aristokrat

@IRONSAM
Which will itself come with exclusive DLC bonus content!

@JCDoe

Actually, I do understand all of what you wrote, but wasn't willing to write as much about it or go into that amount of detail. Nor did I want to get started on the stupidity of health "insurance" in the first place, as it's not insurance at all because people plan on using it. If you bought any other kind of insurance planning to use it frequently, you'd find yourself in court for fraud pretty quickly.

Perhaps we should go back to the origins of health "insurance" as we know it from the second World War. Salary freezes were enacted, so companies turned to other methods of increasing compensation, and paying for your health care turned out to be one of them. This unfortunate consequence of a seemingly benign war-time act ballooned into the problem we see today.

You can blame high medical costs on drug companies if you want, but in fact the real fault lies with the idea of health insurance in the first, and especially with how its enacted. By introducing huge amounts of moral hazard into the equation without any negative consequences, there is no direct, individual negative pressure on medical prices.

Here's a hypothetical situation:
- you get health insurance for catastrophic medical emergencies only, which would cover the unexpected and massive costs of things like car accidents, heart attacks, etc., would only kick in after you've spent $10K of your own money, and would cost you very little money in premiums (dollars per year)
- you then pay out of pocket for all other medical expenses (before you go all crazy, bear with me)

Under this situation, do you think we'd have the same medical pricing we have today? No, because instead of todays complete obliviousness to cost, people would price-shop for medical services, driving service prices down. Doctors would no longer blindly order outrageously expensive scans (from personal experience, I've seen ortho's demand MRI's before they'll even see you for even simple things). Drug companies can no longer reasonably price drugs at these outrageous prices because no one will buy them, so they'll lower prices or go out of business (in return, I'd agree to longer medication patents to help ensure R&D continues). The repercussions go on and on.

The biggest positive outcome of this hypothetical is that there is negative pressure on prices, and the medical market will be forced to adapt (additionally, this would make it easier to find good doctors because they'd self-segregate between low cost and high quality, making price a good indicator of what you'll be getting). Additionally, moral hazard is removed from the situation, meaning that people with minor colds won't go to the doctor unless they are willing to throw their own money away (whereas currently a lot of them are perfectly happy to throw away other people's money). Additionally, the removal of moral hazard will push people to actually be responsible for their own health (for instance, emphysema is never a pre-existing condition from birth, but rather one you acquire through your personal life choices, and perhaps if you knew smoking now was going to cost you millions of YOUR OWN MONEY later, you might reconsider; the same can be said of lack of exercise and obesity).

Ultimately, this plan would mean people would have to have personal responsibility for themselves and their health, which seems like a taboo thing to talk about in any aspect of choice lately. Instead of the government helping you out with your healthcare costs after a lifetime of poor personal choices, why not own up to the consequences of your choices?

Furthermore, people would be able to pocket the ~$15K (on average) that they and their employers currently send to the insurance companies. That would be plenty to cover the average persons medical costs and also help them save for retirement, eat better, etc.

Or we could just keep giving the government more and more of our autonomy and eventually they'll be thinking for us completely!

I always misread this dude's name as Cory Balrog, which simultaneously conjures up images of a street fighting boxer and a huge hell demon.

@sigma8
So are you saying that people can't choose to try the "don't get sick" option if they want to? Especially if it's the difference between trying to realize their dreams versus packing it in and joining the proverbial rat race?

Also, remember that graph up there is for a good month. What happens when they have close to zero income for a month? Do you propose they are better off paying their company health insurance bills with their own credit cards when there's nothing else in the piggy bank?

Wow, this has been like Kickstarterstiq lately...

@allinwonder
Thanks for telling us what to think.

Or perhaps, they'd all eschewed insurance altogether (both through their company and on their own) because they are young, healthy, and would rather make games and get by on what little they can earn instead of sending money into an insurance black hole since they don't foresee needing medical care anytime soon (and are willing to risk the rare medical emergency). That's called an informed decision, as opposed to the forced decision that the government is forcing upon small businesses.

@Arturis
I'm fully onboard with the idea of setting expectations by rebooting the series, but that doesn't mean they have to cow-tow to every bad design choice made in the previous series. In actuality, the very fact that the series is being rebooted implies that it was too saddled with legacy baggage and accumulated poor design to the point that people weren't buying it anymore. To then hide behind the "well that's just how SSX is" excuse only means the series is eventually going to fizzle out like it did before.

I could not get into 999 due to the slow text speed. Why developers think that writing the on-screen text out letter by letter is a good idea is beyond me. Print all the text, force a 1 second delay, then advance upon button input. For a game rated mature, why does it assume we can't read faster than 5th graders?

Sorry for the rant, but I literally just gave up on this game yesterday when I realized just how much slow reading I was going to have to do. Fast reading I'm perfectly okay with, but slow reading just breaks my immersion and makes me unbearably frustrated. Too bad, for it had such an interesting premise...

@Arturis
Why should a game be reviewed by someone familiar with the previous ones? If anything, this series reboot should be able to stand on its own, and thus criticism of the characters is entirely valid. I am familiar with the series, and I've never really liked any of the characters despite the gameplay being fun.

I kind of like new-comers to series doing the reviews, since it brings a less biased viewpoint to the critique. Just because a series has always had bad design decisions doesn't make them any more forgivable (in fact, it makes it less so). And to complain that someone just didn't get it because they didn't know all the backstory is also hogwash: a good game should always be able to stand on its own.

Everything old is new again!