There’s a few public hospitals and there is a law that mandates if you show up in emergency room they have to provide you with emergency care, although they can bill you for it. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. It’s basically not existent in the rest of the industrial planet. And even then it’s just emergency care, doesn’t cover follow-ups, doesn’t cover any referrals… but that is essentially the insurer of last resort is an emergency room.

People that make less than 128% of the poverty level are eligible for Medicaid. Some people are stuck trying to stay below the poverty level literally so they don’t lose their health care. In United States you’re better off making 16K a year if you have serious health expenses then you would be making 25k a year.

People over 65 are eligible for Medicare. Everyone else has either no insurance or employee based insurance which is terrible for obvious reasons. That jobs are incredibly temporary. It also is a huge point of leverage for workers that want better conditions but can’t afford to quit or they could lose their health care.

But yes it is very lame and peculiar that the United States is basically the only major industrialized nation that doesn’t have some kind of centralized universal health care plan where everyone is automatically opted in.

It’s disgusting, and it’s also grossly inefficient with a third of our cost going to paperwork and we spend 20% of our GDMP on health care when the average OECD nation spends about 10% and covers everybody.

Yeah and I think Medicaid actually is a much more simple plan because there was no donut hole or supplemental offerings. People on Medicare tend to still have way higher liability for prescription drug coverage.

Which is silly, they have privatized Medicare so much that it’s ridiculously complicated. And servicing government contracts for Medicaid and Medicare have become a huge growth area which is why HMOs supported Medicaid expansion.

What we should do is simplify Medicare to make it more like Medicaid in terms of no deductibles, no donut hole, but then just eliminate the age bracket. Automatically opt everybody in…

Preferably that would be the end of it but if you absolutely had to have like a German type system if someone wanted to opt out they would have to demonstrate their ability to afford private care but that’s a much less efficient way. But it’s still better than the US model.

I mean literally we could make a map of the 35 OECD Nations and throw a dart at it and wherever it lands it would be a better system than what the US has.

Basically if you live in an expansion state you’re eligible if you make less than 128% of the poverty level. Which is about $16,000 a year for a single adult. If you don’t live in an expansion state your mileage may vary. There was a buffer during the covid emergency stage where states were a little more generous like Texas than they would otherwise have been.

But Texas in particular at one point kicked you off Medicaid if you made even like 6K a year. They were only supporting people that made less than 25% of the FPL. Certainly not 128%. I think all but 16 states at least now extend to that

The problem is even at the peak of its efficacy Obamacare left 25 million uninsured and $100 million underinsured. And it does literally nothing to curb the rate of cost increases.

The United States needs to join the rest of the OECD and have some kind of centralized single risk pool / single-payer plan . The most simple would be something like Taiwan or the UK or Canada but if they mirrored the French or German system which is a little more complicated but still ultimately adheres to a singular risk pool where everyone has automatically opted into… It would result in universal coverage, and could stop the cost from increasing.

The US spends an average of about 90% of its GDP on health care come out every other OECD nation covers everybody at between 8 - 12% of their GDP

I think you’re assuming that the new phones have to be hot swappable. They don’t, they just want it to be relatively easy for someone to do with a screwdriver. The phones can look virtually identical to the way they look today with the exception of a couple of non proprietary screws. This would be no more of an obstacle to water resistance than a button.

This is not a requirement that people can hot swap the battery while they’re out. It’s just getting rid of the egregious obstacles like glue or hiding a battery behind a bunch of other parts or using different types of screws.

Yeah that’s not true and you’re obviously lying. Unless you live in a country where the purchasing power of a dollar is about five or six times greater than everyone else.

Batteries cost $20 as a retail item before you even factor in their labor.

Yeah besides aesthetic preferences change over time and people just grow to prefer what’s ever modern. Or to tolerate it and then that becomes the standard. I don’t remember people bitching that phones were too thick back in the day. Obviously their primary motivation is planned obsolescence and increased phone sales.

It’s incredibly naive to assume there’s any other reason. I’m just absolutely no reason for them to stick glue on the battery or the serialize parts, other than to sell more phones and warranty plans.

That’s absolutely not true. You cannot replace the battery of a flagship phone for $10 anywhere. The going rate at Best buy is $60. And some will flatly refuse because they don’t have the tools because Apple and others use ridiculous proprietary screws. Or intentionally stick a bunch of glue on the battery. Requiring repair shops to use heat, adding a huge degree of risk, and adding to the cost of the repair.

Please tell me a place where they will replace a battery for $10. Batteries themselves usually retail for $20 and then you have to account for labor.

Well I love compact phones sales suggest that they do not do very well. S10e and iPhone mini have been discontinued for that reason.

I don’t think it’s requiring the battery to be hot swappable. Just requires that the user can remove the back with a screwdriver and not have to worry about a bunch of different proprietary screws or absolutely require a third party repair option.

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t make a flip that can have the battery removable with just using universal screws and no glue etc

Well a lot of it is just people that identify culturally with Apple for some reason and we’ll basically oppose anything that they lobby against like right to repair. Side loading…etc …

Also some people have wrongly interpreted this to assume it means batteries have to literally be hot swappable. I kind of wish that was the requirement but I don’t think it’s that militant. I think it’s just requiring that the end user could remove the battery with one screwdriver as opposed to having to find proprietary screwdrivers and use multiple different tools and remove multiple different parts.

Yeah I have a Note 9 That’s not my primary phone by a long shot but I do not want to get rid of it because it’s a really unique phone and has a lot of cool features to use as a standalone music player or something.

But the battery is at 75% health. And I just can’t decide if it’s worth trying to fix it myself which has a pretty high degree of difficulty for someone that’s never done it. Or do I spend 60 bucks --when you can find refurbs for well under $200.

Or just a retire the phone completely. But I absolutely prefer the Note 9 to the s23 ultra, outside of the failing battery and the lack of security patches.

I think what they’re trying to do is prevent people from using multiple different types of screws or proprietary screws. Or making it impossible to get to the battery without first removing other parts like the motherboard or the speakers etc…

I think they want to make it so anybody with a screwdriver can remove a battery if they get enough time. I don’t think the requiring that the battery’s literally be hot swappable although I would like to see it this budget phones go back to that.

I think it just requires common tools, I do not think it’s required to be hot swappable without any tools. But so far the final version of The legislation has not been written. The language you so far in reports is pretty vague.

There were waterproof phones and replaceable batteries concurrently but I don’t think this is requiring batteries to literally be hot swappable. I think as long as you can remove the back and the battery with regular common tools, nothing proprietary, that would suffice.

It would be harder to do an IP68 rating with a hot swappable battery. Although having hot swappable battery is a huge advantage anyway. But I don’t think that’s the requirement here, just so normal people will be able to get the battery out with a screwdriver but not necessarily in 3 seconds so they can replace a battery while they’re out and about

All of that said companies exaggerate the benefits of an IP rating. All of these phones are water resistant, not waterproof and even then water damage is almost never covered by the warranty. An IP ratings are only tested once under optimal conditions, in real life the IP rating isn’t going to hold up after heavy use or one single submersion in water anyway.

So I tend to think the benefits of IP ratings are wildly overstated. Even phones without them hold up pretty well when submerged in water briefly like the Pixel 4a or the OnePlus 7 or the s20 FE.

Yeah but they largely get it because the name Facebook became so toxic and poisoned and it’s probably better just to force them to have to stay in the cultural millieu as Facebook, the company that runs psychological experiments on its users and creates profiles illegally on non-users as well. That pays to be installed on Android devices and not be allowed to be uninstalled.

Yeah just stop using the s*** altogether. There are some s***** corporations I have to Play ball with. I have contracts with work for instance for people that insist on me using proprietary Microsoft software when I edit/file written work. But I refuse to use Facebook / meta. I suppose the only way I would ever use it is if I had a job that absolutely required it for some reason and that I could not live without.

This country is f****** crazy. I remember like 8 years ago I was trying to get into rehab to kick opiates which I eventually did in 2015. When I got into a free bed for a detox, they wouldn’t let me in because it said my insurance wasn’t accepted. The irony was I didn’t have insurance anymore, they still had me listed as being insured with some s***** Blue Cross program at my old job.

I actually had to get proof that I wasn’t insured so the state would cover my bed.

Any other OECD Nation pretty much and you get treated like anyone else. And the sick part is both political parties are okay with this, and militantly fight any serious ever for a public health care system with one single risk pool where everybody is automatically opted in.