Especially when it covers non-citizens and people who are illegally in the country.
We could at least have a little compromise by making health care more tiered so that citizens, payers and people with insurance receive better health care than others. Make a list of services that will only be provided to payers and automatically push non-payers to the back of the queue.
I'm amazed sometimes the things people say here. The idea of withholding medical care based on citizenship comes very close the criteria for evil, with the drawback that it's largely incorrect, too (non-citizen residents, legal and illegal pay taxes at many levels of government for far less in return comparably than citizens).
What is the maximum amount we should spend to save a human? A million? A billion?
Should society absorb any cost to save a human even if it gets exponentially more expensive with each subsequent procedure? Or should there be a cutoff where you are basically told "Sorry, you've exceeded the threshold and have to either pay for it yourself or die"
It would seem that the cost of being stingy here is that the medical care system is more expensive for less performance in the US. Cut off your nose to spite your face exemplified.
This is a non-sequitur, and not related to the original topic which was: Should non-citizens be disallowed from receiving ER care without paying for it themselves?
Additionally, we already had that system in place, it was called "lifetime limits" and it was typically $1-2m on the best healthcare plans.
I'm not a citizen. I come here legally. I pay my taxes. I pay for my insurance. This is not the minority case by the way, all your H1b colleagues as well as F1/J1 students are like this. Should we still die because we're not American citizens?
> I would view that as a horrible compromise, because it would result in poor people receiving worse health care than wealthy people.
It's impossible for that not to be the case. It's even the case in countries with single payer, because rich people who live there and don't want to wait for an appointment or want something that isn't covered will just go to a country that can give them what they want and open their wallet. Even without leaving the country, they can hire private nurses and so on when they aren't covered by the national health system.
Moreover, why is this supposed to be a problem? "Money buys things" is the purpose of money.
There are things a rational national health system wouldn't pay for because they aren't economical, but a rich person would buy for themselves for much the same reasons they buy a Tesla instead of a Dodge. Which means they have a safer car because they have more money. Should we prohibit expensive safer cars because poor people can't afford them?
I think the idea being that generally, two people going to the same ER one being broke and the other being loaded are going to get a similar level of emergency care. Long term maybe not but you aren't going to get the bronze plan of gunshot care while the guy next to you is enjoying platinum.
I think most people believe its morally repugnant that your value as a human being is related to how much money you have. Because choosing to serve one person over another based on money rather than their medical need is exactly that.
Ie: I broke my toe and I have insurance, so I get ER treatment, but that guy who has no insurance and is internally bleeding to death from a street stabbing (and is hispanic, doesn't have insurance and maybe isn't american?) is pushed behind me in line. That is the real life scenario that at least one person is advocating here.
I agree, I think that ER's work more or less like that now (not necessarily the rest of the hospital), I'm concerned for the future this not always being the case.
I think as the governments become more starved (not made more efficient by reducing costs, starved by simply cutting funding without optimizing it logically) that important government services will have to replaced with tiered private companies. As regulations are removed, the same thing occurs.
What if a speed of ambulance was built into your insurance? How do you know what response time is right for you and your family (as it will be framed)?
>Although I would prefer to concentrate on the 10s of millions of non-citizens and illegal aliens who receive tax payer funded health care.
I feel like I should remind you here that many non-citizens are actually tax-payers. Taxes are paid in many different ways, but let's forget about that here for a second and realize that many non-citizens actually come here legally to work.
A blanket statement like that really doesn't mean anything. Same arguments were given about dreamers using tax-payer money, without realizing many of them actually are tax-payers as well.
Is it really fair to let poor people have health services that they didn't pay for? Is keeping poor people healthy/alive really the best allocation of resources?
Shouldn't triage take into account who is the most profitable so wealthy people can go to the front of the line where they deserve to be?
I mean really, why should my undocumented nanny, house keeper and gardeners be entitled to the same health care that I am?
[Of course, I don't pay them enough to buy health insurance but that's their problem.]
As @gselevator tweeted "I never give money to homeless people. I can't reward failure in good conscience."
Not sure what citizenship has to do with this. As an American traveling in Europe, I received emergency room care. They may have glanced at my passport, but certainly did not ask for any other documents. Nor did they ask for payment.
I dont know your experience as an American, but as an Argentinian I am not allowed to enter Europe without health insurance. They dont let you on the plane without it.
How do they know I'm a citizen? Do they deny care to the unresponsive person in pajammas because they can't be sure if the person isn't a foreigner bilking the US health system?
Neither, I wasn't saying what people deserve, only that so many in this country suffer in far worse jobs, and don't get editorials in the Washington Post about it. My mother worked for decades as a Cashier at Safeway, and before that, as a telephone operator connecting calls at AT&T. Her actual talent: singing, she wanted to be a singer.
By comparison, this HR job was orders of magnitude better. My mom didn't have healthcare provided by her job when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, she had almost no vacation, we lived paycheck to paycheck.
There's no voice given to these people, the truly suffering masses, in the news media. Instead, we hear the suffering of the upper middle class, who has a cushy deskjob, free gourmet food, massages, vacations, bonuses, stock, but finds their job boring. Why are we reading this story in the Washington Post and not the story of the person working 60 hours a week and living at the poverty line?
It's a question of priorities for me, not who deserves what. Every human deserves a fulfilling life, but in the grand scheme of things, the suffering visited on the author of that editorial is one of angst, not basic survival, and he's being given a microphone for grievances of being pampered with benefits.
If a trust fund baby complained he's bored with life because he still has to show up for boring meetings with his trustees, I'm sure we can find some sympathy for his ennui, but first I have to work my way through all the headlines of Puerto Ricans suffering, or those who make my iPhone.
It's impossible for every job task that needs to be done to always be interesting and fulfilling, even engineering jobs. Sometimes there's dirty work that had to be done that just sucks, and someone has to be paid to do it. My point is, if I advertise a job to clean toilets, don't show up and complain that cleaning toilets is boring. I know its boring, but I have to paid someone to do it, or buy self-cleaning Japanese toilets. I've had coding jobs before that were metaphorical equivalent of toilet cleaning, and I hated them, but sometimes you need to make rent. I did the work, hated it, and then went on to other more interesting things (founded a startup). I didn't bother submitting an editorial to a newspaper on the experience. It just seems self indulgent to me.
I didn't mean it in the sense "he is inferior to SWEs", I mean it from the sense that Google is a tech company, and at tech companies, the interesting jobs where new product development happens generally goes to engineers, PMs, product and UI designers.
It would be no different than if I went to work at a Hospital, I'd end up in claims processing or administration probably, and someone could say "he's not a doctor or nurse or medically trained, so of course, he's pushing paper"
To some extent, it's up to you to make your job interesting and fulfilling. If this guy spent 2 years doing HR and it was a grind, then he knew all the pain points and probably how to improve the workflow. Why didn't he take the initiative, get some coworkers together, and try to design a better system rather than wear earplugs eating alone in the cafe?
Google expects and depends on people to take initiative. If my project is not interesting, either I find another team that has a more interesting project, or I invent a project for myself and shop it to cosigners. I'm not supposed to sit here stewing in unhappiness for years waiting for my manager to say "oh, I noticed you aren't being fulfilled. Here's a new project to fulfill you."
It's not that only SWEs matter. Most startups have a technical founder and a non-technical founder. Non-technical skills often matter more than technical ones.
This is the number one skill I've been trying to learn at work. Too many minor decisions add up and severely hurt
productivity if they aren't resolved quickly.
>> It's news when some of the biggest and wealthiest companies in the us do not pay their staff (regardless of work, regardless of contractor status) a livable wage.
> That isn't a reasonable expectation. Morally speaking, companies should be expected to pay market rate for the job and anything above that is charity.
You're seriously equating the unlivable "market rate" with the moral choice? You've got to be trolling.
This is true and it's largely hidden by welfare costs that are shouldered by other taxpayers. If your company isn't paying a living wage then you owe a debt to society because they're literally picking up the tab.
They aren't Facebook employees though, they are employees of a company that provides these types of services for many places.
It's somewhat like FB being responsible for the A/C repairman being paid a fair wage by the HVAC company that Facebook uses to maintain the equipment in their campus.
Semantics. If you're working in Facebook's offices for a large majority of your hours, you're effectively working for Facebook. They've just added the middle man to avoid paying decent wages.
Your HVAC worker who may spend 4 hours a month on the Facebook campus is different from someone whose daily job is to clean Facebook's headquarters.
Building Maintenance and HVAC techs spend a lot more than four hours a month on the campus they support. Or landscaping businesses for example. Or security guards.
I just don't see how the building that you work in defines who your employer is. There's lots of counterexamples for that.
If I own a business, and don't want to have expertise, training, etc, in food service, laundry, security guards, landscaping, etc...I should be able to get a company to do that for me. That company has expertise in hiring, training, regulatory compliance, etc. They are delivering that service to many companies, not just me. Their employees might even be transferred from one client to another. They charge me whatever the going rate for that sort of thing is. They then pay their employees however they do. If they are underpaying their employees, that's an issue, but not one that's my issue to solve. That is, barring some odd thing where my company, specifically, is using some unusual kind of leverage to NOT pay market rates for this service. I see no difference in whether that service happens on my campus or somewhere else.
Employment is not thus defined. If I am a salesman responsible for 1 particularly important client for my company and spend almost all my time at the client's office, am I suddenly the client's employee, and they should pay me decent wages?
Well no, the company would still be a net positive to the employee. Without the company, the employee would be making an even lower wage or unemployed.
So, if I boil down your argument perhaps a bit too much: because everyone else pays a wage that requires someone to work 2-3 jobs to put a roof over their family's head and food in their bellies, it's morally right for Facebook to do the same thing?
Perhaps my own morals are jacked up, but something seems really wrong there.
Morally, Facebook would realize that it has all the power in this situation and use its position to act for the good of everyone involved. Squeezing an employee to see how little you can get away with paying them, especially when this makes their living conditions much worse, is immoral.
Protection through obscurity. If the NSA needs to go through the legal process to access data, the chances of them looking through your data is much lower than if they had unrestricted access. The cost of data inquiry discourages data inquiries.
That doesn't really answer my question though. The problem is that Google is handing over data, not what method is being used to try and access that data.
> recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grad
Targeting specific groups just because of the racial or gender makeup of the group seems inherently wrong to me.
A biology major doesn't give people many relevant skills for programming. If it was a math intensive subject like Physics, Stats or Math, I could see it being more fair and valid.
It's a bit cynical to say that's done simply in the name of gender. There are certainly many talented people who move away from tech because they look at it from the outside and observe that tech "isn't for them". There is nothing "inherently wrong" in correcting some of that unless you willfully ignore how our society came to be.
> There are certainly many talented people who move away from tech
Let's be honest, most biology majors turned programmers aren't oppressed people who had passion for tech but were discouraged from tech by terrible, systemic biases. They're people who either couldn't make it to med school or didn't want to go to med school who realized that there is more $$$ in the tech field than in biology research.
> It's a bit cynical to say that's done simply in the name of gender.
Not really. In this context, that is exactly what the parent was saying. Again, there are many non-CS majors that give people skills more relevant to programming. There isn't much of a reason to specifically recruit biology majors (other than for demographic reasons or if the company software is related to biology).
If you're going to make such a claim, you should provide some sort of proof. By your cynical logic, engineers are no more than nerds who don't have the stones to go into finance--where the money really is.
> There isn't much of a reason to specifically recruit biology majors (other than for demographic reasons or if the company software is related to biology).
I know many talented biology majors who have no interest spending their entire career alongside men smugly assume they "couldn't make it into med school". Or those who actually believe in the work that they're doing. Try telling the hundreds of thousands in research labs working on groundbreaking science like CRISPR that their careers are considered settling.
It has more to do with her political involvement and activism than her gender or race. There will always be people who dislike polarizing political figures.
These massive breaches sort of scare but at the same time sort of relieve me. If everyone has their information leaked, there is a low chance that any one person will be an identity theft victim.
We could at least have a little compromise by making health care more tiered so that citizens, payers and people with insurance receive better health care than others. Make a list of services that will only be provided to payers and automatically push non-payers to the back of the queue.