It'll make your blood boil, unless your a lefty

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Yep, that's essential. You can't shop without prices.

Grocery stores have to have price tags, why not doctors, hospitals, and laboratories? It's something I'll be pushing for in my state.

Imagine if you went into a grocery where nothing was priced--how would you shop?

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat
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Which drives them to be more efficient. The feds have no such motivation.

Yes. But in serving their interest, they serve ours too--they control costs.

But they have perverse incentives, too, contrary incentives.

Pretty much. Would that the feds were that efficient.

Sloman keeps touting that Atul Gawande paper I'd read years before.

The nut of it was that Medicare was paying double one town over in Texas, for stuff that was half-price just a few miles away. Because the Medicare feds aren't there, don't care, and just send out checks. That is, they are horrendously inefficient, poor managers of cost.

Medicare has low administration costs in part by foisting their duties on the providers (who just bill more to cover it). But in so doing, Medicare fails to shop and control costs. They swing their iron fist, but they're slow and stupid while providers are nimble and inventive.

That's a critical mistake--the feds NEVER send you your dollar or anything close. They don't. They can't.

The insurance company isn't stealing, they're selling and you're buying. But if you think that's a way to reduce costs you're sadly mistaken. Insurance is for hedging risk, not saving.

Hiring meddling middlemen to pay your bills just adds the middlemen, paperwork & overhead. Hiring government middlemen is even worse.

If you want to save actual /cost/, pay cash. And get catastrophic insurance to hedge against catastrophes.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

You've got things reversed, especially the morality.

If 'wanting to keep what you've earned' is sociopathic, how is 'demanding what other people have earned' not far worse?

Socialism is "You have more, so gimme yours. (Or I'll shoot.)" If you worked 80 hours and the other guy 40, he's entitled to 30 hours of your pay. After all, he has kids. That's sociopathy.

That scheme creates a much poorer, divided society. Nearly wiped out our early settlers.

It's all very friendly, until it runs out of money. Then they start enforcing it with guns. E.g., Venezuela.

Think it can't happen? It's happening here. We're well into the "running out of money" phase, having promised benefits we can't possibly pay, and busily adding more.

Cheers, James Arthur

~~~~ ?I have never understood why it is ?greed? to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else?s money .?

--Thomas Sowell

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

My recollection of the US health system is that if you pay directly you are guaranteed to be price gouged since you have no bargaining power as a one off - the insurers invariably get a better deal as a bulk buyer.

Or are you advocating cash in hand so the doctor can evade taxes? (like dodgy tradesmen offering a discount for cash-in-hand)

You don't have much of an option about haggling on price if you are a road traffic accident casualty or even toothache for that matter.

Scheduled operations you can decide. Even in the UK with a free NHS you can still choose to pay and go privately (but the private sector has a bad habit of throwing its failures back over the wall into the NHS). It allows you to choose place, time and date and a higher trim level room but the surgeon may well also work for the NHS most of the time.

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Reply to
Martin Brown

oys

Canadian economists suggest that most of the extra cost of US health care c an be blamed on excessively meticulous cost-control - a sort bureaucratic c ancer that spends much more on controlling for cheating than cheating could ever cost.

.

Sadly, the feds are more efficient than the private insurers. Whatever moti vates the bureaucratic excesses of US health insurers has driven them to el aborate cost control far beyond the point where it is cost effective.

The kind of motivation that seems so appealing to James Arthur seems to hav e had perverse effects.

James Arthur needs to ask why American health costs are half again higher t han French, German and Dutch costs for the same quality of service. His fav ourite answer - "American exceptionalism" - is a cop-out.

Not as well as the French, German and Dutch equivalents.

r

They are. They dispense about 95 cents of every dollar they take in. For-pr ofit health insurers hang on to bit more to keep their share-holders happy.

I hadn't picked James Arthur as a New Yorker subscriber - he must read it e ven more selectively than I do.

e

re

The fact that the price gougers became targets of criminal prosecutions a f ew years later does imply that there was active deception involved. Atul Ga wande would not have had his attention drawn to the area if nobody had noti ced that something odd was going on, but the actual New Yorker article talk s in terms of legitimate differences in medical practice, rather than actua l fraud.

e

There is the point that no two patients are identical, so two patients pres enting with what initially look like the same symptoms can have wildly diff erent problems and cost outcomes.

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They typically give you back 95 cents of your dollar. Private for-profit co mpanies never do as well.

Correct. But there are different sort of health insurance, and health coope ratives, like Kaiser, do rather better than more commercial operations.

Hiring government middle middlemen does seem to work out better than James Arthur is willing to believe. The European schemes don't actually use the g overnment as a middle-man - the regulating agencies keep a close eye on the performance of closely regulated commercial insurers, which works out well enough that European medical costs run at two thirds of the cost per head of comparable health care in the US, even though the European schemes are u niversal, and treat everybody.

nce

Universal health care exists to protect the whole population against epidem ics. It spends most of its time treating individual problems - like heart d isease and cancer - which aren't contagious, but this is essentially a brib e to encourage the patients to go to the doctor early when they feel sick.

James Arthur can't get his head around this idea. It's ironic that his hero - Bastiat - died of tuberculosis, a very infectious disease, which he seem s to have caught when he met a lot of people in the course of his political activity in Paris. James Arthur doesn't seem to have registered that.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

e.

o

Every government that has ever existed has done that. Initially they used t he money to pay a standing army - them - that collected the money and prote cted its victims from other stand-over rackets. The idea has been elaborate d since then. James Arthur does a great line in double-think whenever this is pointed out to him.

It might be, if that was what was happening. It isn't.

Primitive versions of the scheme were vulnerable to free-loaders. Political theory and practice has come on a long way since then. James Arthur has th e bizarre idea that political science peaked with Bastiat, but his enthusia sm for keeping his ideas simple and easy to articulate has left his with a rather impractical set of prescriptions.

Venezuela was a failed state before its failures made Chavez - the Venezuel an Trump - an attractive candidate.

g

Trump is great on promises. The fact that he promises different things from one outing to the next does suggest that he isn't going to deliver on all of them. Making America great again and cutting the - already low - taxes that peopl e pay to buy that greatness is going to be a neat trick, if he can pull it off.

His history suggests he'll bankrupt the country and tell everybody that the bankruptcy is a stroke of genius.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

I did that 7 years ago, I raised my deductible from $2,500 to $10,000. That lowered my premium from $9,900 a year to $4,300 a year. A huge drop in my cost. Then came Obamacare, my premium has risen from $4,300 to $11,232. (family of 4.) I'd go higher, but last I checked my insurance company didn't offer anything over $10,000. Mikek

PS. Just want to reiterate, this thread started with the cheapest ACA policy in Merklenburg County NC at $32,448.

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Reply to
amdx

Right I don't know how you blame that on the government though. It's our employer based insurance. At some point I was thinking that market forces could work. but to be honest I don't want to spend my time shopping for doctors. (Just like I don't want to spend time picking stocks/ retirement investment.)

I pay cash at the Dentist. I'm not sure it saves any money though.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

So, if you read opinion pieces like the following:

What you'll notice is this guy is essentially taking the same propaganda tack that was taken by similar pundits in a small nation in Africa prior to a conflict called the Rwandan Genocide.

If both sides view each other as subhuman sociopaths a lot of the time, which seems to be both the case on this newsgroup and elsewhere, then this is certainly the expected result:

You'll blame "socialism", and I'll blame insane sociopaths like Kurt Schlichter. Unfortunately there's a pretty good chance there won't be many survivors who remember, or care.

Reply to
bitrex

Indeed. You know, there's a checklist of the stages of genocide, an older one with 8 stages, and a newer one with 10. It doesn't make me feel better comparing current events to said checklists.

Not that you'd get the guy to google it, let alone read it. Those I've tried it on so far have basically dismissed it as liberal propaganda aimed at making them look bad.

And yeah, I share your sentiment, you know what a prosecutor Robert Jackson once said during an opening address in one of his cases?

?The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated?

And they still wonder why people look at them sideways... *shrugs*

/Teo.

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Reply to
Teodor V.

No amount of moral or ethical behavior can save a nonbeliever from hell:

Evangelicals teach their children that anyone who isn't them are subhumans. That's what they do, today, in 2k17, right this minute.

Reply to
bitrex

If you believe in an omniscient God at all then you essentially must believe in the concept of predestination, that is to say if God knows everything then God certainly knows who is saved and who is damned ahead of time.

The universe then runs like clockwork all according to God's plan, and it's completely irrelevant in what way you live your life, as you don't have any free will, anyway. You're just a robot playing out a script that was already written, so the details of how you live your life are totally irrelevant.

To believe anything different and still assume that God is omniscient at the very least means your axioms are logically inconsistent.

Reply to
bitrex

Some of them are already making "death lists" with people who will be

*cough* eliminated *cough* when "they" come to power.

/Teo.

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Reply to
Teodor V.

No doubt.

If these times are the triumphs of conservative Christianity then it might be a good idea to figure out what that success is due to. It certainly won't be Christ, as Christ is long gone from this place.

Reply to
bitrex

I've known evangelicals and Catholics and Mormons and Baptists and Jews have never met one who does anything like that.

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Reply to
John Larkin

Most people give up thinking like that by the time they are about sixteen.

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Reply to
John Larkin

No fooling? Suppose one of them was - what did you expect them to tell you about it? "Hey sorry, can't talk right now I gotta run and get my kids to their subhumanization/genocide indoctrination class"?

Get real, homie!

Reply to
bitrex

Except when it came to his job specification for the personality of the people that spread Christianity...

Luke 14:26 New International Version (NIV)

26 ?If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters?yes, even their own life?such a person cannot be my disciple.

Requiring followers to hate everybody around them isn't a recipe for love and peace.

(The usual /attempted/ explanation starts with "but you must read it in context". Unfortunately the context is clear: it is a standalone statement in a standalone context).

Reply to
Tom Gardner

I'm talking about people that I've known well, well enough to comprehend their moral approach to life and events.

The evangelicals that I've known were very decent and sometimes boring people (after all, they evangelize) who thought and prayed over what was the right and moral thing to do. Their kids were generally great. Ditto Mormons.

If you search around enough, you'll find a few violent crazies among Christians, engineers, skeet shooters, or antifas.

It sounds like you are pretty intolerant yourself. Very, actually.

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Reply to
John Larkin

How hard do I have to look? I can see reposts of Kurt Schlichter's stuff on this NG what seems like at least once a day.

I am sort of intolerant of people who preach hate and violence on the regular, of any political affiliation, yeah. If not accepting with open arms any objectively whack-out shit some violent extremist wants to say or teach as being just as valid as anything else then I guess I'm guilty as charged.

If someone then claims to be unable to distinguish in a qualitative sense between simply having liberal philosophies and being Joseph Stalin reincarnate calling for Christian genocide then I can only assume they're either ignorant or mendacious, and there's no rule anywhere that I'm aware of that says one's a bigot for not tolerating either of those behaviors.

Reply to
bitrex

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