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.

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 proprietary screws.

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. 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.