If "the number" is, say $220m, it could be a number of things. If it's cash today, others have done the math on how things could get divvied up.
The "top line" number can mean a lot of things though; it almost certainly includes the assumption of hitting several targets, some of which are reasonable and some are probably stretches. It's also a very real possibility that the "real" cost that Chase paid was just the right amount to make the common stock evaporate; investors get their money back such that $0 is split amongst common stock. Employees then are given a sheet to sign saying that their stock in WePay is now worth $0, but here's an offer for Chase stock vesting over 4 years.
Anecdata, for sure, but most of the deals I've seen have been something like this. The top-line number is all well & good, but the real dollars people extract from it are invariably less (again, just in the limited set of things I've seen). I'm sure there are exceptions (I bet the Instagram folks did just fine). But if I had to make a guess, it'd be that the founders will come out with a good chunk of cash, and employees will get a job at Chase out of it (with the valued employees getting a nice bonus at the "new car money" level)
>"It's also a very real possibility that the "real" cost that Chase paid was just the right amount to make the common stock evaporate; investors get their money back such that $0 is split amongst common stock."
Would you mind elaborating on this? What causes the common stock to "evaporate" exactly? Is this a side effect or is this intentional?
>"Employees then are given a sheet to sign saying that their stock in WePay is now worth $0, but here's an offer for Chase stock vesting over 4 years."
For an the average rank and file employee who has been grinding it out at Wepay through the ups and downs I am imagining this might not be a "feel good" moment.
> "What causes the common stock to "evaporate" exactly? Is this a side effect or is this intentional?"
This would mean something like paying exactly what the valuation at the last round was, such that it'd cause the cap table to unwind leaving precisely $0 to split amongst common stock. It's not a huge win for investors, but if it's clearly not going to be a huge win, they get their money back (plus whatever conditions they had for more), and can move on.
> "For an the average rank and file employee who has been grinding it out at Wepay through the ups and downs I am imagining this might not be a "feel good" moment."
Probably not. I've had friends who have been at companies that have sold at these "big numbers", but come to the sad realization that the numbers aren't "real" (e.g. their 1.5% stake of $250m is worth $0). I'm sure it's a weird feeling to see the "congrats!" messages! However, the "retention bonus" of $100k over 4 years on top of their salary is usually enough to keep people from burning the place down (being facetious).
The short answer is probably that if Twitter were to ban Trump, they'd face an enormous backlash from folks who take it as suppression of political opinions. It's a blessing and a curse for twitter, I'm sure -- having Trump tweet regularly has probably been a boon for business, overall. If you're generous, you could make the argument that Twitter is allowing the President to bypass the traditional media outlets and have his voice heard directly (for better or worse).
> Surely threatening nuclear war violates their "Abusive Behavior" rules.
Even if you were to try to live by the letter of the law, you'd have a hard time really getting this to stick, I imagine. If this is the tweet you're referring to:
"Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won't be around much longer!"
Then I think you'd have a hard time construing this as "terrorism", any moreso than half of Twitter's population has said (sports teams getting "killed", public figures "not being around anymore" (i.e. probably meaning "in office")).
The interpretation of the Twitter rules that people seem to expect is one which bans everyone they detest and permits everyone they like. I mean, there's a huge overlap between the people complaining about Twitter not banning Trump because nuclear war and the Nazi-punching brigade who rely on Twitter's rules on threatening violence not actually banning all threats of violence.
(Not to mention that that the main reason the demands to ban Trump have restarted is because Twitter briefly suspended someone for posting another person's private phone number to their 800,000 Twitter followers, and she and everyone else is using this to justify why Twitter should have let her get away with it.)
$1.5m, and seemingly a team of somewhere between 18 and 27 people, they're going to need more funding. If they're paying $5k/person/mo (assume for now this includes things like taxes and overhead), that's one year's worth of money. On top of this, they have to cover things like FCC certifications, fees for getting manufacturing rolling and all the other fun stuff that comes with shipping physical product.
$1.5m does seem like a low target for a crowdfunded smartphone, but it's worth bearing in mind that the salaries of those involved will not be propped up solely by a single device. Purism already sell a range of laptops:
I'm not sure what their plans are, but a good punt would be do the form factor Wi-Fi only and use an external, optional COTS hotspot as their 'baseband.' I think their goals would be met, and they could realize some power/cost savings (with the lower cost Wi-Fi-only SKU).
"Trump cited 100% - labor force participation rate as a measure of unemployment, which is complete nonsense because it counts people who are full-time students or who are disabled as unemployed."
Perhaps the point here is that what is "true" and what is "false" aren't entirely black or white. Depending on how you look at it, full-time students aren't employed; they are therefore unemployed. In some contexts, people who currently do not hold a job are an accurate representation of unemployed. And therein lies the rub: context is incredibly important.
Well, for starters, there's the image part of it: the higher the top-line number, the more prestige comes with that.
Then there's the potential that the founder has taken money off the table (giving up on-paper money for cash), so even if the deal isn't quite as nice as it could be, they still own a significant portion of a "successful" company.
Also, the higher the top-line valuation, the more free marketing you get (the headlines read the same, just with a bigger number in it). This can translate into an easier time of hiring, and the ability to hand out smaller and smaller slices of equity for that top talent (employees generally will never see the term sheets to understand that even their 0.01% of the company is likely to be worth very little).
Obviously some founders will optimize for the former (lower valuation for better terms); others will be more interested in ratcheting up that top-line number to attract future investors, high-value employees, book deals, press, etc. That's ultimately the founder's prerogative.
Isn't Medium struggling in its own ways, cutting costs & laying people off? If it was a Twitter product, I imagine the stockholders would want it shut down, seeing it as a distraction to the main Twitter product.
It's got the same general issues as Twitter has. No clear business model, a more limited audience than the creators of the service want it to have and a severe with too much noise and hostility (especially when you go away from recommended articles to random ones).
I think Medium's financial problem is that they aren't charging for their services. My blog is hosted by Medium at my own custom domain, and the only thing they charged me for was the SSL certificate. They ought to charge for that like Wordpress.com does.
But yeah, Medium has some problems and a long way to go, but it has so much potential. One of their problems in my opinion is that most of the articles that show up in your feed at Medium.com have a BuzzFeed like quality to them. They should integrate some sort of RSS functionality into the feed, and start adding all of the best blogs, regardless of whether or not they happen to be hosted on Medium. But that's just what I would do, not that anyone cares ;)
For example, if you follow the "startups" tag on Medium, you ought to get cool stuff in your feed like IndieHackers. They could include IndieHackers and great blogs like it in their feed, and if people happen to click on those stories, they could just redirect people to those sites. So it would be sort of like Reddit, but instead of people submitting links, the editors at Medium would currate what gets added from other sites, and Medium.com users could obviously add blogs to their own personal feeds via RSS.
In a word, the answer is still "cost". You can try to dance around it and talk about how " A single-payer program would inevitably incur additional taxes, but the overall health care costs would be lower for most people and businesses", but at the end of the day, it's going to cost a lot of money. This article claims it'd "only" cost about an additional $100b or so in CA; I think critics would be very skeptical of that, especially since costs are claimed to come from "reduced overhead" areas. I'm not sure that governments have a history of keeping costs low, so voters would likely be skeptical of that.
Ultimately I imagine it boils down to voters in a state with already very high taxes (by American standards) being very wary of voting to significantly increasing their taxes again.
> I'm not sure that governments have a history of keeping costs low, so voters would likely be skeptical of that.
In general that's true, but in healthcare it's not. As a percentage of GDP, the US spends as much taxpayer money as the UK, but clearly gets far less for it - the NHS vs. Medicaid, Medicare and other limited programs. I suppose the problem is that states would have to set up a parallel system with costs on top of the existing federal structures, which as you say would be expensive.
Private insurance and delivery of healthcare is the crux of the cost problem.
If the government provides blanket insurance and it's being delivered by private providers, there's nothing to control costs. This is the exact problem with government educational loans. Society can't control the costs of tuition so costs balloon. And the costs are ballooning because of stupid things like fancy dorm rooms and expensive sporting facilities.
You walk into many hospitals and they look more like a luxury hotel these days. That and all the administrative staff and the fact the hospitals are private and need to turn profits and compete against each other.
And I don't really feel like I'm getting my money's worth from my private employer-provided health insurance either. I am fortunate to be relatively healthy in my middle-age so I go see the doctor once a year, they weigh me, take some blood samples and send me on my way. So I pay an entire year for that. I have no expectations that anything positive or proactive is really going to come out of my "health care." I ended up diagnosing my father's Parkinson's and I see him less frequently each year than his doctor.
So mass private insurance and mass private health care providers seems completely inefficient and a screwed up way to try to properly provide healthcare within a rational cost framework. I want my fellow Americans insured and I want my health care providers freed up to focus on providing health care.
People who work in insurance can get retrained for something else.
Agree cost is a huge factor, but another key issues is the inconvenient fact that most Americans with employer-provided coverage are satisfied with it. Convincing them to take a leap into the dark with no credible promises that they could still see the same PCPs and specialists they can see today and with similar wait time/referral requirements would be politically Herculean.
I can only compare to Norway, which is not single payer but socialized kind of like NHS.
But it is in no way as complicated and inconvenient as people in the US seem to think. I can go directly to a specialist in the private sector at short notice and pay out of pocket if I like. That costs about 100 dollars. If I need to go frequently I can simple buy extra private health insurance which doesn't cost a lot, since they don't have to cover all that much given that they can utilize the existing public health care. Lots of companies already offer this in Norway.
Anyway then you typically visit your GP to get a referral but that is done very quickly, and is really just a formality. I can go the same day and spent a couple of minutes to do that. Then I can go to a specialist covered by my private insurance on short notice.
I think the private/public divide we got in Norway works quite well. Public health care usually handles well most health care needs in a timely fashion and with good quality. The problem is usually things like elective surgery where there can be long waiting times. But these cases are handled quite well by the private sector. You can pay for private health insurance to handle those cases. That is cheap because there are really just clinics open from 9 to 5, which does surgery, then transport you to a public hospital for recovery afterwards. That makes their operations cheap as they don't need to be open 24/7 and don't need their own emergency care, ambulances etc. All that is handled by the public sector.
As someone who likes their employer healthcare, I would like to be able to seek other work or build my own business without having to worry about getting injured.
I don't think single-payer works the way you seem to think it does in nations where it's been implemented.
I have an expensive employer-provided plan. I can, without any referral, make an appointment with a specialist (surely making $300K+) at a top teaching hospital and expect to wait weeks at the most.
There is no way to offer that level of service to anyone and not explode costs, let alone contain them.
> I don't think single-payer works the way you seem to think it does in nations where it's been implemented.
I don't think single-payer works the way you seem to think it does.
> I have an expensive employer-provided plan.
I'm happy for you. What happens when you lose your job?
I live in Belgium. I'm covered by the basic social security health insurance, just like any other Belgian.
> I can, without any referral, make an appointment with a specialist (surely making $300K+) at a top teaching hospital and expect to wait weeks at the most.
So can I. I've never had to wait more than a couple of weeks at most. If it's urgent, they fit you in on the same day or a couple of days later at the latest. That seems to be corroborated by [1]. One exception is mental health care, where the waiting lists are long.
> There is no way to offer that level of service to anyone and not explode costs, let alone contain them.
That is wrong. According to [2], health spending accounted for 10.9% of GDP in Belgium in 2012, which is much lower than the 16.9% the US spends.
The Belgian system contains costs in other ways. For example, doctors (especially GP's) are paid significantly less. Belgium is also over 10x as population dense as the U.S., which offers significant opportunities for more efficient care delivery.
Anyway, it's not clear to me that Belgium has anything like a single-payer system[1]:
The Belgian population enjoys good health and increasing life expectancy
of 79.5 years (2004). Most Belgians have access to health care of high quality, financed mainly through social security contributions and taxation. Compulsory health insurance is combined with a mostly private system of health care delivery, based on independent medical practice, free choice of physician and predominantly fee-for-service payment.
> The Belgian system contains costs in other ways. For example, doctors (especially GP's) are paid significantly less.
That's exactly the point! Single-payer is much better at containing the costs. The cost of a GP's visit is fixed centrally. And somehow we still end up with more doctors per 1000 inhabitants than the US.
> Belgium is also over 10x as population dense as the U.S., which offers significant opportunities for more efficient care delivery.
States like New Jersey and Rhode Island have higher population densities than Belgium. Is health care significantly cheaper there? A cursory glance at [3] suggests otherwise.
One big difference between Belgium and the US is that damages in malpractice suits are not determined by jury, and hence much lower.
> Anyway, it's not clear to me that Belgium has anything like a single-payer system[1]:
What is your definition of single-payer healthcare? If I look at wikipedia [1]: Single-payer healthcare is a healthcare system in which the state, financed by taxes, covers basic healthcare costs for all residents regardless of income, occupation, or health status.
The Belgian health-care system covers everybody, financed by social security contributions and taxation. The compulsory health insurance is about 75 EUR per year, and amounts to simply another disguised tax. What is not single-payer about that?
There are deductibles for doctor's visits (e.g. 6 EUR for a GP visit), but your total healthcare costs are capped at 459 EUR per year (even lower for low-income families). Anything over that is covered by social security.
You can get optional, extra health-insurance which can cover additional services. E.g. if you prefer a single room when you are hospitalised, that costs extra. Some extra health-insurance covers nonsense like homeopathy, which is otherwise not covered.
Btw, dental care is included in basic coverage. No third-world country situations like [2].
The UK has a dual model - NHS for everybody, and if you have spare money, you can additionally pay for additional services through insurance providers such as BUPA or paying directly. BUPA et al have reduced costs due to not having to cover a range of conditions, not having to indirectly fund A&E departments, being able to deny people coverage for preexisting conditions, etc etc. It's very unlikely that the US would ever deny people the ability to pay for healthcare if they chose to.
We do have single-payer healthcare for all NHS services. You cannot pay for NHS services, and NHS services will cover almost everything you'll ever need so long as the treatment is actually proven to work - it's a newspaper-worthy situation when the NHS denies treatment, and usually that only comes into play with e.g. very new cancer treatments. Every citizen of the UK can use NHS services as a right, whether they pay taxes or not. If you have an emergency, you will be taken to an NHS A&E department.
BUPA et al primarily provide slightly nicer rooms for inpatients, might be more flexible on times you can see a doctor, might provide more personalised information on general health stuff (e.g. "how do I lose weight/get fit?"), and might allow you to see a doctor slightly sooner for stuff that's not going to kill you.
I do not believe that Americans as a whole are satisfied with what they have. I believe that you are, since you have significant income and can get coverage for anything you like. I talk to people on a daily basis who have to worry about what treatments they are able to afford for their diagnosed disorders. For many of them, surgery is required for which they have to save up for a number of years and then visit another country, while paying extortionate (in relation to their income) prices for life-saving medication all the while.
"You cannot pay for NHS services" is almost a tautology, since whether a service is NHS or not is defined by who pays. You certainly used to be able to pay for services carried out in NHS facilities using NHS equipment, generally outside the hours the NHS was willing to pay to run them. You can pay to see people privately who also work for the NHS too.
But of course that "service" is mostly waste. If you self-refer yourself to Dr. Smucker, the best [foo] surgeon in the business, you're likely to find that your [foo] isn't broken at all and even if it was, it doesn't need surgery. So you've wasted Ms. Smucker's time and your insurance company's money, and you haven't made anyone, including yourself, any healthier.
And of course, there's like a 50-50 chance that Ms. Smucker is actually out of network by the time you see her, and you'll get a $2,000 bill to pay.
Take out the profit motive and you can build systems to actually make people healthier: networks of clinics and registered nurses and family physicians to handle the bulk of the work (which is, after all, mostly routine) backed up by specialists for the hard cases, and everyone with a mandate to do what is best for the patient rather than what makes the most money. That's what other countries do and it works extremely well, providing better health outcomes than the USA for a fraction of the cost.
We can argue about the potential cost savings of restricting who patients can see and when, but that's my point! Politically, telling folks who are happily "wasting" money on medicine that the government and not their doctors will decide what they can and can't have is a huge loser.
Currently, their insurers are not heavily restricting them, because they're paying for the privilege.
Insurance companies are not different than government, they also try to limit your usage of health services. Every time you get service it is an expense for them.
But honestly I think single payer is just part of the solution. You also need public hospitals, because hospitals have no incentive to suggest a good but cheap solution to a medical problem.
I read a book, where an American went all around the world with the same ailment, got examined and suggestions for procedure to treat it. A VERY telling outcome was that in the US only the most expensive and complicated procedure was suggested to the patient. In other countries he was informed about cheaper and far less invasive procedures. Which btw worked and made him happy, so he avoided a complicated and potentially risky surgical procedure.
This is a problem with the US system. There are something like 2-3x as many surgical procedures that needed often simply worsening the well being of the patient. This is the flawed American thinking that good health care is the same as getting lots of complicated medical procedures.
The drug consumption is also astonishing. When using American health care I was shocked by how aggressively they pushed medication on me. People are trying to push medication on people everywhere in the US. Doctors, commercials, drug stores etc. You are not a patient. You are just a customer.
The US system really just leads to the health care sector focusing on pushing as many expensive drugs and procedures on the people who can pay for them an ignoring the rest, regardless of whether that brings better health or not.
The French system is similar to that. You're right it's more expensive in terms of government expenditure than the US, although quite a lot cheaper in terms of combined public-private cost.
I think it's a single payer system with an additional premium coverage, which can be covered either by copayment in the event, or with private insurance.
Why should voters care if they pay the government for a service instead of private enterprise, if government can provide the service for a lower price?
I don't get why voters think there is something inherently worse with paying taxes than paying insurance companies.
Taxes have the benefit that they can not typically be higher than your income, while insurance can easily be higher than your income.
If you are sick for a long time with say cancer treatment and lose your job, then your insurance costs will quickly get higher than your income.
No, it really isn't. It was just botched legislation. The "bill" was totally unfeasible without more details and a plan for how to pay for it. It's not like it's inherently unaffordable or that the cost is too high. The estimates in the article are pretty much in line with what California already spends on healthcare.
Perhaps if legislators actually knew how to legislate this would have stood a chance at passing.
> The estimates in the article are pretty much in line with what California already spends on healthcare.
Nowhere close. It would have doubled the budget at an additional $200 billion dollars, and this is for a state in which 70% of healthcare expenses are already paid for by public funds.
But the net cost to voters is highly negative, and voter support is very high.
If you can save $10 by paying $5, and your argument for why you won't do it is that it costs too much, I'm going to tell you that you need a math course.
What it seems to actually boil down to is bribery.
"If you can save $10 by paying $5, and your argument for why you won't do it is that it costs too much, I'm going to tell you that you need a math course."
It's not simple math though, it's politics and projections from people with an agenda. If you tell me I can save $10 by paying $5, it's my responsibility to decide if you're lying to me, to question your assumptions, etc. Maybe it costs $8 to save $10, but I give up significant other rights/options/etc.
TLDR, it's not just math, and the math isn't that simple.
If you can save $10 by paying $5, and your argument for why you won't do it is that it costs too much, I'm going to tell you that you need a math course.
But you won't be saving money. Think of it as a conservation of matter problem in physics.
The current insurance model covers some set of care for some subset of people. The goal is to provide more comprehensive care for more people - i.e., much more care will be provided in total. The supporters of government-provided healthcare (whether it's this CA bill, or ACA) don't want to look at this bigger picture and acknowledge that they really are proposing to spend a lot more.
Not only will this cost more, but pushing more care through the existing infrastructure will also result in long waits for care and the other kinds of things people in Canada and the UK complain about. If the infrastructure was built with a given amount of usage, vastly increasing that usage will overtax the infrastructure. And with the financial concerns that surround the problem, it's quite a stretch to say that the capacity will be increased.
Pasting a link with no words is a cheap reply. If you can't spend the time to actually formulate an argument, it's hardly worth the time to reply to you.
Your implication is that because they're the only buyer, sellers will be forced to fall into line. That's not applicable in this situation, for the very same reasons that the bill's proponents claim that a free market system doesn't work.
For the negotiation that you're implying to work, it has to involve the possibility that the potential buyer could say "no" and walk away. In this case, it's not going to happen. There's just no way the government can say no to, e.g., a revolutionary treatment for AIDS - the political constituencies simply won't let it happen.
So what we'll be left with is:
- Treatments for maladies involving well-organized constituencies will get disproportionately better coverage. So AIDS or breast cancer will have much better care than, say, colon cancer.
- The choices in these negotiations will be made by those hyperbolic "death panels". Yes, the GOP were exaggerating a lot, but when it comes down to it, somebody has to decide where finite resources will be spent. Somebody in the government is going to be deciding if your affliction is the one that gets left on the negotiating table in order to close the deal.
I wish I had $1 for every time someone told me I was "guaranteed" to save $10 later by paying $5 today.
Now, instead of an alleged guarantee, let's change that to "we admit we don't even have a concrete budget estimate that demonstrates how this will save money, but take our word for it that at some point it'll pay off. And in the mean time, we need to triple the state annual budget". That's a much harder sell, especially at this scale, and especially when the majority of people are actually satisfied with their personal insurance situation as it is.
Even Vermont; Green Mountain Care; ran away from the idea simply because they could not find the stomach to pay for it. It was supposed to start in 2017 when the ACA permitted such arrangements. to even get close to a palatable number they would force cuts in payments to doctors, hospitals, and more, by nearly twenty percent while doing nothing to reduce the operational costs of such providers.
Another nail in the coffin is that of the many proposals to shift tax deductions away from the rich is to remove the Federal deduction for State and local taxes. High tax states need this deduction to hide their spending. It reduces by a lot the amount of Federal taxes paid in those states to benefit local coffers. Without the deduction tax increases become a real threat by increasing the chance those with large taxable incomes move
The rest of the developed world affords it by paying up to 60% in taxes, like where I live, and still seeing private doctors if you don't want to wait months.
Also much lower salaries for doctors and nurses, as well as building hospitals that are more like public schools and less like luxury hotels.
Certainly much of our spending is inefficient or flatly wasteful, but it would be very difficult to slice it by 20 or 40% at the stroke of a pen. Those hospitals have been built and require maintenance. Those doctors and nurses went heavily into debt for their educations, and so on.
And to add to this, it's impossible to predict the future. Even if you are privy to all relevant details to come up with an accurate "value" to attach to your shares, you have no idea what sort of deals will be made in the future (stock-backed loans or later equity rounds come to mind). All it takes is one bad-for-common deal and you're wiped out, and common is usually the first to get the short end of the stick (and the last to find out).
Edit: a word