I wish there were more patients like you who actually wanted generics. The way I figure, the more [insurance company] money is wasted on a more expensive drug that does the same thing as a cheaper generic drug, the less money is available to treat another patient (whose care then got denied by the insurer); or the sooner that insurer will raise rates and cause another employer to drop insurance coverage for their "team members". Unfortunately, for a large of patients, the only question they have is "Will my insurance cover it?", and if the answer is yes, then they don't care about the cost.

Highly speculative, and likely not the case. There was an 11% decrease in requests. I would expect a substantial jump in the number of requests if the right wing press were trying to skew the numbers.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of businesses running ie6 internally, so if you are (or work for) a software vendor that happens to sell/distribute/support web apps it's still a big consideration.

Cytoman -- I have to disagree with your assertion that your doctor didn't know what a standard deviation was. Your own account of the original story belies what you are saying. You said he wanted your blood sugar within 1 standard deviation of the mean. He had the essence of it when he told you that meant that the test value was within the first 1/3 of the values off the mean. As you know, the 1st standard deviation has approximately 1/3 of the values above the mean and 1/3 of the values below the mean. So what did you really want him to say. Did you want him to write you a formula?
Your endocrinologist just wanted to make sure your blood sugar wasn't too high. You wanted to talk about standard deviations.
He probably wanted to talk about making sure your diet was OK and your medications were at the right dose etc. Weren't those the things that were supposed to really matter at your appointment?

Except the only people with enough time on their hands (artists, welfare, ACORN workers, etc) to make tens of thousands of requests tend to be Obama supporters...

Stupid troll.

Young Republicans clubs? Out of work blue-collar Republicans who feel empowered by becoming teabaggers (and I personally know quite a few of those)?

Agreed. Yet another reason that the insurance model does not apply well to health care.

It isn't all it's cracked up to be. For instance, I have pet insurance to cover vet bills for my dog. Vet bills can get expensive, you know. The company I got the policy from publishes their benefit schedule online for the world to see.

I'm glad that they do it, but I have to say it wasn't very useful for comparison-shopping or even for determining if the policy was worth purchasing in the first place. For instance, the benefit for Arrhythmia is $95 for treatment, and $132 for diagnostic testing. I don't know about you, but I have no earthly clue if that is a reasonable payout for Arrhythmia--I don't even know what Arrhythmia is. I don't want to know, either. I'm not googling each and every thing that can go wrong with my dog (4 pages, 2 columns each, small print) just to get a feel for if the policy is worth it.

In the end, I bought the policy because it wasn't too much money, and I figured it would help a bit when my dog got sick, and it has. If she got cancer or something and I couldn't afford tens of thousands of dollars in treatments, I can always put her to sleep. I love her; but she is, in the end, just a dog. Obviously that's not an option with one of my kids, so I'd have to take a decision on human health insurance more seriously.

For me or a family member, I know I'm going to treat whatever they have, so I need a little more protection than "Well, you can have $95+132 for Arrhythmia". I need, "If your family member gets sick, you're not going to lose your house, your car, your savings."

It's a tough problem, but nobody in Washington is serious about solving it. They are only going to make it worse.

Theres a world of difference between having to patch an OS or one of hundreds of products and doing enough testing to push it out to hundreds of millions of customers than just getting a virus definition added to a scanner. Lets not trivialize the patch process for something as complex as windows. If MS's response time scares you then I'm guessing youre petrified by the response time of most vendors, especially Adobe (flash and reader are the most exploited apps currently).

If anything MS is in a good position to produce an AV. MS doesn't have the incentive the third-party AV companies do: that is, to compete on bloaty features and demand yearly subscription rates. MS cant do this to their free product because it hurts the OS if they suddenly get stingy or slow down machines with bloat. MS has show AV companies that users appreciate a lightweight approach. Sophos, Norton, AVG, and the rest can learn from this.

I also see shockingly poor decisions made by third-party AV vendors. The AVG url autofetcher thing, Norton's incredibly poor UI, Norton and Mcafee's shit firewall replacement for the built-in firewall, stupid heuristics that themselves become DOS exploits, etc. MSE doesnt generally engage in these things. Its a lightweight replacement for all of these for the home user. Heck, even the UI is dead simple.

I'd love to see these companies change their stripes and see WinClam advance to on-access scanning. The idea of an AV as a premium service for home users is a ridiculous one. Its basic functionality in the windows world. Even OSX ships with something that keeps a look out for those trojans in pirated copies of photoshop. The AV industry is a mess and MS's move into free home AV was much needed.

You don't like this? --- Well then send your comments to the lawyer for Bank Julius Baer, a Mr. Evan N. Spiegel at mailto:espiegel@lavelysinger.com