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Comment by fivestar | Hacker News Reader

The whole article starts off with bs: First, non-competes are rarely so airtight that a person can't work in their field for another employer. Second, the whole FUD about healthcare is total bs as well--the ACA is screwed up and Americans badly need any replacement that might control costs better. The whole "pre-existing" condition FUD is crap, too, since the new healthcare bill doesn't do away with that "protection". I should add that I don't think it is fair that un-insurable people push their problems onto the rest of us because all that does is bring everyone down! It's nice to think we can look out for our nation's most vulnerable people, but what if we can't do that and maintain viable economic growth? What then?

I didn't even read the rest--the NY Times needs to go out of business if they can't do honest journalism without injecting their anti-Trump agenda into Every. Single. Article.

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First: This is an editorial, not an article.

Assuming you sign a non-compete, whether or not you can work the field for another employer may require you to consult a lawyer which costs you $$$. Your previous employer may try to bully you, or your future employer into terminating your arrangement. While it's true several state have largely neutered non-competes for "Low-wage employees", higher paid professionals still have less freedom.

The ACA is missing a public option and is suffering from insurance markets being actively sabotaged by politicians who want to replace it with their own flavor.

The AHCA only protects you for your pre-existing conditions if you maintain continuous coverage (No gap greater than 63 days in the prior year), something that millions of people experience every year. This also means, during any significant recession, millions will lose insurance.

The ACA is great. Sure as a self employed person i can't afford the maszive premiums, ($22,000 a year for a $5,000 deductible) but I simply don't pay premiums. If I, or anyone in my family, gets seriously ill one year, we can sign up for ACA coverage at year end and they can't refuse us because it doesn't restrict pre-existing conditions.

And until that happens, I let the suckers pay premiums.

Edit: Corrected my misuse of AHCA.

I believe you mean the ACA. With the AHCA your plan won't work out so well.

But here's the flaw in your premise, sure your new condition will be covered. But I had gall stones, needed surgery, it couldn't wait long. I had two weeks to get insurance using your strategy, feasible.

Then I had a toe torn off. Surgery that night. There's no opportunity to get insurance, and the cost was (without insurance) probably $10-15k (the hospital, the surgeon, the ambulance). Unless you're calling and getting insurance on the ride in, you're on the hook for a large portion of that, unless you don't value your credit score or lie to them about your name and social.

You are right, I meant ACA.

I actually have whats called "short term insurance". It's only allowed for 6 months, but because of that and because it can set pricing based on pre-existing conditions I get roughly the same benefits of the $1800 ACA package for only $200 a month.

The negative is I have to reapply every 6 months, so there if I get gallstones or my toe torn off, it's fine unless it falls right on the end of the 6 months.

Since all of these policies have $5K deductibles per person, and $10k per family, I"m paying for most of those situations out of pocket anyways. The benefit of the insurance is for really serous expensive problems, which will tend to last until I can get ACA. And that the insurance company will knock down the hospital bill to what they deem acceptable, saving me lots of money there.

> If I, or anyone in my family, gets seriously ill one year, we can sign up for AHCA coverage at year end and they can't refuse us because it doesn't restrict pre-existing conditions.

The continuous care incentive mandates a 30% premiun surcharge if you didn't have continuous coverage, and the AHCA also allows states to obtain waivers, for insurance within their state, of the rule prohibiting medical underwriting (price discrimination based on pre-existing condition.)

Fine, I''ll pay a premium surcharge then. Because I'm only going back on Obamacare if I have a life threatening illness that will cost far more than $2000 per month to treat for an extended period.

The AHCA is the proposed replacement for the ACA that has passed out of the House of Representatives (I would guess it won't survive unchanged in the Senate).

There haven't been any plans priced under it as law, so you can't be quoting a meaningful price there.

The likely scenario in the AHCA would be that an uninsured with a preexisting condition would apply for a high risk pool (with who knows what premium) or enjoy the only market plans available, plans regulated in a state convenient for the insurer.

Yep, I meant ACA.

The problem with AHCA is that there aren't enough suckers. Almost everyone would do what you plan on doing, so one person's insurance premiums would have to be enough to almost completely cover a very sick person's medical bills, so insurance effectively wouldn't exist anymore.

That's all great in theory, but if I were you, I would not rely on that plan to save you. When it comes to insurance companies, you are at their mercy. This is experience talking here, do with it as you will. Nothing will bankrupt you faster than not having insurance coverage when you most need it.

The entirety of the NY Times is nothing but one huge editorial.

> I should add that I don't think it is fair that un-insurable people push their problems onto the rest of us because all that does is bring everyone down!

May you and your extended family continue to enjoy the perfect health with which you have all been blessed.

> It's nice to think we can look out for our nation's most vulnerable people, but what if we can't do that and maintain viable economic growth? What then?

I dunno, take down the statue of liberty I guess?

When you talk about un-insured people pushing their problems onto the rest of us, well that would happen without the laws anyway. Those problems generally reverberate throughout a society, so why not just treat them with laws? Also, non-competes may not be airtight, but how many people do you expect to even attempt to legally challenge the non-compete clauses enforced by these multi-billion dollar corporations?

> First, non-competes are rarely so airtight that a person can't work in their field for another employer.

I assume you've based this conclusion on your extensive experience reading noncompetes from many different verticals in many different markets, and not just what the average tech worker sees.

> The whole "pre-existing" condition FUD is crap, too, since the new healthcare bill doesn't do away with that "protection".

No, it simply makes it impossible to take advantage of any protections by allowing insurance companies to charge any price they deem fit to the most vulnerable patients.

> Americans badly need any replacement that might control costs better.

I don't disagree with you here, but neither does the AHCA. And its glaringly obvious to anyone that knows healthcare policy well that the ACA has plenty of room to be adjusted to correct inadequacies. The "Repeal and Replace" mantra on the far right is just political gamesmanship. If Republicans really cared about free markets, they would have brought to the table measures that helped create an educated market, like pricing transparency and enforcing laws against anticompetitive behavior.

> I should add that I don't think it is fair that un-insurable people push their problems onto the rest of us because all that does is bring everyone down! It's nice to think we can look out for our nation's most vulnerable people, but what if we can't do that and maintain viable economic growth? What then?

Man, I gotta hand it to you, this is some Grade A supertrolling here. In the span of just a few sentences you've managed to combine fear, a begrudged sympathy, and a false dichotomy into what passes for an argument, flimsy though it is.

Maybe read up on the idea of the veil of ignorance[1] for that first point. Had you put it a different way I might agree with you in principle—we should stop talking about healthcare as insurance and start talking about how to provision healthcare for everyone. Its not insurance when everyone is guaranteed to need it at some point in their lives. There's nothing in doing so that demands we limit economic growth—the US is for all intents and purposes the only developed country in the world that fails achieve this.

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Veil_of_ignorance

Yes, it's not like the ACA isn't stunningly badly designed. I used to insure my family for $400 a month until it banned the use of pre-existing conditions for determining rates, and now the cheapest available insurance is $1800 a month, which my family can't afford.

Remember when Obama said we could keep our existing plans?

Edit: corrected my misuse of AHCA.

Please stop confusing the ACA with the AHCA.

That was entirely by design. You might not have liked it, but it was an expected outcome.

You're criticizing the ACA. The AHCA is the current Republican proposal passed by the House.

I see the "I don't disagree" bit a lot on here. You mean you agree, then, correct? Then why not just say "I agree!" Is that so hard for you?

I'm not "super trolling" I really want an answer as to why my insurance doubled in the past few years while all I got was a bunch of bs shoved up my ass, which is all I ever get!

"the US is for all intents and purposes the only developed country in the world that fails achieve this"

I disagree with that statement--I don't think you get how bad healthcare is even in Europe. Yes, you can get "free" treatment there, but your taxes run 60%, unemployment is ridiculously high, and the outcomes are no better! Where is the magical answer that socialized medicine provides?

Here's an idea--let's outlaw insurance completely. I look at my monthly budget and between car insurance, homeowner's insurance, health insurance, and two life insurance policies, I'm seeing a pretty good bit of my take home going up in smoke here. It's bullshit--my biggest takeaway in all of this is that insurance is simply bullshit.

100% of your takehome, the takehome of your children and the takehome of their children is going up in smoke in perpetuity if you ever get sick without insurance.

"Well then just dont get sick" is a bit of a stupid way of life. Getting sick is rarely optional.

Blue collar workers get injured. Thats just the nature of their jobs. If you work in a coal mine, your lung is fucked up, at some point. If you work in construction, it fucks up your back.

Wishing for medical care to be outlawed is not just a bit retarded.

Even if you're one of those wholly arrogant retards who think that people who "didnt manage to not be blue collar" - someone has to do it. Its conceptually impossible for the entire population to make it big. Even if every indivdual had the "chance" to be a millionaire, not all of them can be.

Insurance is just about the most basic necessity you can think of, to maintain society.

Or you can just solve it with outlawing insurance, forcing everyone who ran a streak of bad luck into crippling debt and then imprisoning them. Thats what they did in the middle ages. We progressed past that for the better.

Yes, you can get "free" treatment there, but your taxes run 60%, unemployment is ridiculously high, and the outcomes are no better! Where is the magical answer that socialized medicine provides?

I'm American, and I live in northern Europe. I no longer fear getting hurt and going broke nor the ills of old age. Know why? Taxes pay for health care.

Know where that magical answer is? In the diabetic kids. The elderly not choosing between medicine and food. In anyone that gets in an honest accident. Those that develop mental illness or MS.

And I'm not sure where you get this information about outcomes. Every system has its flaws, but at least this one isn't stealing hope from folks and at least tries to take care of their ills.

> I see the "I don't disagree" bit a lot on here. You mean you agree, then, correct? Then why not just say "I agree!" Is that so hard for you?

Ok then, I disagree: a replacement is not needed. What is needed is to amend the original law to address shortcomings.

> I really want an answer as to why my insurance doubled in the past few years while all I got was a bunch of bs shoved up my ass, which is all I ever get!

I won't speak to your particular case because there are too many variables at play between individual markets. One problem is that you don't know what would have happened had the market, such as it was, been left alone in 2008. I know I'd have been screwed several times over in that case—my provider tried to rescind coverage on my 2yo son just after the child provisions took effect, and the ACA prevented that.

Additionally, (and I'm assuming you lean right given your argument) its disingenuous for the GOP and GOP voters to pretend that the ACA is problematic on its merits, when they have been doing everything in their power to ensure it fails for the last 9 years. States that refused the medicaid expansion have only themselves to blame for the substantial number of problems in those states. You can't yell "because FREEDOM" and cut your nose off to spite your face, then complain because you got a nosebleed.

> The whole "pre-existing" condition FUD is crap, too, since the new healthcare bill doesn't do away with that "protection".

Yes, it does, because it allows states to get waivers of that protection.

Can you name a country you would like the US to be more like that doesn't have socialized medicine?

It seems to work for the whole, entirety of the rest of the developed (and most of the developing) world, because the truth is socialized medicine is cheaper and more efficient.

Further, even if it wasn't cheaper, the value gained from a more efficient allocation of labor (due to the reduced friction from healthcare concerns) more than repays the costs of the healthcare.

I'm getting sick of people advocating inefficient capitalism as a good economic policy -- and that's all you're doing with your weird, social darwinist approach.

I'm not cool with it no matter how many countries do it and the reason why is that it takes your very freedom right out of your own hands and puts it into the hands of bureaucrats. The US isn't perfect, and we have allowed oligarchs to run free and do terrible things to us, but the answer is not "more government"--we can't deal with the huge government we have now! So the argument "well, everyone else is doing it" overlooks how bad healthcare is around the world and how nations whitewash their mortality rates to hide the truth.

You phrased it as an economic argument. I'm glad you're being honest that it's not one.

However, it's not taking your freedom away -- it's trading one kind of freedom for another: the freedom to not pay for collective welfare for the freedom from your (or your dependent's) health being used coercively during labor negotiations or to extract rents.

On balance, I think that the freedom to have less social responsibility is less useful than the freedom to be healthy regardless of employment status or job transitions, particularly since it saves me money.

I have more money to spend (because of less rent extraction from healthcare) and am freer to pursue my economic goals (because I am less dependent on an employer for my health).

To me, it simply sounds like I'm freer by having socialized medicine.

With the UK solution for example you can still get private health insurance if you feel like it and many of the better off do.

You can just look at UK and you can see that things can be done better. Or Canada...

The NHS is constantly on the verge of collapse.

But never actually collapses.

It hasn't yet, since the taxpayer props it up.

Of course the taxpayer props it up. It is a taxpayer funded system. That is like saying that the taxpayer "props up" the military or the court system.

You can downgrade the military to some extend if costs keep rising, what of the NHS?

You can obviously (i) downgrade the range of treatments that the NHS will pay for, (ii) increase its funding, or (iii) do a do a bit of both.

When you can no longer do (ii), you start to do (i).

But since no one wants either, the pressure usually ends up on doctors. If there is an exodus from the public sector, instead of a slow downgrade, then it will collapse.

edit: the original point is that the US should have a system like the UK - but is the NHS even sustainable?

The NHS is more sustainable than the current US system by virtually any conceivable measure. In fact, the one thing that every political party in the US agrees on is that the system cannot continue in its present form.

The problem of rising healthcare costs is a real one, not an artefact of a particular system, and there is no easy fix for it.

>honest journalism

It's quite clearly an opinion piece.

The NY Times editors chose to print that versus something else. They only ever print items related to their agenda.

That's just a dumb tautology though.

Imagine their agenda is to post the perfectly ideal set of articles. Success of that agenda would be the perfect outcome for their readers and your statement would still be true.

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