Thanks for your nice words...

Being a somewhat private person I don't normally talk about health stuff. Also, being a cancer patient, I know better than to say I'm "cured". That said, things have been looking good for a while, to the point that my oncologist fired me a couple of years back. I get to deal with the consequences of the treatment, but the original problem is not really an issue in my life.

I do, however, make a point of ensuring that our health coverage never lapses!

Glad to hear it, also happy to see that LWN is still thriving.

I wish stories like this would inspire more techies to support universal health care in the US.

People should not have to beg for more money for their services or goods because they end up with a disease.

Everyone deserves health care, not just people who are visibly successful/popular.

I think universal healthcare might be more popular than most people think. I would consider myself a conservative voter, but I can recognize the good of universal healthcare. Healthcare shouldn't be tied to jobs, and people shouldn't have to bankrupt themselves due to health issues.

I think most discourse in the US is driven by vocal minorities that in no-way represent major sentiment in the rest of the population. It is quite unfortunate. I am not even sure what can change it.

I will be taking my voting very seriously next election because frankly I am tired of this.

This is a nice breath of fresh air to hear. Unfortunately, it appears that the vocal minority you mention are basically conservative congressmen or their boosters.

For now it may be conservative congresspeople but once a Universal Healthcare proposal starts gaining traction all the common support for the initiative will likely shatter. People will disagree on what the intended outcomes are (are they economic, empathy based, or both?), the implementation details, how to pay for it, etc...

Yeah, no. We had this fight when Obamacare was being hammered into shape. Universal didn't happen because conservatives in both parties refused to do anything other than say "the poor can go to emergency rooms for treatment".

Now, it's a bit more complicated than that, and single payer was never on the table because Obama decided to pre-capitulate in the futile hope of being able to tag the ACA as bipartisan, but it's only gotten worse. If a literal global pandemic doesn't bring people to their senses, I'm not sure what will. There's just too much money being funneled to incentivize our politicians to do the wrong thing (Sinema being an obvious example).

> Universal didn't happen because conservatives in both parties refused to do anything other than say "the poor can go to emergency rooms for treatment".

"Conservatives in both parties" is a bit reductive and I'll also call out as misinformation/misrepresentation: https://ballotpedia.org/Obamacare_overview

But, what is useful here, is you've provided a fantastic example of the rhetorical devices and reduction we can expect to see.

I say that as a supporter of Universal Healthcare that both replaces and learns lessons from VA Medical.

> "Conservatives in both parties" is a bit reductive and I'll also call out as misinformation/misrepresentation:

Are you under the impression that Manchin or the other Conservative Democrats support universal healthcare?

They do not.

There's really not that many of them. Secondary to that, which might be a bit pedantic, is I dislike "conservative" being used as a pejorative as I mentioned. It's not really an accurate reflection of what Manchin or others believe in or what the populations they're voting for are concerned with. As I also stated, I think it's a bit reductive.

Seventeen Centrist Democratic Senators voted with Trump to kill banking reform.

That does not sound like "not many" of them.

There are 48 Democratic senators and 2 independents. I'd have to look at why each of those 17 decided to vote against banking reform. It's not like it's as simple as "conservative" or "not conservative", which is exactly what I'm calling reductive.

Conservative Democrats have held the leadership roles in the party since the end of the Regan years.

>The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was a non-profit corporation founded in 1985 that, upon its formation, argued that the United States Democratic Party should shift away from the leftward turn it took in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. One of its main purposes was to win back white middle class voters with ideas that addressed their concerns. The DLC hailed President Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of Third Way politicians and as a DLC success story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council

And liberal congressfolk, too, mind. That the behavior of Congress doesn't reflect the broad desires of the public is an ongoing problem -- Gilens & Page's 2014 "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" is a rough read -- and isn't strictly correlated to whether your tie is blue or red. That said, I do admit that we _also_ have a serious issue with the political class at the national level being split between folks that tack right as hard as they can and centrists that follow them because you gotta land where the "center" is.

I live in a country that Americans would recognize as having 'universal health care', and while the US system is also bad, I would prefer it to the fragile and dysfunctional government monopoly that I'm used to. I would prefer a free market with mutual aid societies, but the corporatist system in the US at least lacks the single point of failure and complete unaccountability of a government monopoly.

The US system doesn't typically have choice either except to get another employer... who probably has the same insurance company anyway.

In addition to not being able to choose insurance company, we also have a limited selection of doctors who we can see, assuming you want your insurance company to cover it... and by "cover it" I don't mean the insurance company pays for the whole thing either, its still just a portion... and usually an inflated price because doctors tend to have 2 rates, one for people with insurance and one for individuals paying totally out of pocket without insurance where the out of pocket rate is typically slightly more than what you'd pay out of pocket with insurance but insurance gets a huge bill (which they are all too happy to send you a mailer on how much money they "saved" you).

> complete unaccountability of a government monopoly.

That is a problem with the quality of your democracy, not with government monopolies. A corporate oligopoly is virtually identical to a nondemocratic governmental monopoly.

The key thing you want is democratic control.

Democracy is not a mechanism for accountability. No democracy can produce accountability, that's not what it's for. A company with competition has a degree of accountability because their customers can go elsewhere if they are mistreated. A citizen without a lot of money to spend on political campaigns have very little recourse when they are mistreated by the government. Even when the government breaks its own laws, there is almost nothing you can do between qualified, absolute, and sovereign immunity.

The US and other governments have long histories of medical abuses. I would not want an organization that preforms unnecessary and intrusive surgical procedures without consent[0], falsely told people they have cancer in order to remove their reproductive organs[1], intentionally gave people syphilis, hepatitis, and other diseases[2], pretended to treat syphilis to see what happens when it's left untreated[3], etc. to be my only provider of health care. It frankly seems irrational to want an organization that can act with impunity and seem to abuse every function and responsibility it is given to be the sole provider of anything.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/22/ice-gynecolo...

[1]: https://www.insider.com/inside-forced-sterilizations-califor...

[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/ugly-past-u-s-hum...

> Democracy is not a mechanism for accountability.

It is. It is a particularity of the Anglosaxon language space that propaganda that it isn't took root.

> LWN is the only Linux news service that has the technical depth and breadth while also staying solvent.

Would you have any other publications to recommend?

I personally read El Reg, ArsTechnica, Phoronix, TechRepublic, and a few others (including CNET). The last two are arguably of less journalistic quality, however I do very much like the ability to leave comments and participate in discussions.

lwn has no peers. Before I found it, and when I was earlier in my career, I spent about an hour every evening trying to read most of the relevant to me threads on LKML directly (seriously). I've paid for it for the kernel section alone, but the rest of the news is really good.

phoronix is hit/miss. The methodology Michael uses for many of his clickbait benchmark stories is often absolute garbage. He does a relatively decent job covering the latest happenings in desktop linux tech, but overall the quality is all over the place and the clickbait + ads get really old. I once setup the phoronix test suite to build an automated performance regression test harness and was ummm underwhelmed. That was about 10 years or so ago mind you, so maybe it has improved since.

The others you mention are all quite good. I'm a huge fan of just about anything sjvn writes (he posts a lot of zdnet, pcmag, etc). I'm also a fan of following the planet blogs for some of the bigger projects I care about (e.g.: https://planet.gnome.org/) but that's more raw source than actual aggregated news. Just depends on what you're into.