After a long long repeated discussion on Health Care provided by federal government, I finally understand the core issues here. First is the really stereotypical argument, government can not do anything right. I am just going to refute this stereotype right away. Sure someone can bring up tons of evidence, but, this is a totally wrong generalization on existing evidences. However, I do agree Federal Health Care is pretty much destined to fail. Here are my arguments:

 

 

The issue is not because government cannot do anything right vs private company. The issue is, when something goes wrong, government cannot resolve it due to inflexibility. A government simply cannot change price, reject candidates, layoff employees, or file chapter11 like a normal private company. Even if you turn a successful insurance to a government agency (no government intervention), the same failure will happen due to the above issues. A government has a lot more responsibility than a private company. When they start something, they can't quit. All they can do is putting more money into it. That's where the problem is. It is not because the government can't do anything right, but, simply because we do not allowed our government to do the same thing as private company.

 

 

I am just going to list out some realistic events now.

1) they said they are squeezed by insurance because insurance usually don't pay full amount.

2) also they have to pay a lot to malpractice insurance.

 

1) they raise insurance price because the medical bill is so expensive, which is true.

 

1) Go to emergency room for treatment that cost 100x more compared to a scheduled treatment.

2) They don't pay at all.

3) Go to emergency room because they will get treated no matter what.

 

1) Pay tons of money on insurance because the bill is expensive.

2) Bill is expensive because those frequent emergency user does not pay. Someone has to pay, which is the one with money.

 

1) They think they should get paid more.

2) The whole industry is heavily money driven.

3) They expect to get paid more because medical school is expensive.

4) For the people who want to help people and does not have enough money, it is uncommon that they will be a doctor due to higher difficulty to pay for the school.

 

You can see a bad cycle here. The whole system is unbalanced to heavy money driven. This is partially caused by expensive education system. The expensive education system encouraged people to focus more on money than helping people. (You can argue about this, but, I believe it is pretty accurate). The industry is so money driving, everything is expensive. Poor choose to not pay at all by going to expensive emergency room. Hospital choose to cover those lose to charge patients even more money. Those charges goes to patients insurance. Those insurance in turn raised the price.

 

What's left as victim is the people who has some money to pay for the over priced medical bills. They are paying for those expensive emergency room charges indirectly. To say you don't want to pay for the poor (the people didn't pay the bill), you are paying for them in your own bill indirectly. In addition, many of insured are chained to one insurance as they gets older because everywhere else will not accept them or will charge more.

 

The current medical system is unbalanced. The problems are not solved by private companies. They simply raise the price and pass the problems to the next. Ultimately, the insured are paying more than they should. Certainly US medical is one of the best, but, only if you have the money to pay for it. The system is way too money driven that it becomes inaccessible to less healthy people. It is almost like all bags are LV bags and there is no cheaper alternatives. It is clearly wrong when choices are scarce.

 

1) I still believe in Federal Health Care. Sure it will fail like SSN, but, something has to be done. We need a brand new Insurance (not taking away medi-care's money) provided by government. It really helps the people who can't get a decent insurance. And high tax on rich people isn't that bad. People like Bill Gates already donating their money. The tax is just helping them to donate their money instead of doing on their own. And tax raise is only done to rich people, not the poor anyway. And you know the high % of tax rate is only done to the extra amount over the threshold, not the entire income. So, they are still super rich. I believe Federal Health Care is need to give people more choice. If you don't want it, you can subsidize for your own health insurance.

 

2) We need a cheaper medical education to the citizen of United State. We need more doctors and cheaper doctors. If the school is so expensive, it is harder for less healthy people to join the field. If they don't have to pay so much loan, they wouldn't need higher salaries. Lower the boundary of medical education. Make it more accessible to more candidates. I believe this will make a healthier system and we currently are.

 

3) Ultimately we want to reduce unnecessary emergency room visitors. They go there because they know they will be treated without paying the bill. This is really wrong and waste of money. I do not know what should be done. But, perhaps giving them health care will reduce these kind of incidents.

 

 

 

Do you love daily puppy, www.dailypuppy.com ? Don't want to check the site all the time? Well sure, you want to check it all the time, but, you would still want to see them cuddle in your desktop. I found and made a solution to it. Here is how.

 

1) Go here http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDailyPuppy

This is the RSS Feed site for daily puppy. You can use IE7 or IE8 to view it, and there will be a subscribe button to add the feed to your computer. You need to add the feed to your computer for the later step.

 

2) Go here to download the my gadget, Feed Slide Show , http://gallery.live.com/LiveItemDetail.aspx?li=d5cac105-ce11-4364-9fb4-a9e5db2ffeb8

This is based on Green Tea's Feedr, but I tweaked it for better experience. He used Vista Slide Show as base. I made it to support Windows7 High DPI Setting, fix the bug of showing n+1 pictures, and allow each instance of this gadget to use its own setting. Meaning, you can launch more than one Feed Slide Show and each one of them show different feeds.

 

3) Install it and drag it onto desktop. Click Universal Setting Icon to set it up. You will see daily puppy feed in the list if you have added the feed in step1. I specifically added the option to only show one photo, so you can get keep star at the same daily puppy if you want.

 

 

 

Kindle is a device from Amazon that gets really low customer impression. First, it is expensive and the screen is like 90s black and white portable display. The things is, have you ever seen the device works in action? I went to Sony store and saw a similar text reader. At first, I just laugh at it why even bother to make an overpriced uninspiring device to compete with Amazon's Kindle. I told my brother how silly it is. Then, he came back saying the screen is strange. He thought the screen is fake, like those fake cell phone for display. But, when he press the button, the screen actually changes.

 

I was amazed at how it looks so realistic to actual paper. There is no light coming out of the screen. It is totally different from our light-shooting TVs. Simply put, it is like real paper, you can't read it when the room is dark. I went online researching on this new technology. It is called Electronic-Paper (e-paper). Now, what amazed me even more? "electronic paper reflects light like ordinary paper and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity" (Wikipedia). Wow, this is why Amazon is using it. A display that last almost forever since it doesn't use electricity to maintain the graphics. Now everything is clear.

 

Using my geeky sense, this will be the future of TV technology or at least the mobile display. Why?

Pros: Easy on your eyes. Easier to see under the sun.

Pros: Save earth and your pocket for obvious reason. But, the longer battery life span is where it shines.

Pros: Well, it pretty much look real since it reflect light like any object. When it is more advanced, we probably can imitate different material for crazy realism. For example, use reflective material to imitate metal reflective property. 

Pros: No loss to color since there is nothing to consume (None-LCD TVs). No loss to brightness since there is no light bulb to burn (LCD TVs). The reason you would want a new TV is only because it's quality getting getter, not because the machine wears out because it will not wear out.

Cons: The fact that you don't need to replace it when it gets old is unattractive to manufactures.

 

 

 

 

 

Yuppy,

This build of my free software is going great. Only one last feature, the dynamic background, and I am pretty much done. I am thinking of using sub-namespaces, but it is not important. The movie player is buggy when using the progress slider. Somehow the MediaElement got disabled when I move it with keyboard (high probability) or mouse. Closing Windows doesn't resolve the issue is concerning.