> Before his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr was thinking of attacking the lucrative AMA revenue stream. As the Financial Times reported, “Kennedy’s team has discussed how the CPT process could be done in-house by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to three people briefed on the matter.”
Congratulations, the author managed to find the one thing where RFK Jr actually makes a good point.
The "economic termites" problem also applies to other parts of the economy. Software patents like Amazon's for "1 click purchases", the hot mess that is mobile phone standards where a wanna-be startup has to negotiate with a bunch of different patent pools (which is why you don't see new players other than Qualcomm, Apple/Intel, Samsung and MediaTek (who probably got started by just shitting on IP laws - if going by bunnie's old "gongkai" post, at least the people using their stuff in the old days certainly did), video/audio codecs that have the same situation, even ham radio has its issues - DMR for example is an ETSI standard, but the most commonly used voice codec theoretically has a patent that (IIRC) runs through end of the year, and Yaesu's C4FM is fully proprietary.
> 1. Liability Insurance: From what I understand, this cost has gone up faster than inflation.
The problem is, if you fuck up say a child's life during birth by noticing too late the child is running out of oxygen... two decades ago, the child would probably be dead by age 10 or even earlier. With modern medicine, it is manageable to keep that shell of a human alive until it dies at age 80 - that cost has to be paid for by liability insurance if it can be shown that the cause was a mistreatment. We have that problem with midwifes in Germany, who are dropping out in droves because insurance prices exploded [1][2][3].
>Software patents like Amazon's for "1 click purchases"
I'm not sure why this is mentioned, it's hardly a drain on other retailers to have a second click in their process.
>We have that problem with midwifes in Germany, who are dropping out in droves because insurance prices exploded [1][2][3].
I'm not convinced that's a bad thing, especially in Germany where there seems to be a lot of woo based practice masquerading as actual medicine. If the insurance prices are exploding due to actual malpractice, the profession probably should clean up their act which necessitates people leaving the profession. Sure you probably lose some of the good with the bad, but maybe they should have cleaned house a little earlier.
"I'm not sure why this is mentioned, it's hardly a drain on other retailers to have a second click in their process."
Much research shows that many people will leave one site for another for the tiniest delay or inconvenience. They've long competed on this. Why do you think Amazon patented saving a click or two in the first place?
Also, patents like this force most sites to be inconvenient for customers to avoid getting sued. Increasing patents like this increases odds that a site owner is sued for their optimizations. Also, patents don't allow for independent creation like copyright does. Every patent takes that method away from everyone else for 20 years even when they independently invented it.
I dont like patents at all. Even if we have a system, we shouldn't allow patents for software because they're only a hindrance to most software developers. We virtually never use or benefit from them. People who such money from developers using patents rarely contributed anything of value. Usually just filed a piece of paper.
> I'm not sure why this is mentioned, it's hardly a drain on other retailers to have a second click in their process.
it's a drain on any startup company doing anything with the web to search for trivial patents. Thankfully, Europeans don't have to do this.
> If the insurance prices are exploding due to actual malpractice, the profession probably should clean up their act which necessitates people leaving the profession. Sure you probably lose some of the good with the bad, but maybe they should have cleaned house a little earlier.
This is not about homeopathy crap, this is about actual errors that can happen, people aren't infallible after all - just that the financial impact to liability insurances in such cases used to be waaaay lower even 20 years ago than it is now.
Congratulations, the author managed to find the one thing where RFK Jr actually makes a good point.
The "economic termites" problem also applies to other parts of the economy. Software patents like Amazon's for "1 click purchases", the hot mess that is mobile phone standards where a wanna-be startup has to negotiate with a bunch of different patent pools (which is why you don't see new players other than Qualcomm, Apple/Intel, Samsung and MediaTek (who probably got started by just shitting on IP laws - if going by bunnie's old "gongkai" post, at least the people using their stuff in the old days certainly did), video/audio codecs that have the same situation, even ham radio has its issues - DMR for example is an ETSI standard, but the most commonly used voice codec theoretically has a patent that (IIRC) runs through end of the year, and Yaesu's C4FM is fully proprietary.
> 1. Liability Insurance: From what I understand, this cost has gone up faster than inflation.
The problem is, if you fuck up say a child's life during birth by noticing too late the child is running out of oxygen... two decades ago, the child would probably be dead by age 10 or even earlier. With modern medicine, it is manageable to keep that shell of a human alive until it dies at age 80 - that cost has to be paid for by liability insurance if it can be shown that the cause was a mistreatment. We have that problem with midwifes in Germany, who are dropping out in droves because insurance prices exploded [1][2][3].
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2014/49932222_...
[2] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2015-07/hebammen-elternprot...
[3] https://www.br.de/nachricht/hebammen-mangel-bayern-102.html