When the Gov is paying all of the bills it can really drive down prices

That's why all those tanks and fighter jets and aircraft carriers are so CHEAP!

Or alternatively, consider the US university system prices when the government started providing more money (in the form of loans) to students who otherwise couldn't afford college. Yes, that's not the only factor, but an increase in the demand for something, especially by giving out money for that thing, will likely increase that things price, not lower it.

A person or group of people suing a private company falls under none of them.

It falls under the first of them, in the appellate form. SCOTUS would not re-try the case or anything, but could consider the application of law(s) used in the case and whether those laws are compatible with the constitution.

I think we're probably saying effectively the same thing, just in different ways.

SCOTUS only hears cases that related to either lawsuits involving the government or government officials, or matters of law/legality (including constitutional/civil rights).

The second part of that is correct, though the first is not. Any cases could come before the Supreme Court, though a great many will involve the government (executive branch) in some way. This is kind of a selection bias, though, because the government has the resources to appeal (or fight appeals) all the way to the Supreme Court, and because the government is a party in a great many court cases (all criminal cases, for example).

Important cases do tend to involve the government, though, since they establish what the government can or cannot do, which affects all of us.

[ IANAL, so any or all of this could be wrong, but I think it is correct ]

with many asking when "Papers, please?" will become the standard mantra when trying to go anywhere

I guess you haven't flown in the US in the last couple of decades, as showing your "papers" to a government agent is now standard practice (and has been for a while). ISTR that the TSA wanted to expand into train stations, too, but I don't know if that ever happened.

I'd at least like a more secure way to validate my identity, something that is not so simple for criminals to fake.

This is one of my personal pet peeves whenever I have to use Windows. Try having multiple overlapping Putty windows up and not getting confused. I'm not sure what causes it, but some windows don't even have the single black pixel border. Windows Explorer (the file browser) is the worst with this, if you have two of those overlapping. Worse, there's not even (AFAIK) a setting to restore window borders.

Both of those examples have Wikipedia pages:

Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement lists several active organizations pushing for Hawaiian independence
Texas Succession Movements lists many efforts over the years

There was a failed bill in 2023 in the Texas legislature to have a state wide referendum on secession: Texas Independence Referendum Act. It wasn't popular enough to even get a hearing, and it's not clear a state can legally secede from the US (there was a whole war over that sort of thing), but it's not like the proponents were put in a camp.

The US has plenty of people with crazy ideas. We don't jail them unless they appear violent or dangerous, such as advocating hurting or killing people. I think that's because we realize that we all have ideas that someone else would consider crazy.

Your referenced story is about Elon calling someone else a "pedo guy" in a tweet that was later deleted, getting sued for defamation in the US, and the jury finding Musk not liable, mostly due to lack of evidence (the plaintiff's legal team was "unable to prove their case and should have focused more on the evidence" according to the jury foreman). Maybe try reading your references before posting in the future?

I was curious, as I had never heard about these educational claims, so I did some brief research. See Wikipedia on Musk's Education. There does seem to be some conflicting claims of when degrees were awarded, but it appears the University of Pennsylvania did give him Bachelor's degrees in Physics and Economics. He was also admitted to a graduate program at Stanford, but did not enroll. That probably falls short of what most people think of as "dropping out" (i.e., going then leaving), but it's not too far off.

IMHO, the person who actually pulls the trigger is more responsible for a death than someone who orders them to. Legally they are the same, but to my mind, the actual assassin is more responsible because they could chose not to pull the trigger. This is different in a military & war situation, though, as soldiers are not allowed to defy legal orders from their superiors. But we aren't talking about the military here.

Can you elaborate more on the policies and orders that Brian Thompson gave that directly caused so many deaths? Even one death?

Did UnitedHealthcare under his direction engineer some kind of virus and release it causing a global pandemic killing millions and then he denied those infected treatment or something?

Or did this policy say something like "we're not going to pay for organ transplants for elderly people with three other conditions who probably wouldn't survive the transplant surgery anyway"?

If there were evidence of UHC policies or orders from Brian Thompson that did substantially contribute or cause even a single death, he should (and I hope would) have been prosecuted. For manslaughter at the least, but possibly murder. But I assume such evidence doesn't exist. If it does exist, please tell me so I know. Has to be something verifiable, not just hand-wavy "it's well known" or the like. That's just a conspiracy theory.

A policy of "we're not going to pay out more than the maximum specified in the insurance contract" doesn't count, as no one would expect insurance to pay out more than the maximum.

Of course, even if Brian Thompson was guilty of such crimes as some of history's greatest butchers, it still doesn't make shooting him right. But I would concede that shooting someone who used health care to kill hundreds of human beings, was somehow immune from legal prosecution, and intended to keep doing it might be morally (though not legally) justifiable.

This whole discussion is very hypothetical, so why do you think that someone is "legally obligated to pay" for anything? Anything like that is going to depend on very specific circumstances.

I don't think I'm up anyone's ass, any more than you believe in magical medical dust that just heals anyone of anything. That's not how things work in the real world. Medicine is a finite resource, and you cannot obligate random people to provide it to you for free. That's called slavery and theft. So you need money to pay for medicine.

Money to pay for medicine is also a finite resource. And paying for unnecessary or ineffective treatments for patient A means there is less money to pay for necessary and effective treatments for patient B. Profits do come into things, but even a non-profit insurance will only have a finite amount of resources. And you don't want to hear that you can't get treated because you got sick in December and all the money for the year was spent by October.

And no where did I assume that decisions on what sort of health care should be available to any given patient would have to be done by an evil corporation. It could just as much be done by an evil government. Would it be better or worse if Luigi killed a government bureaucrat or the head of a government health care agency because they deny care to people in general? Of course, it would be an horrific murder in either case.

I do agree with you, the insurer should pay what they are supposed to pay. But this story isn't about any case where an insurer isn't doing that. It's somehow about how insurance companies just do that in the general sense, with no specifics. I bet there ARE hundreds if not thousands of those specific cases. OTOH, there are probably hundreds of millions of cases in the US alone where the insurer IS paying what they are supposed to.

But as bad as those cases are, they are still not to the same level as shooting someone in cold blood. THAT IS WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. No one is saying that insurance company policies to deny people what they are owed (should they exist) are good or even legal (depending on the specifics). But shooting people to death is one of the worst things you could do to another person. If I have to keep explaining that to people, I would submit that it is those people who have their heads somewhere generally shouldn't be.

The problem is that denial of healthcare is not really much different from assassination if it leads to death

You really don't understand the difference between a sin of commission and a sin of omission, do you? One is actively doing bad things, like shooting someone in the back. The other is refusing to do a good thing that would help someone else. Sins of omission can be pretty bad, but generally, sins of commission are considered to be worse, and from a legal perspective most of our laws are designed to deal with them. For example, something like negligence would be a sin of omission because it is not doing the good thing you should have been doing.

Why is this important? It means that your statement is a false equivalence. Shooting someone to death is much worse than refusing to pay for someone's health care. All health care comes with some sort of cost -- the doctors' time, materials needed, maybe even prioritizing one patient over another (like in a triage situation). Of course there is a spectrum, but at what point is the cost too high? It seems reasonable to give someone who has a headache an asprin, but should we spend a million dollars to try something that might extend the patient's life a month?

I don't personally have all the answers. These are complicated ethical and philosophical questions. But it is important to remember that no health care is free. It is just a question of who pays for it. And if there is wasteful spending (i.e., doing things that don't provide good value), then someone (maybe society overall) is hurt. Sometimes, it is the shareholders of an insurance company (could be you if you have a 401k). Or maybe it is the next patient who can't get health services because their insurer went bankrupt.

So yes, these are complicated issues, and they are VERY different from shooting someone in the back because you don't like CEOs.

btw, this post comes off like I'm defending insurance companies, which is unfortunate because I think insurance is in general a terrible way to pay for health care. I was just so appalled at your equating of cold blooded murder with difficult choices that would have to be made regardless of how we provide health care that I had to say something.

Even natural disaster warnings are abused in the US. A couple of months ago I got two such warnings while driving to work about Hurricane Milton. TBF I was in the path of Milton, but it wasn't going to arrive for a couple of days, and hurricanes are big things that everyone knows about in advance. I didn't need multiple cell phone warnings about the hurricane (while I was driving causing a potential distraction, though I didn't look at them until I arrived at work to see what they were).

I had deliberately left that class of warnings on thinking it might be useful, and like you said it can be, but not if they are abused. And now those warnings are disabled on my phone, too.

DST only really makes even a modicum of sense at a certain latitude band. That band is probably from about 30 degrees to 50 degrees or so. Maybe a little outside that range. But go too close to the equator or poles and DST doesn't do much besides annoy people.

Unfortunately, the majority of CONUS is in that latitude band, so a lot of people who live there think that DST is a good idea, so it continues year after year.

Interestingly, time zones themselves tend to drift west of their natural locations. Take a look at this world map of time differences between local and solar time. The value is essentially what time is it when the sun is at its highest point in the sky compared to noon. +2 means 2pm, -2 means 10am. That map shows the difference in standard (non-DST) time. Add another hour for DST. But you can see how wacky some time zones are. The UK and France are basically north/south of each other, but France is an hour later (and in the same time zone as Poland). Same thing with Argentina and Bolivia. Of course China is just crazy having only one time zone for a country that spans 5 natural time zones, and is also not that far from the equator.

What's my point? Probably nothing other than that people and societies are very weird and irrational about time and our clocks. I always hope for rationality, but never expect it. :)

You might be surprised. I for one am probably going to do something this November I've never done in my life -- vote for Trump. Not sure if this will get downmodded, but let me explain some of the reasons why, in no particular order.

1. The economy was much better under the last Trump administration than it is now. I'm not sure if it is coincidence, but somehow the economy under Trump actually worked. The current administration is just obsessed with spending larger and larger amounts of government money in an effort to curry favor with the voters, but that just leads to more inflation.

2. I know it is somewhat cliche, but yes the border is a factor. Strict adherence to the law isn't always good, and our immigration system probably needs some changes, but we do need to control immigration and cannot just let anyone and everyone cross the border. Immigration in small numbers is generally good. Too much, though, will overwhelm the culture of the host country. Finding that balance is hard, but I think the current Biden approach is too far.

3. Media lies. The mainstream media in this country has been consistently pro-Democrat party, and very much anti-Trump. Going back to 2016 when they pushed the fake Russian collusion conspiracy theory, to 2020 when they hid information on Hunter Biden's laptop and generally convinced me that Biden was just a nicer person than Trump (I now think they are both pretty average with some good and some bad). More recently, the media was definitely complicit in covering up Biden's unfortunate mental decline. Basically, they've burned a lot of bridges with me, to the point that I don't really trust them much more than the average Twitter (or /.) post. They could be right, but they could also be wrong or just plain lying.

4. Democrat party pushing censorship. This one really cinched it for me. For a long time the Democrat party has been very anti-2nd amendment (anti gun ownership). I'm not very comfortable with only the government owning all the guns, but it wasn't a deal breaker for me. But now they are coming after free speech, which is. Kamala Harris recently talked about needing to limit some people "free speech privileges". She doesn't even believe Americans have a free speech right, just a "privilege". The Democrats feel the need to control what people hear so they don't think the wrong things. This just isn't acceptable to me, and I cannot vote for any Democrat while it is true.

5. Somehow, the Democrat party has become the party of the rich elite and the Republican party has become the party of the working class. Also, the Democrats are pro-war and the Republicans are anti-war. Weird.

6. The Democrats in general put way too much emphasis on a person's skin color or gender. Kamala Harris is only the VP because Biden promised to select a black woman to be his VP (way back when he was running against Trump). She was not as qualified as other people, but she had the right skin color and gender. I grew up at a time when everyone was equal was the mantra, so that influences how I look at the world, and I try to look at people as people, not diversity quotas. btw, Biden's mistake was saying out loud his intention to select a black woman, as that forever characterized his selection by that.

7. Kamala Harris herself. She has not impressed me with anything she has said or done. Doesn't mean she would necessarily be bad, just that she isn't impressive herself. There is no reason to vote FOR her. And I suspect most people are voting AGAINST Trump than FOR Harris.

This post is getting long, so I'll wrap it up. This is entirely my opinion and how I see the world. You may disagree, and I suspect many will. There are lots of things I don't like about Trump (I don't think the environment will be improved under him, for example), but on balance I think he is the better candidate.

IMHO, the biggest problem is that SSNs are kind of treated like private data when in many situations they are public data. My SSN identifies me uniquely (or it should), but it cannot prove that the person with it is me. But often companies use the SSN to do the latter, which is where the problem comes in. Of course, they do that because they don't have something else that could be used. So various institutions need to trust that someone that has my SSN is me, even though there's no way to know that for sure.

Trying to keep an SSN secret is like trying to keep your username secret. What would be useful is a better authentication -- effectively a oassword for your SSN.

This could be done by getting everyone to establish a password (a secret) and when a bank wants to authenticate someone, that person could go to a website, enter their SSN and secret password and get back a short code they could give to the bank. The bank could then confirm the SSN + code at the same website (and the code could expire after a period of time). Or any number of other protocols, but the idea would be you would never give the secret out, and you could even change it as desired without having to change your SSN.

But the point is we need to separate the identification from the authentication aspects.