I think this is significant not necessarily for what it is now, but for what it can evolve into and inspire in other services. I'm excited to see what comes of this!
I challenge anyone with a painful but non-life-threatening injury - say, a torn labrum, or a torn ACL - to go live in Canada or the UK and see what their treatment is like compared to here. Anyone?
I have not torn an ACL in the US, but when I did in Canada, I found the treatment professional and quite reasonable in timeliness (Vancouver, BC).
I saw 3 different doctors, including seeking multiple opinions from 2 different knee specialists. I decided not to have surgery right away, and got a brace.
A few years later, my preferred leisure activities changed, so I decided to have surgery done. It took 11 weeks to get an appointment (as it was elective surgery at that point). The surgery was done by an experienced surgeon (a few hundred ACLs under his belt), and he met with me 4 times himself during the following year to follow up on my recovery progress.
Total out of pocket cost was ~$300 for a couple optional recovery devices (icing machine, etc.).
Physiotherapy appointments were, however, covered by my employer's extended medical at the time. That was about $1-2k that I would have had to pay had I been completely uninsured. I probably would have elected for less and cheaper physio care in that case though.
Short version: after reading this article/thread, I'd honestly be scared to join YC in SV, especially now that I have a daughter.
(Side note, I tore my ACL in Ontario and had an initial appt there, but ended up getting treatment in BC. It seems a lot of posts here talk about which state you have coverage in? Is the paid-for insurance not country-wide either??)
I live in Australia. I broke my calcaneus into 12 pieces 3 years ago. I stayed in hospital for 3 weeks whilst the swelling went down and then had my heel operated on for 9 hours.
I've been self-employed since 2003 and I've never paid a cent in health insurance, I just pay the Medicare levy like everyone else. I didn't pay any money at all for this stay or surgery, and also received free pain medication (endone, oxycontin etc.) upon release.
The surgery was successful and although I still have some pain sometimes, I can walk, run, play sport and do anything else I like.
If only the U.S healthcare system were my broken calcaneus :)
This is the dark side of the Canadian system. Long waits for elective care. My dad is a doctor near the Canadian border and a good % of patients in his local system are Canadians who are coming down to pay out of pocket for elective surgeries they would have to wait for years to get in Canada. On the other hand, another hot business in my homeland was sending busloads of senior citizens up to Canada to buy cheaper generic drugs.
It does sound like the Toronto or Vancouver areas may be the sweet spot for health coverage. Just a short jaunt to the US to partake in that system and permanent residence in Canada to make it plausible to live without working at BigCo.
I had a torn ACL in the US while uninsured. I waited a few weeks before I saw anyone in hopes that it was some kind of major sprain. I finally made an appointment with the Ohio Orthopedic Center of Excellence (I highly recommend it), and the first doctor I saw (a non-knee specialist, for $85 for about a half hour) said it probably wasn't a torn ACL, but he scheduled an MRI anyways.
The MRI was on the order of $1200, and another appointment later (this time with a knee specialist), it turned out that I did, in fact, have a torn ACL. By now, however, it had happened nearly a month prior, and the doctor recommended waiting at least two more months for the swelling to fully subside.
Reluctant to make such a big investment and being fearful of such a major surgery, I waited about 9 more months before I finally had the surgery. Since I didn't go to a hospital, the costs were actually reasonably low: ~$2500 each for the facilities, the anesthesiologist, and the surgeon. From diagnosis through final checkup, the cost was about $10K, and I was fortunate enough to have my doctor advise me on personal rehabilitation (I didn't go to a single session of rehab).
So I was lucky to get into a good facility with a good doctor and get reasonably-priced care, and now I'm stuck in a job I don't like with high credit card bills in order to pay off a large cost for a fluke basketball accident. Call me crazy, but I'd be interested in taking my chances in Canada or the UK. I've only just now (a year later) paid off the anesthesia, and I'm halfway done paying off the surgeon.
My uncle has a torn ACL up at Whistler, BC and he paid for an MRI out of pocket ($800) at a private clinic and got surgery the next day and otherwise excellent treatment. However, had he not paid for the MRI, he would have waited quite a while to get one and then have the surgery.
Cheers for a brilliantly composed article! Looking forward to the interrobang - I'd never heard of it until the Oatmeal gave it a shout-out recently. Don't worry about the articles "liv[ing] up to the first one" - you're obviously thorough and articulate, so I wouldn't say you have too much to fret about!
That brings up a really powerful point: what users do and say they do are generally not the same. Finding out why there's a discontinuity between the two usually leads to discovering a great opportunity.
PBL can be very powerful in the right setting, but as you point out, it really boils down to student/professor rapport. In the best case, PBL is a fantastic learning tool, but in the worst case, as you say, it can be incredibly divisive.
I started using one of those productivity tracking applications that monitors your program use, as well as your browsing history. When I forget it's tracking me and it gives me a report of how I just spent an hour watching hulu and other crap like that, it's embarrassing enough just for my own eyes - based on that, there's NO way I'd want anyone else looking through my history.
Now, if there were a way for it to know what the cool "trailblaze"-y things are that I'm doing and skip over all the irrelevant (99%) stuff...
I, too, am curious how they've come to that conclusion. I would think it makes a difference what the app is asking of you. Asking for a "like" is certainly much less invasive than asking for access to your friends, photos, personal info, refrigerator, etc... In a split second, the longer/deeper that list is, I'd think the less likely someone would be to click "OK".
In a bizarre way, MS is continuing to create standards: when you're a developer, you have to have all the IE bug fixes in your back pocket and know which bugs are IE's bugs and which ones are yours. How much time do you think is spent circumventing IE's shortcomings? It's strange to think that there's a whole slew of sites that get tons of traffic based on IE's flaws.
It's bizarre to me that many blogging platforms still treat blogging as a content-production exercise, when in reality it's a blend of content-producing and content-aggregating. I wish more platforms would build on what Tumblr has done in terms of making aggregation more painless.
