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.
The more titillating version would be to crawl Backpage or similar successor service for phone numbers of escorts and correlate that with known phone numbers of public figures such as politicians to determine when both were in the same place at the same time. Then publish client lists, with links back to original escort ads for extra sensarionalism.
This is a slippery slope for Google, and raises questions about their handling of ads for other industries where questionably ethical and/or illegal ads are run on Google.
As an example from my industry (full disclosure- as cofounder of an Obamacare-only startup, I am very biased here):
Search for 'Obamacare' on Google and you'll be presented with ads for sites that do not sell actual Obamacare plans, but use misleading language suggesting they do. The goal is to bait and switch - bring people in promising Obamacare plans, and then sell them plans that pay higher commissions but do not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act such as no restrictions on preexisting conditions, coverage of maternity services, paying for hospitalizion, etc etc. This is definitely unethical (people think they are covered for e.g. hospital visits and aren't) and in some cases illegal under state insurance law, but state enforcement personnel don't have the bandwidth to audit Google ads, and Google's auditors don't appear to have the industry-specific knowledge to catch that behavior.
Given this move with bail bonds, will Google seek to more broadly enforce an ethical standard on its platform (not to mention laws)? Or is this a one off? Note that insurance is a significant portion of Google's ad revenue, whereas bail bonds are negligible.