I'm thinking about letting the taxpayers subsidize me.

On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 5:42:52 PM UTC-4, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wr ote:

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erly universal system, like the medical care systems in every other advance d industrial country.

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l police

niversal firefighting

have universal defense

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(I don't choose to be hungry, so it makes sense to have universal food care ?)

Taking away people's choices and forcing them into something less efficient isn't compassionate or smart.

Our European friends don't appreciate how much bigger the US is than European countries. Things that make sense in Europe don't make sense here.

Maybe this will help: Why doesn't all of Europe use the same 'EU' health plan, administered, for example, in Athens? Or Rome?

Answer: because that would be crazy, right?

Why do European countries have their own laws? Why not have Paris hand them down for the whole continent? Think of the savings!

In the U.S., the federal government exists to *serve* the states in situati ons where individual states could not effectively act. (For example, imagine 5

0 states debating in 99 legislatures whether to declare war.)

There are very good ways that could cut America's cost of health care in half without taking anyone's life, liberty, or property. Unfortunately we're mired in this O-dumbo-care nonsense instead, as President Obama conti nues to insist on force-feeding the country.

He won't succeed. It won't work without everyone's active help. Instead of help he's got half the country ferociously opposing. If you want to do something to a free people you have to ask, you need their goodwill, and for heaven's sake don't lie to them about the important facts.

Cheers, James Arthur

And, SPECIFICALLY, what has the Right offered as an alternative? What *SPECIFIC* changes are *you* advocating??

It would actually be GOOD for the Supreme Court to rule the subsidies "illegal" and let the mess unravel. I suspect you'd see lots of new (Blue) faces in the House and Senate come the next election -- not because folks *wanted* to vote blue but becasue the Red faces wouldn't have addressed the mess that ensued!

How many years have they had to offer some alternative? Instead of (what is it now, *50*?) "symbolic" votes to REPEAL??

I think the Reds will find veing in the majority (in Congress) is a LOT harder than being The Party of No.

[As far as LYING is concerned... have you fact checked the last REPUBLICAN administrations "truthfulness"?? And, THEY marched folks off to be put their LIVES on the line for *their* (ahem) "truths". Yeah, maybe the next Bush will be more truthful than the past two??]

"He's only zapped the people who buy their own policies so far (the 'individual market,' 5% of the country), and held off (contrary to law) the employer provisions.

There's a reason for that. If the rest of the country had already experienced the joy of Obamacare, they'd be rioting in the streets."

Just wanted that said again, he's only screwing with a few of us at a time, to prevent an overthrow. Mikek

Do your research. How many members of congress are medical doctors? No blah-blah, numbers please.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I've underlined the salient point. If it doesn't sink in now I can't help.

[...]

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

I also tend to look at the risks (of lawsuits). But mainly I don't really want to deal with day-to-day production.

Hint: All it takes is one case where your client either doesn't have deep enough pockets or files for bankruptcy. Then whatever liability shield is in the agreements becomes meaningless, then they'll come after whoever produced the gear. Meaning you.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

This does not compute. Who pays for that? I assume you are not on welfare.

Sure. And why are they rising?

Because it is bad. I had much better health care before Obamacare.

Obamacare took freedoms away, lots of them. Before, people could consciously pick and chose what they want. Now they can't. The nanny state decides for them. Plans were de facto terminated. The president clearly said "If you like your health plan you can keep it". That was in the opinion of many people a flat-out lie.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

ly universal system, like the medical care systems in every other advanced industrial country.

ASslampoons go, this is pretty funny, but you have used it before, and it s till avoids the point that the US system is rubbish, and everybody else has schemes that work better.

The only thing that makes sense to a right-wing nitwit is more right-wing n itwittery.

It's not that you lack the intelligence to process the arguments, but since the logic doesn't come out supporting your preferred point of view, you ch ose not to bother processing the arguments. Your brain has been washed rath er thoroughly, and a layer of irrational anti-pollution scepticism installe d to keep it squeaky clean

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

You should be used to that by now. And I don't recall you getting upset whe n it turned out that Dubbya had lied to get you into Irak.

As you have reminded me before, the US isn't formally a democracy, but a re public. Granting the defects of your constitution, it's actually a poorly d isguised plutocracy, with a thin veneer of elected representation to give t he working class some illusion of representation.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

That's what Obama would call 'collateral damage.' Or maybe he hopes to turn them into moochers--it's hard not to be corrupted when your government gives you other people's stuff, and calls it 'just.'

Cheers, James Arthur

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And the whole point about national insurance schemes is that it recognises that people don't shop around wisely when they get sick, so the free-market price pressure doesn't actually work.

National insurance health schemes substitute administrative supervision for free-market price pressures. They don't work perfectly either, but since e ven the most extravagant of the competition - the French and German systems - deliver much the same quality of health care for everybody for two-third s of the price per head of your system, they clearly work better than your system.

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This doesn't give America's bankers and their GFC the credit they deserve f or sucking American wallets dry.

,

It all depends on your point of view. James Arthur is dedicated to preservi ng a health care system that doesn't work all that well, and making it work even worse, so he does see Obamacare as a "giant leap backwards" rather th an as a depressingly small step in the right (left-leaning) direction.

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There is is rioting in the streets, but at the moment it's all about US equ al opportunity policing - where the "opportunity" is to be exposed to racis m.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Obama took office just after the GFC hit. If he;d been silly enough to foll ow the Tea Party economic advice (as laid out here by James Arthur) the US labour participation rate would have dropped as much as it did after the 19

29 stock market crash - about 25%.

A 3.5% fall isn't good, but it could have been a lot worse.

as.

US kids who were brought up in a era when almost everybody's real incomes r ose every year, have difficulty adapting the behaviour they learned from th eir parents to the current (post-Reagan) economic climate where the persist ing expansion of the economy only makes the rich richer, and leaves the poo rer 80% of the population on the same income (if they've still got jobs).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Obamacare is welfare, mostly. Most of the sign-ups are Medicaid, a poverty program, and almost all of the people on the exchanges are subsidized.[1]

[1] E.g. E.g. "At the 37 HHS-run exchange, about 87 percent have qualified for Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) premium subsidy tax credits. In 2014, only about 80 percent of all enrollees have qualified for tax credits."

It's funded through taxes and rate hikes on the people who pay--you, and Mike--plus added to the deficit.

Cheers, James Arthur

operly universal system, like the medical care systems in every other advan ced industrial country.

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sal police

universal firefighting

to have universal defense

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You don't choose to be hungry, but you get hungry every day. Getting sick, like getting invaded or burgled or having your house catch on fire, is an i ntermittent event.

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The US health care system costs half as much again per head as the most exp ensive of it's international competitors. Persisting with it isn't compassi onate or smart.

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The US - at 320 million - is bigger than Germany at 81 million, France at 6

6 million, or the UK at 65 million. In administrative terms the health care systems in each of these countries are operating on the same scale.

It's not being bigger that makes the US different, it's that the US is being run more for the benefit of people with lots of money than it's European counterparts. Germany does have the benefit of it's 1948 constitu tion - Frances's is even more recent, but it was written by Charles de Gaul le so that he could stay president of France for as long as possible so it does have defects.

For the same reason that it doesn't yet have a central government. It does have a European Parliament, but executive action is negotiated between the national governments'

Wrong. It's a perfectly sensible idea, but it isn't going to happen for qui te a while, probably not until machine translation has been perfected, or u ntil every bureaucrat in Europe has mastered English as a second language.

Another straw man.

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The US constitution wasn't the first stab at setting up a federation - the Netherlands did it first - and while they got a lot of stuff right, my seco ndary school lessons about the Australian federeal constitution did emphasi se that it had made different choices about states right than the US consti tution. The 1948 German constitution probably incorporates further fine tun ing.

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You didn't much like his approach to dealing with the GFC either. You seeme d taken with the therapeutic virtues of re-running the Great Depression bac k in 2010. Your opinions are those of a right-wing nitwit, and really don't deserve to be taken seriously - even by you.

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As you do?

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Lol, nearly everything you come up with on this topic is "blah-blah". Funny that you demand others do your research as pointless as it is.

Congress doesn't do their own thinking. They are prodded and motivated by special interest groups. The AMA and many other medical groups are some of the most influential lobbying groups in Washington.

But you left out the results... bottom line, we need more doctors to deliver more care. Do you really think we can provide medicine at the same level of care to more patients if we don't have more doctors? If they can't even keep up with what was recommended by their own special interest groups, how will they handle the added care required by covering more people?

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Rick

That does appear to be from a reputable source, a study published in Science. But here is something you didn't quote, "Experts cite many root causes. In addition to the nation's long-standing shortage of primary care doctors...". You can't expect more people to be seen by the same number of doctors.

Yes, you would see it all as a big lie rather than errors. Ever hear the expression "early days"?

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Rick

*Everything* covered by insurance is "free" if you use it. That's what insurance is, you pay for the average of all expenses and you get your covered when you need it.

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Rick

And their policies pay for yours? What???

There's no free market anyway. As others have said, you can't know the prices with any low effort. In some cases it is literally impossible. I know, I've tried.

No, doctors remove price feed back. Do they hand you a price list when you make an appointment or show up? No, you are just expected to pay after they treat you. Heck, I've had doctor offices ask me to give a credit care *before* the procedure when they can't tell me how much it will.

Lol. Poor Mike. I don't think my surgery will have any impact on Mike's rates.

I am thanking him and all the other loyal tax payers. :)

No, they won't, not because it is a step backwards, but because it doesn't address the real issues.

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Rick

I don't either. That's why I contract out my production. They even perform the final test and burn-in which I used to do. Like I said, my biggest hassle now is the international shipping.

A multi billion dollar company folds and they come after me? lol I think you are being a bit paranoid. The risk all comes from the design, not the production. How much O&E insurance do you have? A mil, three? I'm protected by billions.

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Rick

s that people don't shop around wisely when they get sick, so the free-mark et price pressure doesn't actually work.

There's no point discussing things with you when you just make things up.

In this very thread we had several examples of free-market Mike carefully shopping for health care (actually, physically, controlling prices and spending IRL), and free-loaders telling us it's impossible. "People don't shop wisely when they get sick" isn't supported, nor does it matter. Most money isn't spent in dire illness, and, urgent care benefits considerably from economies gained from price pressures in ordinary care.

Centralized administrations don't shop at all, they just demand.

or free-market price pressures. They don't work perfectly either, but since even the most extravagant of the competition - the French and German syste ms - deliver much the same quality of health care for everybody for two-thi rds of the price per head of your system, they clearly work better than you r system.

That's just a load of blather. You've got no idea what's in Obamacare. I j ust spent another three hours looking through O-cr@p's 'healthy lifestyle' b.s. It's so laughably nanny-stupid, so twisted, it boggles the mind.

And yet you feel perfectly entitled to pontificate without knowing a damn thing about it.

Cheers, James Arthur