the government has been known to step in and tear them apart. They certainly want to avoid that.

No, the view that they asserted was that it did not violate the Constitution, not anything about the "impression of impropriety".

For the most part, the Supreme Court doesn't rule on if things are right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust -- they rule on if they're allowed or prohibited by the Constitution (or other laws, but most of the time they seem to work based on the Constitution.)

Jeff, I'm sorry that you're paying more. I'm envious that your state is implementing single-payer, though! California considers and rejects the bill every session, so far.

MVP itself is not-for-profit. Interesting that they think the pool in the two states they focus on is now that much more expensive. I can't imagine why.

Thanks

Bruce

To pick a nit, if you require medical attention after an auto accident, typically the at-fault driver's auto policy would need to cover that.

If they are so kind to stick around and your expenses do not exceed the limits.

Certainly such scams existed, but 30 seconds of googling can typically separate the good from the fraud.

The web helps. At the time, I was not able to see the plan until the salesman was present.

I think you are confusing laissez-faire capitalism with freedom. In this particular case the insurers had the task of operating a risk pool, but no incentive to allow any but the lowest risk customer into the pool. Freedom was harmed overall, as a significant number of people had no viable path to medical care.

There are a good number of people who, like you, would feel less encumbered if they were able to live on an island without any civil services and thus without any burden to pay for their fellow man rather than themselves. My surmise is that few of them would survive very long. However, I would encourage you to try if you are able to find such a place. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

I am hardly surprised that insurance companies do not like the situation of having any additional regulation imposed upon them and will raise fees or do anything else they can do to protest and to discredit it.

If you've even hung around the emergency department of a hospital, you will have seen where the real cost of uninsured patients was going. Suddenly this cost is transferred from the hospital to subsidized plans. Ultimately, it should result in better management of the expense.

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.

There's nothing that will protect you against the amount of "0 days" that Windows 7/8/2008/whatever is going to be vulnerable too either. That's what "0 days" pretty much means -- it hasn't been fixed because the people who would fix it have just learned about it, or not learned about it yet at all.

Now, granted, at least if a "0 day" hits Windows 8, Microsoft will probably make a patch for it after a while, where they won't for XP ... so it should eventually be fixed after it's hit "1 day" or "20 day" or "296 day" or whatever status where XP wouldn't ... but don't go thinking that keeping up to date on patches will stop "0 day" exploits.

So what?

That may not be a viable solution, but what he's doing is. He has a usable computer, more secure than most, that does what he needs it to do.

You aren't trying to claim that what he's doing isn't a "viable solution", are you?

And even if he did upgrade ... he'd probably still want to do all that stuff.