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.

"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Is Glenn Beck writing the summaries now?

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.

From the vaults:

REAL VIRTUALITY, Seattle, Thursday 2099 (NNN) — Microsoft Corporation has announced a limited one-off extension of availability of its Windows XP operating system to April 2101 after criticism from large customers and analysts. This is the fifty-sixth extension of XP’s availability since 2008.

Through successive releases of Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system, demand for XP has remained an important factor for businesses relying on stable XP-specific software and installations, who have pushed back strongly against the software company’s attempts to move them to later versions. Windows administration skills have become rare in recent years and consultants have demanded high fees. Reviving Windows administrators from cryogenic freezing has proven insufficient to fill the market gap, as almost all begged to work on COBOL instead.

“Windows XP is currently in the extremely very prolonged super-extended support phase and Microsoft encourages customers to migrate to Windows for Neurons 2097 as soon as feasible,” said William Gates V, CEO and great-grandson of the company founder. “Spare change?”

Microsoft Corporation, along with Monsanto Corporation and the RIAA, exists as a protected species in the Seattle Memorial Glass Crater Bad Ideas And Warnings To The Future National Park in north-west Washington on the radioactive remains of what was once the planet Earth, under the protection of our Linux-based superintelligent robot artificial intelligence overlords. Company revenues for 2098 were over $15.