alt Hacker News> most people would interpret that to mean
You're just asserting common convention among some implicitly selected audience that you consider "most" people, rather than justifying why that is the most reasonable practice.
Not that I consider it unreasonable (as I explained above).
Most people (in the populace) are unfortunately not numerate enough to have a thoughtful opinion on how it ought to be accounted, and are irrelevant to this discussion.
>You're just asserting common convention among some implicitly selected audience that you consider "most" people, rather than justifying why that is the most reasonable practice.
The purpose of language is communication, so if "most" people (which I mean to be laypeople off the street, which is the presumptive audience for this report) understand what it means, then it's mission accomplished. On the flip side, if the language used is deceptive/misleading, even if the underlying principle is sound, that's bad. The "most reasonable practice" question is unhelpful because it quickly devolves into questions on how society ought to work, which is subjective and no objective statements can be made about it. For instance, why even argue what the "profit" margin is? Should private entities even be making money on healthcare? Why not put out a "study" on how much unitedhealth is "stealing" from people instead? After all, the position that for profit companies shouldn't be involved in the provision of healthcare isn't exactly an uncommon position.