Insurance does not just give docs everything that we want. In my limited experience, the negotiations over rates are heavily tilted in the insurers’ favor whether they be public or private, and in the last few years the main issues up for discussion have been how much we will be cut and from where and what new hoops we and the patients will have to jump through to secure reimbursement. I should add that reimbursement from some public payors (especially variants of Medicaid) doesn’t even always cover office costs, particularly for evaluation and management specialties. Private insurance reimbursement rates are often pegged to Medicare rates, and so we essentially never set our own fees. Nearly the only people ever faced with paying the full hospital and physician charges are the uninsured, and even many of them can bargain if they are savvy since most providers recognize the risk that that “self-pay” will turn into “no pay” which frankly happens a lot.

I’ve pointed out that problem out on this blog a time or two before. Lamentably, Hispanics, in defiance of typological realities (Indians being, on a per capita basis, darker complected than Hispanics) seem to have seized the onomastic high ground on this one.

I was reflecting on the word Brown though; it doesn’t only mean Desi brown but Latin Brown too.

That might actually be more relevant to an American audience because both the US and UK are browning albeit differently.

That said, plenty of technological improvements do seem to date from about that time, but one wonders why they happened then and not earlier.

yes. that’s what the archaeology seems to suggest.

You’re just not going to let the scissors thing go, are you?

prolly not.

I am wondering about the productivity of the areas just south of the ice. Pretty high I’d guess. It was cold, but the actual level of solar energy was just as high as it is today at the same latitude. Summers might have been pretty nice, if the wind wasn’t from the north.

A steadily rising population does not suggest a simple Malthusian model.

End of the ice-age?

6000 years or so ago in both the new and old worlds agriculture was raising populations. No mystery there. But what was going on during the 20,000 years before that? Gradual, worldwide technological improvements? Expansion of humans into more marginal habitats as they develop technologies that allow them to thrive? This is a Cornucopian chart, not a Malthusian.