Frankly, that sounds like a bullshit policy, and certainly doesn't apply to all universities. Students are paying for access to the resources of the university and shouldn't be giving up IP. UMich has a much more reasonable policy here: http://www.techtransfer.umich.edu/resources/policies.php
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The University will not generally claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students. (A “student” is a person enrolled in University courses for credit except when that person is an Employee.) However, the University does claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students in their capacity as Employees. Such students shall be considered to be Employees for the purposes of this Policy. Students and others may, if agreeable to the student and OTT, assign their Intellectual Property rights to the University in consideration for being treated as an Employee Inventor under this Policy.
If you're uninsured you get price gouged. A simple trip to the doctor with some basic tests can be a months rent. I have catastrophic health insurance; $5k deductible 20% copay to $50k. It won't pay for anything, but it will give me insurance group rates. Where is this magical free basic healthcare? Does not exist. Medicaid is only free if you've already become bankrupt.
You only get price gouged if you don't negotiate or shop around.
My mom is uninsured. She negotiates everything and often pays less than I do (I once compared her bill to mine). If you pay cash up front, the doctor's office will be very nice to you. Additionally, they give you stuff for free that an insurance company might pay for. An actual exchange:
Mom: "$300 for a splint? No thanks, I'll just have my son tape my finger to a piece of wood."
Doctor's office lady: "Oops, my mistake, I thought you had insurance. We only charge people for stuff like that when they have insurance."
Need medicine for high cholesterol? Doc prescribes $100-a-month latest whiz-bang pill. Say to doc, "Dude, can't you do better than that?"
Get a $10-a-month pill from Wal-Mart that works just as well.
It's a real eye-opener. Businesses will charge anything as long as the customer doesn't actually have to write a check for it.
EDIT: Since many of you haven't experienced this, I'll share another story.
I tell the doc I have sleep apnea and would like to try a CPAP machine. He says first I need sleep study, which is around $2K. Why? Well because the new insurance guidelines say you should have one. So we talk a bit, and it becomes clear that it's not needed. Cross out $2K.
So he writes a prescription and sends me to a place in town that sells the machines. Cost? $1600. Price for same machine on the net? $350.00
I call the doc back and he faxes the prescription to the internet vendor and Bob's your uncle.
This is about $3500.00 that 99% of everybody else would have had their insurance pay that wasn't strictly necessary.
Negotiating your own healthcare prices is a terrific eye-opener.
I would like to have a proactive patient such as your self. As a student, I am always put off when a physician prescribes an on-patent medication when there is an equivalent that is off-patent (assuming that the research supporting both is equivalent).
Hope I didn't give the wrong impression -- my doc rocks. He's just a busy guy, and the drug companies are making pitches all day long about how the new and patent-protected stuff is so much better than the other stuff. He's just playing it safe. He's always open to a conversation, however, and most times once we talk we arrive at a better place than the one he first recommends.
And I'm not being a "proactive patient" out of any kind of charity on my part. My money rides on all of this stuff, and every little bit is very important. I'm just trying to make very certain that each little thing we do is priced at exactly the least amount is has to be.
[There might be a lesson here, but I refuse to spell it out.]
$300 for a splint is one thing. Try negotiating an MRI when you've just been in a car accident.
Its a real problem. Insurance companies have a ton of weight by virtue of representing many patients, which they effectively leverage for lower prices. Those paying out of pocket have no such leverage, and pay much more.
She has negotiated for post-hoc price reductions on emergency care.
Hospitals have leeway in what they charge. If you make it clear that you will be a pain in the ass unless they give you a good deal, they will do so. This is where you drop words like bankruptcy, $25/month for 30 years payment plans, and threaten to contest every single item (out of 47) on the bill. They will take all sorts of nickel&dime charges off your bill, lower prices here and there, etc, giving you a reasonable deal.
All this aggressive price negotiation is fine if that is your choice. But keep in mind your company will have to employ other people and if the company does not provide health insurance you will be expecting your employees to also perform these same kinds of price negotiations for their medical services.
Much like vaccination, this only works because many other people are covered by insurance. What the hospital doesn't charge you (and thousands of other people without insurance), they make up for by raising rates across the board. Just because you negotiated the rate downward doesn't mean the procedure's cost went down for the hospital.
Tell me the story about how she negotiated minor surgery that one time. "$20,000 for a C-section? No thanks, I'll just have my son sterilize the dremel and the staple gun." That story is awesome.
When my wife was pregnant, and on health insurance that didn't cover pregnancy she told her doctor she didn't have insurance. End result flat fee, under 2K to have the baby and about double if a C section was necessary.
I can only tell you what the average of the two C sections we were billed for cost. Uninsured cost of a C section without a prolonged stay in the hospital appears to be under $10k, anecdotally from G searches on "uninsured C sectio cost". Our son stayed in the NICU ($$$$$$$) for a week; your wife can also wind up in the hospital for an extra day or two.
Yeah I am glad we dodged that bullet. The insurance was odd they wouldn't cover the pregnancy but they would cover the kid after birth so any NICU costs would have been covered.
This isn't odd; it's standard. Covering normal pregnancy and birth is a pricey add-on if it's available at all, but by law the new child must be covered.
Except under very strict circumstances, not charging everyone (including insurance companies) exactly the same amount for everything according to a practice fee schedule is illegal under the US healthcare system. Just because the insurance company doesn't actually pay the full amount (contract law gets mixed in here), it doesn't mean that a self pay patient gets to have free services. One reason medical costs are so high is because doctors are generally paid the lesser of the service charge amount on their fee schedule or the insurance company contractually allowed amount. Simple game theory dictates their prices be as high as possible.
Self pay patients can be charged less if a standard sliding fee schedule is created by the practice. This is to make sure that discounts are applied uniformly across all self pay patients against some criteria (e.g. 10% discount for families at 400% of the federal poverty level). I'm sure there are other ways too, but they must be applied consistently.
In the highly unlikely event the doctor's office is prosecuted for failing to charge her for a splint, I'm sure they could plausibly call it a billing error. Note that they didn't charge her less for the splint (which only cost them a few dollars), they simply took it off the bill.
I'd love to see the DA actually try to prosecute the doctor for this. It would make a great reelection platform: "I prosecuted doctors for failing to charge uninsured patients $300 for a $6 splint."
> You only get price gouged if you don't negotiate or shop around.
Nonsense. Health care isn't something you price-compare on Amazon and Best Buy before making a purchase. It's something you need right now when an unexpected medical emergency happens. That's why an insurance market exists in the first place.
A quick google search suggests that emergency care makes up less than 3% of medical spending in the US. So negotiation and price comparison is possible for about 97% of medical spending.
His story works because he's framing it as getting a broken finger set or getting meds for an ear infection, and ignoring the fact that what we need insured is prolonged illness and hospitalization. What his mom really is is "very lucky"; also, not afraid to throw "bankruptcy" onto the negotiating table.
But catastrophic insurance will cover prolonged illness and hospitalization, and quite cheaply if you're able to shoulder $5-15,000 of the risk yourself. We're talking about how to get around the price-gouging that accompanies everyday lab work and routine care.
The problem isn't cost. Of course you only want to get catastrophic coverage. But you're as likely to be declined for high-deductable coverage as for low-deductable coverage; at least, we were.
Of course, Xanadu is (or would be) a digital remake of Vannevar Bush's memex: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
Frankly, I'm not sure Ted Nelson has added much to the original concept with Xanadu.
You can download Xanadu(R) Space(TM), a user interface demo, from here: http://xanarama.net/ Windows only, but I got it to work in WINE. Ted Nelson really likes his trademarks, probably because it's as tangible as Xanadu has become after 40 years.
Long term, higher education is screwed. There's no real way to improve the efficiency of 1prof:10-100 students. Most attempts just result in an inferior product. Increasing productivity in all other areas means that professor and the resulting education gets more and more expensive (everything else gets cheaper in comparison).
Long term, haircutting is screwed. There's no real way to improve the efficiency of 1hairstylist:10-100 clients. Most attempts just result in an inferior product. Increasing productivity in all other areas means that the hairstylist and the resulting haircut get more and more expensive (everything else gets cheaper in comparison).
If you're interested in how the pros do it, about 5 years ago I temped at a bulk mailer--mostly medicare checks to doctors--using pitney bowes(IIRC) equipment. The machine I was running was organized in an L shape 20'x20'. One side would strip the letter off the continuous paper stack, collate it, fold it, and seal it in an envelope. The second side would stamp it and stack it in postal bins. A bad day I would do about 20,000 but if I had everything calibrated and the guy on the shift before didn't muck things up too bad I could get close to 50000 in an 8 hour shift. The system I was using rather old and temperamental, so I wouldn't be surprised if modern equipment is an order of magnitude faster.
Once the machine was running I didn't have to do much besides put envelopes in the hopper, but the noise, paper cuts, and opportunity to lose a finger while clearing a jam made it a horrible job.
Don't need to be celibate to go extinct. Remember Nixon? Hoover? They used to run America from colonial times until... well, know any Quakers?
"Although official Quakerism may not have abided the activities of many of these feminists, the Quaker belief that "in souls there is no sex," and the opportunities provided Quaker women to preach, hold meetings, and write epistles, gave rise to the high percentage of Quakers among the "mothers of feminism," including Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul."
The autocorrect is maddening. I've been researching Riak recently. It's new so there isn't a lot available. Paired with another search term I frequently get results only for "risk." Let me know if I might have made a typo, but don't assume I'm an idiot and do something different than what I told you to do.
Dropping keywords also annoys me. If the keywords don't exist then tell me that so I can adjust my search. Don't give me a long list of results that I have to click through before realizing you screwed up the search.
The only reason the google search bar is still my default is because I use it as a quick and easy calculator.
If you're using a Mac you might find it interesting to know that the spotlight search bar can be used as a calculator almost exactly the same way as Google can... Unfortunately it can't do conversions (at least not on Leopard). Also, the shortcut for spotlight is CMD + Space.
He is not your employee, he is your son. If he doesn't want to play football, he shouldn't play football. It is not the obligation of our children to make us proud. Frankly, this is just fraked up.
It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, written for academics. I suspect most faculty, Harvard faculty included, do not wish to be intellectual caddies for the rich kids at the country club.
You're spouting some fine bullshit. Suggesting that Harvard could expand to handle more students than it's handling now isn't "socialism". It's rational unless you're suggesting either that there aren't more brilliant students now than already go to Harvard, or that there aren't more brilliant professors now than already teach there. If both those are false, which they are, then Harvard can be seen as wasting its endowment on non-practical things rather than both growing and helping a larger community than it is now.
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The University will not generally claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students. (A “student” is a person enrolled in University courses for credit except when that person is an Employee.) However, the University does claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students in their capacity as Employees. Such students shall be considered to be Employees for the purposes of this Policy. Students and others may, if agreeable to the student and OTT, assign their Intellectual Property rights to the University in consideration for being treated as an Employee Inventor under this Policy.
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