ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
"or" is the word you're looking for.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Crimes were committed. That is legitimate grounds on which to premise an investigation.
Not of the Trump campaign.
That investigation of those crimes then looking at the primary beneficiary of those crimes is natural.
This is not probable cause or grounds for an investigation. (Notice I said "or", which responds to your second paragraph.) It's wayyyy too subjective. One could legitimately believe there was probable cause to investigate, say, the release of Trump's tax records. Very possibly a crime was committed. Very possibly not (that's the nature of PC/investigations). If they had something specifically pointing to a particular individual for an actual crime, they could go about investigating them, with the level of what they're able to do being dependent on the nature of the evidence in question. It would be insane to say, "Whelp, law enforcement can just willy-nilly decide 'who benefits' from the release of Trump's tax returns and use that as a predicate for a far-reaching investigation into them."
The investigators said this was why they were looking into it (Mueller Report, p. 5)
Bullshit. Page five is just facts and narrative. Page 11 is where they describe why they were doing what they were doing. Nowhere in this document do they ever say that any investigation was predicated on anything as ridiculous as, "We picked who benefited and started investigating them."
Citation?
Check out the DOIG.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
The Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager were hacked into, and their internal communications were released in a manner designed to politically disadvantage her, and advantage her electoral opponent, Donald Trump. Given those crimes, and Donald Trump's public support and encouragement of them (including the famous "Russia, if you're listening" quip, as well as 100+ references to Wikileaks in his stump speeches) there's very obviously reason to follow up seriously with a look at the Trump campaign.
This is 100% not probable cause or legitimate grounds on which to premise an investigation into the Trump campaign. That is why none of the reports from the "investigations into the investigation" found that any of the investigations were predicated on this... it would be literally illegal to do such a thing. Instead, they relied on other grounds.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
ROFL! That's a hilarious take. But I have no idea. The rules are made up, and the points don't matter.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
If the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, and he doesn't know it's classified, I think it still becomes declassified in doing so.
I don't think this is actually the case, in part because the rules of classification don't have to actually make sense. For example, a currently held legal position of the USG is that even if classified information is leaked in public (like, for instance, the Snowden materials or others like that), so that it is plastered on every journalistic outlet in the world, it is still "classified". I've heard stories of people seeing things marked classified a month or two after the exact thing was on the front page of NYT. The USG literally believes that, for example, if a person with a security clearance who works for the gov't, but doesn't have a need to know (or doesn't have the right level clearance or whatever), goes to a public website of a journalistic outlet and downloads classified documents, it is "spillage", and is probably theoretically intentionally mishandling classified information. Now, I think it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone is actually going to get prosecuted for downloading a copy of the Snowden documents (even folks with security clearances who signed documents essentially saying they wouldn't do this). But that's, like, the "official" view.
So, I think that if the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, it would be considered "spillage". Of course, the (sitting) president wouldn't be guilty of mishandling classified information, but the information would still be considered classified, and every member of the executive branch is supposed to treat that information with the same rules. (Of course, certain people's jobs is to analyze the effect of such spillage and what changes need to be made, but that's still within the regular rules concerning handling classified materials.)
Once we realize that we're sort of in this world where the rules are a bit made up and don't have to make so much sense, we're in a bit of a pickle and have some unfortunate choices to make. Let me actually proceed by merging these examples... suppose that Trump was being prosecuted for downloading a copy of the Snowden documents after leaving office. We have a broad statute. That broad statute sure as hell can be interpreted as making that action illegal. Yet, we sort of have good other reasons to not prosecute him (or anyone else who downloads them). Is the information still "classified"? Yeah, kinda. Is it treated sorta differently? Yeah, kinda. It's weird.
Back to the "president tells some other country something that's classified" case. Is that information still classified? I think so, and I think much more clearly so. Is it treated sorta differently? Yeah, kinda. Here, it might be a bit easier, because often, classification markings will indicate whether it's releasable to specific countries. So, for example, if the president up and told a delegation from the UK some classified information that wasn't previously classified as releasable to the UK, should the executive worker bees then proceed to mark any instance of that exact information as releasable to the UK moving forward? Hell, I don't know. It would make sense to me to do that, but the rules really are kind of made up at this point. It's not like we're going to get a statute that is on point with this level of granularity. The authority for this level of granularity likely flows from the president's power, and rules for exactly how you should handle this may be contained in executive branch documents outlining best practices... but honestly, probably isn't even there. I think this sort of situation just isn't formalized in any process document, and would probably just be a matter of norms and how various actually people in the gov't socialize the issue and feel like they should do. It probably gets to be extra tough, because if the president doesn't explicitly tell his people what his intent is, it's entirely possible that he actually desires there to be some ambiguity. Rather than having his worker bees suddenly all simultaneously start telling the UK, "Yes, this is actually true," perhaps he wants the UK to think that it might be true, but not know for sure. Then what? Sorta makes you almost lean in the other direction? But there sure as shootin' ain't gonna be an explicit statute that lays all this out in gory detail. Just the regular, broad, overarching one.
So now, the instant case. If a president takes stuff home, I doubt he's implicitly entirely declassifying it. Is he, like, implicitly marking it "releasable to former presidents"? "Releasable to former presidents, and the folks they want to share it with"? I mean, weird. I would tend toward probably not really. But the president has always been in a unique position WRT classified stuff. We're already, as shown above, in a world where the president can just sort of do shit with it, and then we're stuck trying to retcon in some set of sort of consistent rules for the worker bees to follow. And that leads us to the final insane part of the whole story. It's always been about retconning a set of rules for the worker bees. I don't know that we've ever had to even try coming up with a set of consistent rules for former presidents. At least, not to my knowledge; maybe as this drags on, we'll get some incredible historical research about how informally secret info was treated by a former president in 1840, or how Eisenhower did such-and-such after leaving office. But my sense is that most presidents tend to be happy to drift off into the distance and sort of disappear. They're fine with playing nice and giving stuff back. And the folks still in gov't aren't out to get them. So, it all just sort of works relatively smoothly, behind the scenes, informally, and no one needs to come up with their Super Consistent Set of Rules That are Still Totally Made Up for former presidents and classified info. In any event, basically all those factors are opposite here (Trump is not happy to drift off into the distance and disappear; he's not fine with playing nice and giving stuff back; the folks still in the gov't are out to get him).
That brings me to what I think is becoming my conclusion, more and more. The core conflict here is simply an incredibly vague area where there are no real rules plus a violent disagreement between Trump and the bureaucracy. This wouldn't be the first time. Hell, I came around to the idea that his entire first impeachment stood solely on the pillar that Trump disagreed with the bureaucracy about what is "in the interest of the United States", and the bureaucracy didn't take kindly to being disagreed with. Similarly, here, Trump is like, "Fuck you, there are no real rules as to what I can do with this stuff. I make the rules, even implicitly (and as such, they have implications for how things work after I leave office); your job is to figure out what you worker bees are going to do around the edges of what I do," and the bureaucracy violently disagrees.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Clearly and obviously, starting to chant shifts the norm from a world where people don't chant to a world where people chant, but nothing is seriously done. There are many many issues that live in such a state.
Then, thinking about the world of various issues that progress from "people chant, but nothing is seriously done," there is a spectrum. For some issues, most folks are perplexed as to why nothing serious is done. Perhaps it must just be corruption or whatever (e.g., they think climate change is really bad, they chant about climate change, but nothing is done, so maybe it's just a bunch of polluting companies paying off politicians to not do anything serious). For other issues, most folks think, "It would be madness if something were seriously done about these chants." Perhaps even the major journalistic outlets are filled with serious remarks from serious people saying, "It would be madness if something were seriously done about these chants... and I'm a serious person who will make sure that nothing is seriously done about these chants." I'm sure there are many other cases.
What factors lead some of these chants to become reality, while others don't? I don't know. I don't have a consistent theory here. I'm sure others in the thread will chime in, "Whether or not it serves the regime." Maybe. I don't know. What do you think?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I already said that the right started the chanting. Please speak plainly.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Nah, we've got plenty of laws. Especially when people are pushing ideas like, "Campaign finance laws make it illegal to talk to foreigners," trying to resurrect the Logan Act, etc.
blatant procedure prosecutions
Can I introduce you to an indictment from New York County?
Through the last eight years or so, with the left-leaning friends I have in the real world, I've had discussions about this possible politician crime or that possible politician crime. There have been many such times where they were wound up about how you could totally plausibly read the law in a way that totally plausibly gets at so-and-so. Often, I just poke at the implications of their broad reading, especially given the reality of political life. When they start to see just how broadly this shit could be construed if we walk down that path, then I drop, "Is this something that you really value enough to 'let justice reign' equally on both sides' politicians?" And some issues might actually be. Most of them have not been. Most of the time, they realize, "Actually, that would probably have some pretty bad effects and barely bring any real benefit to society."
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Ah yes, the gotcha. It's the right's fault, so your observation is invalid. Sorry, but I can acknowledge that the right certainly played a significant part in chipping away at the norm... while also acknowledging that the observation remains true. In the before days, one could at least sit back and say, "There are some crazy righties chanting 'lock her up', but we're a serious democracy which doesn't prosecute politicians on questionable charges, and there are serious people who will ensure that we stay that way." I am on record as one of those people, prior to Trump's election, prior to the reality become clear to everyone that he didn't try to force through some charges. (As an aside, has there ever been a single piece of reporting along the lines of, "We're giving an exclusive account of the breathtaking meetings in which Donald Trump applied consistent pressure to produce a prosecution, but was rebuffed by so-and-so"?)
At the same time, one can also sit back and say, "It turns out that many people who said they were serious people who would ensure that we're a serious democracy which doesn't prosecute politicians on questionable charges... are now cheering on efforts to prosecute politicians on questionable charges, so long as they're the politicians they don't like."
I agree that the public statements are a problem, even in the absence of substantial actions. One possible world we could have ended up in is a world where dems chant "lock him up" at rallies, but then dem politicians still refrain from pushing questionable charges once in office. It might have been a weird state of affairs; maybe the chants would continue to be tit-for-tat, but serious people would ensure that reality stays serious alongside it. In that world, do the chants eventually go away? Do they persist, like how in many other domains, the public chants and pushes both sides' politicians for things that those politicians continually reject actually doing? Man, I don't know. I wouldn't like it, but I don't know how it would go. Regardless, we are no longer in that possible timeline. We're in a different one.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
President Camacho, eh?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I might be surprised, and this could turn into the speediest trial ever, but I'm guessing this is unlikely to end up in a conviction quickly enough to "bring Trump down", at least in terms of preventing him from getting the nomination. However, what is the argument for the various indictments swaying folks who would have otherwise voted for him? With the NY indictment, paying off a porn star for an affair was already baked in to at least his 2020 results, so that part won't do him much worse (and that election was quite close). The actual business records/campaign finance charges are ticky tack, strained, and at best barely technically supported. Regular Joe is barely going to be able to understand what the big deal is supposed to be. With this latest indictment, I think a lot revolves around, frankly, demographic change. 2016 was eight years ago. Most rightists who were politically mature back then are going to remember "but her emails" and remember how the narrative shifted on classified information and prosecuting political candidates, so it might not shift them much.
...and right as I was about to write the next sentence, I had a change of direction. I was going to say that Republicans are still more traditionally pro-nat-sec/military/etc. and would be more concerned about classified information. It would make sense politically that this issue would have more of a chance to sway some of those folks. However, I realized as I was writing the above, that the older righties will likely remember the "but her emails", and while the younger righties might not remember, they're generally much more skeptical of the nat-sec/military/etc., uh... "industrial complex". They grew up on the narratives of Assange and Snowden and think that a lot of that is bullshit anyway. So, maybe it won't really sway any of the right's voters, but perhaps for different reasons.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I mean, Re: Hillary, destruction of evidence is a pretty automatic charge. Can you imagine Trump not being charged with it? Not to mention the 1001 charges (also apparently seen here, according to reporting), and the OIG report quoted FBI agents who were dumbstruck as to why such charges weren't brought against folks, because they were dead-to-rights. But nope; that stuff is reserved for the likes of Flynn and Trump... the folks who need to be removed.
Possibly more interesting for actual culture war analysis is just observing the public narrative shift. Back in the days before it was fashionable to prosecute Trump and anyone related to Trump, when the possible charges were against Hillary, it was a grave and serious thing to prosecute politicians, especially when they had possible elections in front of them. "That's the stuff of banana republics!" they said. "That's, like, what Putin does!" they said. It was "deeply dangerous for democracy". Whether or not our democracy was legitimate was supposedly hanging in the balance, depending upon whether their preferred candidate was charged with a crime. You don't hear that anymore. For good or for bad, fair and just or unfair and unjust, it's a change in the narrative. Whether this change can be easily flip-flopped on in another 5-10 years... or whether it will be persistent, possibly leading to endless tit-for-tat, I don't know.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
« D'être un exemple pour d'autres »
I happen to know someone who works in management at a rather large multi-national, and they shared a copy of their internal comms strategy for pride month. It was quite interesting in general, but one aspect in particular may be of interest here.
They distinguished between their internal comms and public comms. If employees asked about their plans for pride month, they would talk about the various internal activities/resources/whatever they had set up for it, but the story on public comms was different. "Due to the unprecedented backlash in the US market," they wouldn't be doing/saying anything publicly. Their "stakeholders" have decided that it wasn't worth the risk, and even though they totally totally TOTALLY support everything about pride, they just feel like they have to protect other equities too. Ya know, like, continuing to make money.
They emphasized that this was for the US market only, and that other localities would make decisions locally. Insert twitter meme about various companies having rainbow logos on their US twitter accounts, but not on their "[Company] Middle East" twitter accounts.
I chalk up points for two things. 1) The backlash is actually having an effect, at least for now, this year. 2) The theory that these things have been done so far in large part not because the market cared, but because employees cared. The classic example is that if you're a tech company in the Bay area, you're not really asking, "Should we signal support for this because it will improve our perception in the market?" You're asking, "How many of our employees will revolt if we don't signal support for this?"
Now that the market is showing signs of actually caring about this a little bit, they're rushing to make a distinction: do what they can to continue to placate their internal bands of radicals while not being publicly perceived as political. I'm left with two questions: 1) How long will this distinction be tenable? Perhaps that depends on how strongly the market continues to backlash against overt pride support (i.e., can the right take another scalp next year). 2) Is there sufficient internal appetite in any companies to revolt against the internal shit? If the prior theory was, "They're listening to the market," and this shift in the market response is actually generating a shift in public comms, and if the current theory is, "They're still listening to employees at least enough for internal efforts," then perhaps some companies could well be primed for an internal backlash that actually results in changes there, too.
I don't think I expect (2) to be probabilistically super common, but from what I'm hearing, lots of upper management folks who really just want to make money actually know that woke radicals in their ranks are a serious threat... and really are gradually working on, uh, marginalizing them, to the point that if they have an excuse, any excuse, to move them out without inciting too much leftist backlash, they'll absolutely take it.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Thanks!
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I'm interested. Can you give some example titles? Are there any that can be dabbled with for free to get a sense for what you're talking about?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I've been thinking more and more about Robin Hanson talking about how the public basically said "no" to the nuclear energy revolution. He was making analogy to the possibility that the public might say "no" to the AI revolution, wondering what that might mean. In any event, he said something along the lines of, "Imagine if the public hadn't said 'no' to the nuclear energy revolution. Would energy be a tenth of the price today in the alternate timeline than it is in the real one? How would your life be different?" It's the "hidden costs", the "hidden timeline". @functor could have kept his apartment at 23C and paid like a Euro more.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Can it be taken intermittently? Like, in your example scenario, can a person just live normally for roughly a month, but then take it for a week when life gets stressful... then cycle back off it?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Wifeys and little bins seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. I didn't realize in the before days.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Choice or not a choice, 'round these parts, atheism is what Robin Hanson calls the "sacred".
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I mean, it depends on what you mean by "could". Like, they're trying to be in a position so that they 'could' search Vladimir Putin's comms... and if they're ever in that position, then they probably 'could' search some rando terrorist's comms.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were a work.
This depends on which version you think is an accurate description of what Snowden revealed. For example, the version @2rafa gives:
capable of effectively trawling trillions of Facebook messages or emails that raised flags
...just isn't the sort of thing that Snowden's documents revealed. Most of the discussion was around two different programs: 702 and 215.
702 was never about trawling trillions of FB messages/emails. It was that if they found a specific term that was uniquely associated with a foreign intelligence target (e.g., they rolled up Terrorist A, got into his computer, found the email address for Terrorist B), they could go to various companies and said, "Give us anything that crosses your wire that has this email address for Terrorist B." This is eminently doable; not really even that hard, even.
215 was an attempt at bulk collection of metadata (who talked to who, for how long), which didn't include the content of those comms. This would be, on its face, useless for trawling for specific messages that raised red flags. Instead, it was just things like, "Well, Terrorists A, B, and C all talk to this other number, so prooooooobably we should check that number out," or, "Terrorist A's number, which had been talking to Person B and Person C on a regular basis, suddenly disappeared, and at the same time, this other new number started talking to Person B and Person C with approximately the same regularly. Mayyyyyyybe, that's Terrorist A's new number." This is much more "needle-in-the-haystack" type of a problem, and they pretty publicly admitted that it was much less effective at doing much (was able to do some things, but much more inefficient).
So, a possible refined version of this conspiracy theory would have to be something like, "We'll use Snowden to target some 'vulnerable' journalists (who are 'vulnerable' to wildly exaggerating), and hopefully, to paraphrase the old saying, the wild exaggerations will travel the world before our consistent media push to describe it more circumspectly can get its shoes on." In this case, you'd sort of have to posit that the entire push to rein back in the perception was, itself, a sort of second-order psyop, because if they just wanted Snowden to make all the people who are most likely to pay close attention to sources and methods freak out and change their behavior, they'd want to just be silent and let Snowden make everyone believe that they're omniscient.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
It's the emergencies and other life-threatening conditions that bankrupt people.
I thought about this for a minute, couldn't actually reason from first principles whether or not it should be true. For example, I'm not sure why the modal medical bankruptcy isn't more of the type, "I got cancer or whatever, so that blew my out-of-pocket max for a couple years. I'd have been okay financially even with just my out-of-pocket-max, but I also couldn't work anymore, so I lost my income. That's what really tipped me over into bankruptcy." One could plausibly categorize this in the "life-threatening" bucket (one could quibble by type of cancer, as some may be curable/treatable but still prevent you from working for a long time), but even then, it's not clear that the medical cost side is the long pole in the tent.
So then I went to see if I could find some data in the literature. Unfortunately, while I didn't spend hours and hours doing a complete literature survey, my sense is that this data is not readily available. Medical expenses/debt relating to bankruptcy became a political football, so there was a flurry of papers on the general topic. As expected, many of them feel like they're picking/choosing their metrics specifically to try to get a splashy number/talking point to support this political position or that political position. But even given those limitations, I got a little bit of a sense for what I think is available.
Turns out that even figuring out the connection between general "medical expenses/debt" and bankruptcy is difficult. Publicly-available bankruptcy documents don't come pre-packaged with a nice conclusion, "This bankruptcy was because of medical expenses." Even when you can tell from the bankruptcy filings that some of the debt was medical, it doesn't often contain information that allows a categorization of whether or not it's specifically emergency-related. Nor whether it's life-threatening. One example is that folks just try to put some measure on the amount of debt at bankruptcy (like, the medical debt needs to be some percentage of total debt and some percentage of income), which obviously has benefits/drawbacks as a measure. There are some more clever attempts. Consider one study, which
reported that the bankruptcy rate for drivers who were admitted to an emergency room after a crash (“EDA Admit”) was 45% higher than the rate among drivers who did not seek medical care (“Not EDA Admit”). Although this may show a correlation, the authors found that it did not establish causation because bankruptcy rates were “thirty to fifty percent” higher for EDA Admit drivers in every pre-crash year. Thus, the authors conclude that households whose financial characteristics make them more likely to file for bankruptcy are also more likely to have severe auto accidents, but that health shocks (as represented by auto accidents) are not a causal factor on bankruptcy filing rates.
This attempt is really nice and clever, because we can access pretty good data on auto accidents, knowing that they at least reflect a sudden, unexpected event, though some could quibble over whether all the folks who go to the ER after a wreck are actually in "emergency" condition or are just being cautious given the circumstances (I say this without judgment; this is a very unexpected event where caution may be appropriate; the circumstances are much more likely to rapidly develop into a true emergency situation, even if the instant symptoms are minor). It has some obvious drawbacks, too, as auto accidents aren't necessarily reflective of all types of medical emergencies, and they may correlate with other behavior more than other types of emergencies or life-threatening conditions.
In sum, I'm just not sure I have data that swings one way or the other on this question, and I'm sort of leaning toward the position that measurement issues push me toward, "We just aren't going to be able to conclude something here," at least until someone is able to be extraordinarily clever in overcoming the limitations in the data. I also think that "emergency" and "life-threatening" sometimes go together, but sometimes don't. Car crashes are unlikely to permit much shopping around for most people. Cancer does moreso.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
How would price transparency even look if it's not just "Medicare for all, you pay taxes, we provide healthcare"?
This seems like it would actually be the opposite of price transparency, at least from the perspective of consumers. Each item of healthcare would still have a price, but they would be totally and completely oblivious to it. It would be entirely up to bureaucrats to look through the prices and decide what procedures seem to be worth it.
Concerning (1), selection of a doctor is approximately as difficult as any other selection of a good or service. There are a variety of solutions other industries have used. Branding, reviews, spec sheets, etc. Compare your ENT to very similar services that don't get to play the "insurance made me do it" shell game, like lasik or cosmetic surgery. Since they have to actually convince you to pay a real sticker price, they're vastly more open about it. They usually have free consultations; they tell you on their website what cool expensive tech they use; if you're the type of person who wants to shop around, ask questions, and figure out who you're comfortable with, you can do it. Some people are still going to view it as, "Well, you just go, do the thing, and pay whatever price," but if you want to be more informed, you at least can. You can at least usually get them to not lie to you and say that it's impossible to know what the price will be.
Concerning (2), this is obviously a more difficult one. Let's scope out a bit and consider a comparison with a hypothetical ENT who doesn't have access to their own CT. My experience has been that with someone like this, they send you out with orders to get a CT from somewhere and have the results sent to them. But then, when you come back, usually, you don't pay for an "additional" visit. Instead, it's treated as an extension of the original visit, which needed to be interrupted because of the need for a test. There is a true tension here that is hard to resolve. For legacy reasons, we don't just pay doctors by the hour, we pay them by the service. If we paid them by the hour, it wouldn't matter whether we got the CT there or somewhere else; that doctor is still just spending the time of "make recommendation for CT + evaluate result of CT", and those things are just more or less stretched out across different days.
The fundamental thing happening here is some sort of bundling. Bundling often makes sense. I had a dental implant, and there were multiple visits. Several were just, "Let's follow-up in two weeks; I want to see how it's healing to make sure there aren't any issues." Every one of those was bundled with the price of the original service, not charged as an "additional visit". Honestly, I was naive at the time, didn't ask a lot of questions, and sort of didn't know that they were bundled until after the follow-up appointment was finished, asked if I needed to pay anything, and they said no. This sort of bundling makes tons of sense. Other times, people don't bundle. I got stitches for a cut one time, and when I went to get them taken out, I had no idea whether this <5min followup was going to be bundled or not. Turns out it wasn't. Honestly, if I had known that it wasn't bundled, I probably wouldn't have spent the money for them to use scissors for 10 seconds. Again, we can compare to lasik. I haven't had it yet, but I've looked at websites. They often publicly state that certain follow-ups are bundled, because that is valuable price information for consumers.
In any event, the extent to which a service is bundled/unbundled is also usually not transparent. Are you sure you'd have had to pay for an additional visit if you had the CT done elsewhere? Did you ask? I'm not 100% against the idea that they might want to essentially give you a discount on the evaluation of the CT if you have them do the CT, but I want them to have to tell you this explicitly. "If you get the CT done here, we will bundle the price of the next step where we evaluate the result of the CT and decide what to do next. Alternatively, if you get a CT done somewhere else, we will not bundle it, and you'll have to pay extra for that." Most critically, I think this should not be a pressure tactic. It shouldn't be, "If you just sign on the dotted line RIGHT NOW, we'll give you a GREAT DEAL on this new carCT follow-up!" Like, if they're bundling, they're probably not bundling strictly based on things happening right now. What if it's the end of the day; the guy in the office who actually runs the CT machine is about to go home; maybe it'll be better if you come back in the morning; "we'll do the CT first thing and then evaluate the results immediately after". Do they still bundle the follow-up? I'm guessing probably. So, there shouldn't be any difference between that and if you go home, shop around, then decide to have them still do the CT a few days later. If they're still going to bundle in this situation, I think we've gotten most of the benefits that we're going to get.
So in sum on this point, I just want them to have to be more explicit about what is/isn't bundled. When they say, "We should do a CT; we can do it today," they should have to follow it up with, "Here is our price for a CT. That price includes the follow-up evaluation of the results. That price is good even if you shop around and then decide to have us do the same CT service tomorrow or next week. You can get a CT somewhere else if you want, but then we won't bundle the follow-up evaluation of the results, and it'll be an additional charge of $X." At least then, we can see what they're doing. We can see how their price is structured and make comparisons. It's still a bit anti-competitive to be integrated in this fashion and to have this type of preference for their own product. Honestly, anti-competition cases have been brought on less in other industries. I don't even think we need to get there now. Just get the prices and what is/isn't included out there in the open. Then, when people actually see what's happening under the hood, when they're actually seeing what games are played where and what things cost, they can decide which games they're willing to play and which prices they're willing to pay.
Finally, I also agree that true emergencies are tough. Sometimes, health situations naturally create their own pressure tactic. I don't have great solutions for this. I also think that true, really time-critical emergencies are far far more rare than most people think. Probably more than 90% of healthcare transactions simply won't matter that much if it waits a day or even a week. Don't stop us from putting good rules in place to improve the 90% just because those rules may not help the small minority. Even if we just exempt the small minority from the rules, we've made nothing worse (the small minority is in the same situation it was before), and we've made the 90% better. That's a pareto improvement.
But I do think that they should still have to be transparent if it's possible. Yeah, some people might take a risk in going to another hospital, hoping the stitches hold. Some people might even get burned by their choice (that's the nature of risk). Maybe they'd have needed the extra surgery a few days later at the first place, too. Lots of ways it could play out. I'm not saying my solution makes literally 100% of situations/choices turn out 100% optimal and that there is never a case where something bad/expensive happens. Literally no solution can accomplish that; again, that's the nature of risk. But I would rather be informed of the price and be able to make my own choices concerning my personal risk tolerance than not. Maybe the difference is $60, so I don't think the risk is worth it. Maybe the difference is $600, and I'm indifferent. Maybe the difference is $6000, and I think the risk is worth it. Someone else may be really risk averse and still pay the extra $6k. Yet someone else may estimate the risk differently and want to save the $600. Which of us made bad choices? Which of us got burned? Which of us came out ahead? Nature decides that, and no policy that either of us comes up with can possibly guarantee that no one will ever get burned. I just want people to be able to have the information and be able to make their own choice.
This is where the real battleground is, and probably where reasonable minds could disagree. Of course, some unreasonable minds are going to be super partisan about the whole thing, tipping every subjective factor one way when it comes to politicians they like, but the other way when it comes to politicians they don't like. Regardless, this is a far cry from, "We looked to see who benefited and opened an investigation into them."
Section 5 covers assessments, Section 6 covers preliminary investigations, and Section 7 covers full investigations. These are the areas where this current battle is being waged.
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