HealthSherpa, a YC startup launched right here on HN and built on top of the government’s backend, now enrolls more people in ACA coverage than Healthcare.gov.
Great work guys! This could be very useful for us. Some feedback for our use case:
1. We’re in healthcare, so data privacy / security and HIPAA compliance are a must. One way to limit this problem might be by architecting it so that our data doesn’t touch your servers.
2. Support for ActiveRecord-like abstraction layers would be great. Our underlying schema is fairly gnarly due to multiple rounds of regulation-driven changes to our data model so directly querying the Postgres DB isn’t really feasible for most of the team that does basic analysis.
Pricing is fine/cheap for what it could make possible for business intelligence/analytics.
Just a clarification: federal judges (like the one in this article) are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress. They are not elected and do not have constituents in the same way elected officials do.
Interestingly enough, that's also a strong argument for the death penalty. We cede the right of private retribution and the state assumes that responsibility, carrying it out in a more structured and ostensibly fair way than mob justice. Historically, the state assuming the responsibility of giving citizens justice (including for capital crimes) was one of the key turning points in the rise of centralized rule and in Europe, the transition from the Middle Ages to early modern Europe. A great book that explores this topic is, 'The Faithful Executioner,' about a 16th century executioner in what is now Germany. I imagine people today may disagree about how important that still is.