
Ask HN: How to support old hackers? - aeontech
Hi HN. Over the past few years I&#x27;ve seen several instances where historically significant members of the software, hacker, or open source community have fallen on hard times enough to be reduced to fundraising for medical assistance, and&#x2F;or being forced to abandon their open source efforts due to inability to survive doing it. Latest in long line of examples is Captain Crunch (John Draper), one of the fathers of phone phreaking [0]. In fact, he got Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs into phreaking, and their first business before building Apple I was building and selling blue boxes [1]. In a way, without their meeting, there may not have been an Apple.<p>In this case, a massive part of the blame is of course with the US health care system, which basically makes it extremely difficult to survive old age unless you have a retirement plan and insurance - things that many self-employed developers never had.<p>The question I&#x27;d like to raise, however, is not &quot;what is the root cause&quot;, but rather &quot;what can we as a community do about it&quot;. Some trade professions take care of their elder members by forming a union and contributing to a common pension plan, but it seems that there aren&#x27;t many unions for software engineers. We have the good fortune of being members of one of the best-paid professions in the world, and I find it very sad that we still end up with our members and elders falling through the cracks and struggling to survive.<p>[0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gofundme.com&#x2F;crunch-medical-fund&#x2F;<p>[1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-definitive-story-of-steve-wozniak-steve-jobs-and-phone-phreaking&#x2F;273331&#x2F;
======
patio11
The news about Captain Crunch gave me pause, too.

I'd encourage young folks on HN -- self-employed or otherwise -- to start
planning for old age now. Not tomorrow, not after the exit, etc, now. You get
absurd amounts of leverage for starting early.

Self-employed US folks get access to the two best pension plans in the country
which are not funded with tax dollars: the Roth IRA and the SEP-IRA. You can
set up a Roth account trivially; the SEP takes more work but lets you sock
away min($54k, 25% of your compensation) every year in a tax-advantaged
fashion.

Max out contributions. Buy broad market index funds. DO NOT raid the
retirement account to pay for weddings, house downpayments, new businesses,
college expenses, etc.

For similar reasons I'd suggest everyone with dependents get term life
insurance (cheap and easy when you're young and healthy) and strongly consider
getting private long-term disability insurance.

~~~
kasey_junk
This is, of course, all very reasonable and important advice. Everyone should
follow it.

But it turns out that _medical expenses_ are beyond the scope of normal and
appropriate financial planning. They are a systematic problem in the United
States and require a systematic solution. In many cases, the insurance
required to prevent the kinds of financial problems in the OPs question are
unavailable at _any_ price and the expenses associated are financially harmful
for all but the richest members of our society.

There is basically no way to answer this Ask without addressing the systematic
problem of health care.

~~~
aeontech
Fixing heath care would certainly work, but that seems nearly unachievable
with the current political system (recall that even ACA that is so vilified
was largely based on Republican plans in the first place). Though I suppose
civil rights and voting rights also seemed nearly unachievable at first...

So is there really nothing between the two extremes of "fix everything" and
"donate what you can when you hear from someone in need"?

------
Mz
The US really needs a single payer health care system. We are developing more
and more drugs and surgeries that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
From what I have heard, more than half of all bankruptcies involve medical
bills that they can't afford and this is true even if the individual has
_good_ insurance.

I worked in insurance. Insurance works well for things like car insurance
where the threat of increased insurance costs can be a deterrent to
irresponsible driving habits. But health insurance doesn't really make sense.
It boils down to "you bet your life."

Like with fire and police, not giving adequate health care to some people who
can't afford it threatens the welfare of all of society. The reason you don't
want to refuse to put out a fire because someone didn't pay their fire bill is
because the fire can spread and destroy large parts of town, not just the
house that originally caught on fire. The same basic principle applies to
health issues: Infections can spread.

So, when we kick some people to the curb on this issue, we undermine the
health and welfare of all of society.

~~~
trcollinson
I agree on all points. However, I have one honest sticking point. It seems to
me that the US health insurance industry is a huge job creator (in other words
health insurance companies employ a lot of people, doctors offices and
hospital etc employ a lot of people, all to process insurance). As a very
serious question: what happens to these jobs by going to a single payer
system? A statistic I found showed health insurance companies alone employee
2.5 million people in the US. They also do provide a massive amount of money
to the economy. I would hope that a single payer system would reduce the cost
of health insurance administration significantly and thereby reduce the need
for these jobs. But what is the macro economic ramification on the US economy
and how do we mitigate that? I don't think we can stick our head in the sand
and pretend the issue is not a real burden on going to a single payer system.
We need to solve it to achieve the goal. If even 50% of those jobs are lost
that is a massive surge in US unemployment.

~~~
Mz
I worked for Aflac for over five years. They do not do major medical. They
provide supplemental insurance. When I was there, 75-80% of their income was
from their Japanese division. Japan has a single payer system.

Most insurance companies have multiple products. When the landscape changes
and undercuts some current product, you come up with new ones and retrain your
people. Plus, the government would likely hire some of those people to work
for it once it took over payments because those people already have HIPAA
training, are familiar with Gramm-Leach-Bliley Etc.

------
itamarst
Push for single payer healthcare. Most developed countries have this, and it
works massively better than US system.

Fight for continued existence of Social Security.

~~~
aeontech
I feel like the US needs another "New Deal" type of program. I understand the
dangers of inflation when money is printed indiscriminately with no value
produced to back it. What I still fail to grasp is whether there are such
dangers when the money is used to pay the citizenry for creating public
infrastructure, public health care, teacher salaries, basic science research,
et cetera. Such investments in the country's future seem essential and
tragically low for this economy. Or is the only root cause of objections to
this type of government spending moral, not economic?

