With 'Obamacare' Kicking In, Microsoft Sees a Health-Data Windfall 201
curtwoodward writes "Now that President Obama's federal health care reform is past its major political hurdles — and with renewed focus on out-of-control costs in healthcare — companies that sell 'big data' software are licking their chops. The reason: Healthcare has huge piles of information that is being used in new ways, to track patient admissions, spending, and much more. From hospitals to insurance companies, they'll all need new ways of crunching those numbers. It's basically an entirely new field that will dwarf the spending growth in traditional data-heavy industries like finance, retail and marketing, a Microsoft regional sales GM says."
"Big Data" (Score:3, Insightful)
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Is the absolute worst fucking buzzword out there right now. It is a great way to figure out someone is a complete idiot right off the bat.
I usually employ the standard of whether somebody is capable of making a point without resorting to profanity.
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Yet you used profanity in your post.
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I usually employ the standard of whether somebody is capable of making a point without resorting toprofanity.
Re:"Big Data" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"Big Data" and buzzword bingo (Score:2)
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I agree with you whole-heartedly. There may be occasions to use profanity or outbursts of shouting, but those occasions seem to be those which require being intimidating or acting like a rabid dog in order to get the other side to back down. Profanity does not have a place in normal discussion, argument, or debate.
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As a bonus point, I think that "cloud computing" is the worst buzzword out th
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Given that it's two words I'd be tempted to agree.
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People who know the point they want to make use profanity, people who are to stuck up / proper try to talk around the use of swearing and usually end up sounding like a complete idiot.
Personally, I find I'm often more influenced by whether by a native speaker makes frequent basic grammatical errors or not. (e.g. "to" vs. "too").
(And by McKean's law I must have several errors in the sentence above of course.)
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The assumption that someone is likely to make a valid point if his spelling and grammar would be unacceptable in most grade schools is a pretty hard one to make.
Personally, I make allowances for foreigners (who, oddly, frequently are better spellers and write more grammatically than native speakers), and common spelling mistakes based on bad typing (double-striking a key to turn 'to' into 'too' doesn't bother me much, or off-by-one key mistyping, that sort of thing).
But if you don't know the difference
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Being a grammar/spelling pendant reflects badly on the no life having fucking morons that waste their obviously worthless time.
That goes double for the 'don't cuss' festering care bears.
When someones got _nothing_ they attack spelling/grammar/language.
Re:"Big Data" (Score:4, Funny)
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If she's into that, and asks nicely. Won't draw blood under any circumstances.
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too vs to i can forgive (though it should not survive proofreading), but misusing there/they're/their or you're/your is outright inexcusable.
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That's "Total Fucking Fool" to you...
Re:"Big Data" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm biased, as my entire job is building those systems so many people refer to as "big data" - but the marketing is terrible. The technology itself is quite good, and makes a huge amount of sense. The problem is, companies traditionally used to doing data stuff for large corporations (ie, EMC, Oracle) are pissing themselves. This destroys their entire business model - so they're flooding the market with crap trying to avoid losing absolute boatloads of money and accounts to these technologies.
Talk about big data with those companies all you like, and they won't mention the actual reason hadoop and the like are a big deal:
1- It's all open source. Don't wanna pay? Self support.
2- It's all designed to run on the cheapest commodity hardware you can find. Why buy appliances with huge markups?
This has companies used to huge margins on appliances and software shitting themselves. They tried FUD with single point of failure stuff, and now that that's solved, they're stuffing infiniband into custom rack designs and saying how much better it is. Meanwhile you can buy 4x the gear for that same price.
Is it a buzzword? Yup. Is it saturated with marketing? Yup. Is it a stupid idea? Hell no.
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I work for a "big data" company too...but we are a bit different than most (streaming SQL), not trying to replace DBs and data warehouses as this going to get someone fired when they learn the hard way what ACID is.
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In my case, I didn't even talk about the major advantages like the complex analysis. 100 billion row joins don't sell execs. I did it purely based on the cost vs. enterprise grade storage. That got it in the door - and then I was selling the platform to developers. Showing a dev team a little pig script written on the spot, then sending it out on a production cluster and watching it use 800 cores and 8TB of memory, processing a few dozen TB of data while we're sitting in a room, and the devs got on boar
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the absolute worst fucking buzzword out there right now
The worst buzzword out there is, without a doubt, "Obamacare". This clusterfuck of an industry bailout bill has pretty well no resemblance to health care reform, or to any of what Obama actually wanted to do.
It is a great way to figure out someone is a complete idiot right off the bat.
br? That is also true about people who use the word "Obamacare".
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I know somebody who works in pharma.
It's certainly likely that 'the suits' were lining their wallets, and virtually guaranteed that our Ruling Class [amazon.com] is out to shear us all after the sheep fashion.
One is curious as to what you think "Obama actually wanted to do". My guess is Single-payer [wikipedia.org], that smashing British success story [wikipedia.org].
Because, hey, if we've bought enough of
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Obama certainly didn't want to do single-payer, nationalized health-care, a "robust public option," (whatever the Hell that means, since if it was any good the for profit healthcare system would cease to be in an number of years, so they might as well go to single-payer) or any of those things. Obama is a neoliberal, he'd never propose anything that wasn't a cash grab for someone (the Republicans are also neoliberals, but they have that Southern Strategy gunking them up that means they can't be as fleet of foot as a neoliberal Democrat like Obama). His healthcare plan was basically written by the Heritage Foundation, not generally known as a bastion of socialism.
Basically, in countries that are sensible, they understand that healthcare ought to be like fire and police departments. (Whereas in neoliberal Hells like the United States, they'd like to make the police and fire departments more like our wonderful healthcare system. They're already doing it to the post office and the school. And it's bipartisan.)
It's not capitalism, it's Thatcherism (oh, and you know what country has suffered under the yoke of Thatcherism for year? I'll give you a hint, she was Prime Minister of the UK.). There Is No Alternative. (I'm looking forward to our coming Greek style healthcare, myself, though in many ways we already have it.)
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Obama is a neoliberal,
You might as well claim Obama is a courtier of the Seelie court, if you ignore Obama's actual ideology and actions.
he'd never propose anything that wasn't a cash grab for someone
That's not what neoliberalism means. Basically, it's a negative connotation label for free market or laissez faire-economy beliefs or advocates.
For example, the US health care legislation, supported by Obama, of which an aspect is discussed here is heavily anti-market and high regulation. It requires insurers to cover various things and forces them to ignore preexisting conditions (interfer
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"Greek style healthcare"?
Taking it in the ass?
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Because it was better than not doing anything.
Big Data is great for funding (Score:2)
In recent years we had SOA, SOA is dead, Cloud, SOA in the Cloud. A lot of software architecture topics. Good for funding software engineering faculties. However, the database people had not that much new things to sell. Ok there is no-SQL DBs and graph-databases, but to really sell them, you need a new buzzword. And big data is superb. All the problems which where solved for small and normal data, can now reselled for big data.
Actually the is something new, it is the complexity of the data storage and its
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I disagree. It accurately describes an entire class of software whose sole goals in life is to make managing huge volumes of data easier.
Unlike the word "cloud" however, which describes absolutely nothing at all.
I thought that about "Expert Systems" (Score:2)
Big Data might be a buzz word, but it's real. Computers have been fast enough to crunch large amounts of data for a while now, but you needed either a lot of money or a brilliant programmer for both to do it. Cheap Linux clusters and Hadoop for free changes all that. Code monkeys have enough power at their disposal to do num
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> We had 2000 years of dark ages where people basically did nothing
Hmmm this time period overlaps with something else that happened over the same 2,000 years. 2,013 to be exact.
Same gov't gives us the TSA and summary execution (Score:5, Insightful)
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
Re:Same gov't gives us the TSA and summary executi (Score:5, Insightful)
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
UK Economy: $2.4 trillion
UK Heath expenditure: under $200 billion.
That's 1/12th of the economy, sounds like you overspend on your health system. Shouldn't the competition keep prices down?
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Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
UK Economy: $2.4 trillion
UK Heath expenditure: under $200 billion.
That's 1/12th of the economy, sounds like you overspend on your health system. Shouldn't the competition keep prices down?
First, US government involvement has historically lead to anything but keeping prices down.
Second, since most US health care is through private insurance and through private transactions, the US population basically spends that much on health care for the simple reason they want to.
Third, Obamacare is fundamentally dysfunctional. It's two main goals of greater health care coverage and lower cost are diametrically opposed. It's pretty damn impossible to increase demand without increasing cost. Of course,
Re:Same gov't gives us the TSA and summary executi (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
They only appear diametrically opposed if you're a moron. The reality is that people will be forced to pay into the system if they have the money rather than waiting until they get sick to get insurance so they'll at least be contributing something rather than being overwhelmed by bills and declaring bankruptcy. What's more, we're already starting to see checks mailed out to people whose health insurer charged too much for premiums. My insurer was pretty good at estimating the real costs so my check was pretty small. But for other people the checks were a lot larger.
Obamacare also mandates that insurance companies pay for preventative care, you know the care that prevents serious and expensive conditions from occurring or at least reduces the likelihood of such conditions occurring. The US pays a crap load of money for preventable diseases to people who haven't been able to afford coverage and have to wait until they have a serious illness before seeking help or worry about whether or not their trip to the hospital for a possible heart attack is going to be covered.
As far as the historical, that's not the government that's because morons like you vote for corporatists with no interest in keeping costs down if it means corporate interests and the rich suffer. Every other country that's gone with universal healthcare has lower costs than we do, if we screw that up, you can blame the GOP for corporate welfare.
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You might want to study the economics of this a little further. Forcing people to pay into the system does not bring costs down, it brings revenues up. I live in such a system where everyone who can afford to is forced to pay. More than half the government's budget is now on health care and for some odd reason, all that money gets soaked up by an ever expanding layer of management. Services have deteriorated to the point where it's often cheaper to just pay for a patient to go get care int he US. The f
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Obamacare also mandates that insurance companies pay for preventative care, you know the care that prevents serious and expensive conditions from occurring or at least reduces the likelihood of such conditions occurring.
I wonder how much of that preventative care actually is. Medicine is a field notorious for being very difficult to figure out costs and benefits of actions and their consequences.
If preventative care really had that solid benefit to it, then why aren't most insurers funding it already? They aren't dumb. My take is that preventative care is great for finding expensive problems (a major turnoff for insurers) and not so great at actually helping us live longer or cheaper.
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Government can and does some really bad shit.
Government can and does some good shit.
I cheer for it when it does the good shit, and complain about it when it does bad shit. Sounds perfectly logical to me.
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i'm roman_mir i can't post under my name due to a liberal conspirasy mod'ing me down
No, it's due to your constant trolling and name calling.
Big healthcare data? (Score:3)
Over the last 10 years I've had MANY MANY files that have gone missing, been lost, been misplaced and just plan gone from the health care system. In one case after losing the same MRI test three times they also lost the paper copies! Now I don't know a lot of industries that can lose the same work multiple times in both digital and non digital form.
Clearly I'm left with a very different out look on the health care system and data management and security, So as for collecting big data, that just wont work, that data isn't secure enough inside the system to account for anything. It would be like running a survey of 10,000 people where you only return 7,000 surveys, the data will never work because your missing to much important data.
Re:Big healthcare data? (Score:5, Interesting)
What big health care data? I'm not joking when I saw that the last place I would ever trust sensitive or critical information is a hospital...
What big health care data you ask? The data that your government (also known as your new healthcare provider) is going to demand, that's what data.
From how fast you drive to how much fattening butter (in grams, weighed by the smart container that reported it to your smart fridge), expect data to be collected everywhere. Isn't it ironic how the hipsters think all this new smart tech is really "cool" today, without even thinking of the consequences in the future.
And expect that data to be used against you, to charge you more for the lifestyle you want.
As far as security goes, no comment when it comes to our government. InfoSec seems to be the least of their concerns, especially when it's your data.
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Privacy is only dead to those who have given up on it, e.g. you.
While the current technical possibilities make it easy for some entities to invade your privacy, it is not a technical question at all. Popularise and pass laws (remember that democracy thingie...) that punish someone who violates your expectation of privacy. I know this sounds outlandish over there, because it probably is, but where I live (Switzerland) both the government and companies have to tread very carefully with peoples data. For examp
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They can dig everything they want up on me. Personally living in Canada it's a little different up here, but we'll follow most moves the US makes. The health care sector can dig up what ever they want on me and they can even publish it for all I care...
Ah, just to make things clear, I don't pay my ever-increasing medical premiums with "publications". I pay it with cash.
You let me know how much you give a shit about your medical privacy when your individual insurance premiums are adjusted every 3 months based on them digging up "everything they want" on you. Now tell me why they wouldn't do this. Ever.
Or perhaps you won't get that job because the healthcare data warehouse was hacked last year, and your name showed up on the wrong disease list in a Googl
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And it costs half the price per capita of US healthcare.
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The aggregate statistics for countries with socialized medicine and general survival rates do not paint a rosy picture for your 50% off bargain.
Considering that the US ranks about 25th on the list of highest life expectancies, and that plenty of the countries above it have public or strictly regulated healthcare, I think those dirty marxist communist hippie countries must be doing something right.
Or perhaps those countries simply have a lower level of corruption of their government than the US, allowing them to have saner and more efficient government regulation of life essentials such as healthcare.
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The European Union begs to differ.
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Wow, you're a nutjob. Sorry for not offering up anything except for an ad hominem, but your comment is just too paranoid.
I can track an individual down on the planet to the very speed he is walking with 3m accuracy with free apps today that overlay it on a satellite view detailed enough for me to peer inside your window of your house.
Tell that statement to someone 20 years ago, and see what kind of colorful labels they come up with. I'm not a nutjob. I'm merely old enough to remember what actual privacy meant in this world, and not ignorant enough to know where it's going.
Perhaps it is you that needs to wise up.
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I can track an individual down on the planet to the very speed he is walking with 3m accuracy with free apps today that overlay it on a satellite view detailed enough for me to peer inside your window of your house.
Unless you are working for the USAF, you're a fucking liar. Also, here is a hint, my father-in-law actually did telemetry on the SR-71 while it was still a "secret", they were able to do what you just described *in 1970*.
Another paranoid moron is what you are.
Every feature I mentioned is freely available with Google maps and/or cell phone apps today. Use your damn head.
And those are merely the unclassified tools for you to use and/or know about. I'm quite certain the classified capability I've described exists easily today (as you also confirmed in 1970) with micro-GPS tagging, satellite imaging, and the ever-popular unmanned drone.
Oh yeah, that's right, the drone is now well-armed, and also has the ability to kill you now instead of just watching, and there's
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So it sounds like you don't want government run health care, but you want other people to subsidize your butter gorging lifestyle?
No, I merely want whatever agency is going to run healthcare to come up with a reasonable way to calculate medical premiums without going to extremes to create ways to generate more revenue.
I used to get a rate insurance adjustment every few years. Now it's every year. Soon it will be every 6 months, just like auto insurance policies have shrunk down to. But the big difference is we don't change our driving habits all that often. Changes in eating habits can create expensive medical issues rather quickl
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It's not so much what we're going to do. It's what people do. Health care is free? I'll take two please. Make that three, I've got some free time...
Oh you mean... (Score:4, Funny)
You'll lobby the government to update everything to metro and get a big nice juicy contract.
USA medical spend 15% of GDP, Europe 8-10% (Score:5, Insightful)
US system is FUBAR, 50million uninsured, huge numbers of medical induced bankruptcies (for the heinous crime of being unlucky), lower life expectancy.
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US. Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
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ed funding has suffered through the last 3 decades
Not by actual money spent [mercatus.org]. The chart I just linked to shows US spending per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity (a crude measure for estimating the relative cost of living for various countries) is the second highers of OECD countries. Yet the results are far weaker (Finland spends a third less by the measure and gets better results).
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In the UK the figure is 9%. Everyone has access to healthcare free at the point of use ( tax funded ). The downside is that when we reach the age of 30 our crystals glow red and we have to report to the NHS death panels.
You've missed the official narrative (Score:2)
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US
You are absolutely correct on that.
Unfortunately you have missed the fact that such a thing is officially labeled as "uncontrollable, completely nutbar, crazy-ass Stalin-esque Hitler-loving Castro-backing communist socialist fascism!". So while it makes sense to a sensible person, the dominant conservative narrative here tells people that it is a terrible, terrible idea that should never enter the discussion. Even our allegedly "liberal" president took the idea off the table about 12 seconds into the
Re:You've missed the official narrative (Score:4, Insightful)
What you are saying happens on both sides, but disagreeing with the effectiveness of a single payer health care system is about as pants-on-head retarded as it gets. There is so much proof for its greater effectiveness WITH lesser costs that arguing against it is... frankly clinging to an ideology thats been totally disproven in multiple countries by multiple different types of government, presiding over multiple different cultures.
All it boils down to is "We can't do that becuz thats the cumminists. If we do that they win!"
Additionally conservative media in the U.S. can't even back up its crazy lines anymore without generating extremely biased(or in some cases completely fabricated) studies. Its gone beyond the point of retardation to the point where it seems like the conservative movement in the U.S. is actually trying to do as much DAMAGE as possible to the U.S.
Reality check: Cold war is over. Both sides lost. Get over it. Merits to be found in both forms of government. Take the best of both sides and be happier.
Re:You've missed the official narrative (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully at some point our country peacefully separates into two (or more) new countries so that the sensible and logical people can have single payer health care and the others can yell at each other about pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.
You can always move to Canada or England if you think they are so much better
That is a very common statement, but why do I need to leave? Why can't I help change the system and then other people can leave? Why are you the one who deserves to stay?
On top of that, the people who say things like "why don't you just go leave and live in Canada or the UK" often have no idea how difficult it is to do that. I am a highly qualified worker but I need a job offer in one of those countries in order to move there - I can't just show up and declare myself to be living there. Conversely, the conservative free-market havens like Somalia and Afghanistan tend to require almost nothing in order to live there, so why don't you leave instead?
It always amazes me that liberals complain that conservatives want to run their life
Well considering how the conservatives in government are constantly impeding on my ability to live my life, I would say they are indeed telling me how to run my life.
it is the liberals who are demanding that everyone follows their rules
Single payer health care does not demand you follow any new rules. If every other industrialized country in the world is any example, it would actually result in you keeping more of your earned income than what you currently keep - and it will still allow you to die from preventable ailments if you choose to do so.
And when you don't agree with the liberal it goes right to name calling.
Considering they way you are already throwing around unsubstantiated assumptions I would say you have already gone to name calling.
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It would help if you liberals weren't all such lying sacks of shit. Sometimes name calling is accurate.
Every other industrialized country doesn't have single payer. e.g. France, Germany, Japan etc all have mandated insurance.
Also note: There are other civilized countries with the death penalty.
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Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
No matter how thin you slice it...
Life Expectancy at Birth by Race and Sex, 1930---2010 [infoplease.com]
White Male, Born 1930, 58 Years
Black Male, Born 1930, 47 Years
White Male, Born 2010, 76 Years
Black Male, Born 2010, 72 Years
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US Census Data
US Population 1930, 122,775,046
US Population 2010, 308,745,538
US Population 2020, 337 million (est.)
"In 2019, when the last of the baby boomers (those born between 1949 and 1964) have reached age 55, nearly twenty-nine percent of the total United States population will be age 55 and older." Source: Government Accountability Office, "Older Workers: Demographic Trends Post Challenges for Employers and Workers," 2001
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The time isn't far off when we will have 100 million seniors to care for.
Then there is the problem of providing medical care to the poor of all ages. The politics
Uses of 'big data' (Score:5, Informative)
i work at a major medical research institution. A few years ago, our CIO showed us a graph of data they'd gone through showing a large spike in heart attacks in otherwise healthy men. The spike then dropped a few years later. Normally someone wouldn't be looking at this data, so it wasn't until after the spike was gone that this was investigated. Turned out that Vioxx had been put on the market about a year before the spike started, and was pulled off the market about 6 months or so before the spike dropped off.
Getting massive amounts of data (anonymized of course) can show trends in public health that can give us a lot of information and save lives and money.
(and yes, I hate the term 'big data'. No sense of scale of how big it is.)
The premise of this article is entirely wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also, why is Microsoft explicitly being mentioned?
Maybe because the guy returns his calls? That's how a lot of the people who get quoted over and over got where they are.
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Forget MS, hello IBM (Score:3)
If you want "big data" you think IBM, you don't think Microsoft.
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If you want "big data" you think IBM, you don't think Microsoft.
But mentioning a company to rail against, besides Microsoft, won't get you on /..
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If you torture the data long enough, you can get it to tell you anything you want. Oracle didn't invent that.
Wanna See My Big Data? (Score:3)
(opens coat)
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4) Pay for step 2
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4) Pay for step 2
That's why I pay taxes. Same as providing roads, picking up trash, looking after aircraft in flight, providing education, etc.
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That's why I pay taxes.
Well, then that government is your insurer. At least, when it's not throwing that money at other things.
Re:Confusing (Score:4, Insightful)
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What does an insurance company have to do with it?
Something along these lines:
1) pay $x to insurance company
2) feel ill
3) go to doctor
4) have insurance company pay $x*20 to doctor
5) get better
It's an actuarial calculation. The sum of everyone paying to the insurance company must be more than the sum of what doctors are charging from the insurance company. So, the insurance company searches for ways to widen the difference as much as possible all the while staying competitive with the other insurance companies.
The problem with the US system is that you don'
Re:Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of other government transfer programs that tax the young to pay for the old. It only "works" until the demographic shift inherent to an aging population gets bad enough that there aren't enough young people paying taxes to support the old people. Then you either move the age to qualify for benefits up or you run up massive deficits.
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There are lots of other government transfer programs that tax the young to pay for the old. It only "works" until the demographic shift inherent to an ageing population gets bad enough that there aren't enough young people paying taxes to support the old people. Then you either move the age to qualify for benefits up or you run up massive deficits.
This is exactly the same no matter how you fund it, publicly or privately. In a perfect capitalist system, the baby boomers have all saved lots of piece of paper saying $100. They reach 65, and all demand that the youth accept these pieces of paper in exchange for doing work for them.
The youth decide they spend far too many hours as a country looking after old people, and not enough time looking after themselves. As such, they charge the old people more, and pay themselves more.
A piece of paper saying $100
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If the boomers in that capitalist system did their retirement planning right instead of depending on some government bureaucrat to do it for them, they'd be invested in assets that grow to counteract most or all of the inflation.
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If they hadn't voted for politicians that borrowed the money to avoid service cuts or tax raises it wouldn't be anywhere near the problem it is now. Or had been given the ability to invest the money in some low risk fashion it wouldn't be a problem.
But, in addition to that, the Boomers absolutely refuse to acknowledge that there are going to have to be cuts because the SS trust fund can't afford to pay out COLAs when wages are stagnant and there is no inflation. What's more, it's mostly their politicians th
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If the boomers in that capitalist system did their retirement planning right instead of depending on some government bureaucrat to do it for them, they'd be invested in assets that grow to counteract most or all of the inflation.
They may be able to beat others of their generation (most won't, obviously), but the point remains that the economy is a way of trading work. Your dollars are useless to me unless I can for them I someone who will work for me.
Retirees won't. They are a drain on the world no matter if it's the government, or an anarchy. You live in your retires state as long as my generation allows it. We can. Noose to make dollars worthless, and there's not a damn thing you can do. If you own assets, we can take them off yo
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Good luck with that. More retirees vote than youngers. And most lawmakers are old. Some ancient. They know that taking away olders benefits won't get them reelected.
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Assets that grow? Stocks? Why will stocks go up if there are fewer workers to spend their wages on the products?
Property? If there's an oversupply of houses relative to people wanting them why will house prices go up? The same principle applies to rent.
Land? Worthless without someone working it.
Boomers have been buying these assets and hence bidding up the price. We'll see what happens when they all start selling them.
GP is right: you can't bank labour, and it's going to be in short supply in a lot of
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You are overgeneralizing just a bit. The economy is not the same everywhere. There are always ups and downs and an astute investor can take advantage.
Stocks don't usually all go up or down at the same times. Same with land.
There is more to value than pure labor. I know, heresy to a Marxist.
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The problem with the US system is that you don't have laws stating that that insurance companies cannot deny pre-existing conditions, must provide treatment for basically everything, and cannot charge differently due to you being a high-demanding customer, only being allowed to increase prices due to age and even so within pre-defined limits.
what you describe here is not insurance but a payment scheme managed by 3rd party. Insurance is about the management of highly unlikely events. Covering someone who is 100% certain to generate costs has nothing to do with risk management, it's a money losing position. Risk management would be: 5% chance of costing X => premium is roughly 5% of X. The price discrimination against cost centers is what makes insurance work. With coverage of 100% certain cases you have only offloading cost on someone else, w
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what you describe here is not insurance but a payment scheme managed by 3rd party
Let me give you two numbers. The worst insurance we have, for the cheapest age bracket, local area only, cheapest hospitals etc. etc. etc., costs about $25/month/person. All treatments included, no restrictions. The most expensive top-of-the-line insurance for the most expensive age bracket (65+ seniors) with all bells and whistles, global range etc. costs about $1500/month/person. And those are values for when you pay it all by yourself. Family, business and other kinds of collective contracts get even low
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Holy shit, where do you live?
I am self-employed in New York and I pay $1,500/month for shitty family medical insurance with a $6,000 deductible. None of us has been to the doctor for more than a checkup in years.
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Holy shit, where do you live?
Brazil. Worse than the USA in absolutely everything except for private health insurance prices. :-)
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None of your handwaving changes the fact that the grandparent is correct - what you describe is not insurance.
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So you claim - but the vast spread between the two numbers you give tells a different story. The numbers says you're wrong - because otherwise there wouldn't be a need for the most expensive block to be paying sixty times a month more.
It could be made so that the values would be the same, it's just a matter of dividing the cost plus profit equally among all customers, much easier in fact. But that results in this little problem: while very successful 65 years old senior can have enough money to spend on top-of-the-line health insurance if he planned his retirement right, a fresh-from-high-school youngster doesn't. So, this is more a matter of adjusting prices due to the customer's paying power than anything else.
Also, to make thing clear
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It's an actuarial calculation. The sum of everyone paying to the insurance company must be more than the sum of what doctors are charging from the insurance company
Um, no. They invest the payments. These investments must exceed the sum they pay to the doctors.
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They have increased job security to a point, but with the cap on non-service spending they can't make the bucket loads of cash they had been making. And Obamacare does have provisions where they pay for quality rather than quantity. Which should deal with that. What's more, with the insurance exchanges it's a lot harder for insurance companies that aren't providing quality services to keep people using their insurance.
So, collectively it may have increased their job security, but if an insurer is doing as p