> Individual deductibles are limited by law to ~$6500 even on the worst plans.
Deductibles can be higher, but more importantly it's very important to undertand that "out of pocket maximum" does not mean the same thing to normal people vs the insurance companies.
One would think that a 10K/yr "out of pocket maximum" means in the worst case scenario you may have to pay 10K/yr and then insurance covers the rest. Which wouldn't be that bad.
If that were true the US wouldn't have the epidemic of people going bankrupt over medical costs.
What really happens is you get hit with a 200K bill from a hospital visit and the insurance company decides unilaterally they don't really feel like paying based on some obscure technicality, so then that amount does not count towards your "out of pocket maximum". So now you're on the hook for the 200K, good luck.
Nearly all of it goes to grifters who hang on to the system but don't contribute anything. The obvious ones are all the insurance company employees who don't provide any healthcare, just push paperwork to try to find ways to deny coverage. And all the oberpaid administrators, and of course those multi-million bonuses to all executives involved need to be paid somehow.
If that sounds overly cynical, consider a primary care doctor visit. I get about 15 minutes of the time of a nurse assistant (some searching suggests average wage 50K) and 12 minutes with the doctor (searching suggests average wage of 250K).
So the cost of salaries to the people that actually provided me healthcare that day, is $6 + $24 = $30. Even if we double the salaries of both nurse and doctor, it'd be a $60 visit.
Of course, there's office overhead like rent, utilities, etc.
But I get billed $500 for that visit. SO where is all that money going? Obviously not to the health care professionals.
If we simply removed all the grifters from the system, health care would be quite affordable.
That does not match your earlier statement about administrators or health insurance, though. Or does your primary care doctor work in a big hospital that takes a 400% margin?
I don't know where the majority of the money goes, if you're looking for a precise breakdown.
The point I'm making is that only a very very tiny fraction of the bill goes to the people actually providing healthcare (the nurse and the doctor).
Of course some overhead is inevitable, but there is very clearly a vast amount of waste here that could be eliminated. A nurse + a doctor provide $30 of their time, and $470 of overhead is tacked on to that. That's why healthcare is so insanely expensive in the US.
A - Never. Cash with no return is just decaying with inflation.
B - Depends on interest. If your mortgage interest is lower than no-risk interest (e.g. SGOV) then no, you'd be throwing money away by paying off the mortgage. If OTOH your mortgage interest is substantially higher than no-risk interest, then yes, paying it off (or at least overpaying monthly) is a good idea. There is a gray area if your mortgage interest is slightly higher than no-risk return right now. Numerically it makes sense to pay the mortgage, but there is also a safety aspect in keeping the liquid cash on hand.
So that leaves some combination of C & D. The best ratio there is a harder question to answer.
> but even a year away from hands on technical work is going to leave you likely stranded and unable to execute on the technical aspects
This is an interesting myth, but certainly a myth. I guess if we consider technical skill to be intimate knowledge of the latest fad framework, that might be one source of the myth. But that's not technical skills, just trivia about an implementation detail.
The fundamentals like networking, process and memory management, databases and SQL, all change slowly and are very long-lived career-spanning knowledge.
Agreed, I haven’t seen this in my career at least. I’ve worked with contractors on a yearly basis who would take some time off and then hit the ground running.
If there’s any data supporting the opposite, I’d love to see it.
Kubernetes is not a fad. DynamoDB and MongoDB is not a fad. Golang is not a fad. These were all born in the last few decades, so they are rather new, and they will stay for equally long decades. And the list goes on and on... So all of those skills in your list mean nothing when it comes to these fundamental technical tools. They require an understanding on a completely different abstraction level which is equally complex as of those that you listed.
So if you don't have the understanding of these technologies when the project requires it, you are obsolete and you have no right to be in a leading position. And such fundamental technologies are born continuously.
So this myth that you can have fundamentals and that's enough is definitely untrue.
> Kubernetes is not a fad. DynamoDB and MongoDB is not a fad. Golang is not a fad.
These are indeed good examples of things that are merely tools, not fundamental knowledge.
Time-transport me an expert C programmer from the 80s and I'll have them productive in Go in two weeks. It's all very familiar territory.
O send me a mainframe programmer from the 60s and they'll be up to speed on kubernetes in short order. Pushing your workload to a remote cloud (mainframe) won't be exactly be new to them.
Databases have been studied and their properties understood for a very long time.
Sure, the exact details vary a bit and the command line options are different, but that's not significant.
Yeah, that sounds logical. Some of the most popular technologies of this time are just teeny-tiny tools, but some of long obsolete technologies and their attached skills which have no correlation to anything recent is somehow fundamental and has magical properties in your view :D Thanks for the good laugh!
> Databases have been studied and their properties understood for a very long time.
No they haven't. Noone ever considered schemaless databases or column-storage databases or vector databases for half a century after the birth of computing. So that kind of knowledge (relational DBs, etc in the 60s and 80s) meant nothing in light of these new technologies, and required completely different skills and knowledge.
But it's clear you are not familiar with these technologies, so it's a waste of time to engage with you now
> We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.
While there is truth in that, it is also important to note that there is no such thing as a clear-cut line where we go, ok this is it, now it's a dictatorship.
Which in turn means that it becomes easy to rationalize and say that because they aren't doing this or that yet, it can't be a dictatorship yet. And those goalposts keep moving.
So perhaps one analogy is like a recession. We never really know the economy is in a recession until it's already been in one for a while but it wasn't obvious yet, only in hindsight.
Now sure, if everything else is equal then yes it is true. Building a small apartment building on the same land as a single house will result in more units than the cost multiplier of the build, so as you say, they'll be cheaper.
But everything else is never equal. It only makes sense to do such increased density in an area that is becoming more and more expensive and the delta increased density will make the area even more expensive.
NYC is the densest area in the US, and is not exactly known for the cheaper per-unit housing costs.
> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money.
Unfortunately, that's not correct. A multi-trillion dollar company most absolutely has not just such a person, but many departments with hundreds of people tasked with precisely that, maximizing revenue by exploting every dark pattern they can possibly think of.
It would be good to provide a factual basis for such a confident contradiction of the GP. This reads as “no, your opinion is wrong because my opinion is right”.
