I'm thinking about letting the taxpayers subsidize me.

But not producing? Mikek

I'm on sick leave. Too bad my company has lousy benefits. I'm only getting $1 a month at this point.

--

Rick

40+ years of savings plus the huge growth in the stock market, should sustain you for at least 30 more years. Get a hobby. Mikek

--- It seems to me that it's rather the other way around.

Sorry, just couldn't resist... ;)

es

ut weapons of mass destruction, and claiming that Saddam had something to d o with 9/11, James Arthur is either grossly imperceptive or grossly partisa n - I favour the latter explanation. James Arthur can be quite perceptive w hen finding evidence that appears to support his point of view.

t was pointed out here back then that Dubbya's case was less than substanti al - he's got no business complaining about Obama now. In fact - since he s ounds exactly like a Republican apologist - it wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect that his claims about Obama are somewhat exaggerated for political effect, much as Dubbya's were about Sadam.

You've made a number of nonsense statements, then use that as support for a false moral equivalence.

I didn't vote for Dubbya, hard as it might be for you to grasp, yet he didn't tell me I could "keep my plan, period," nor did he constantly lie about anything that I noticed.

There's zero evidence he lied about Iraq, and decent evidence released since that they had WMD--chemical weapons discovered in the invasion. You're just repeating nonsense.

The biggest error of all in Iraq was Obama's: after all that questionable blood and treasure, throwing it away by buggering out before it was able to stand on its own.

Obama? Deity for dummies. Pathological.

Cheers, James Arthur

No, the subsidy was meant as a permanent welfare program. Rick's wrong.

The laughably absurd exchanges were supposed to be self-sustaining too, but half are already going broke--they can't live off 3.5% of their gross traffic!!!

Individual rates up some 40+%, the exchanges tack on 3.5%, and that's all supposed to make it cheaper?

Idiot socialists. It's reassuring to see the know-it-alls who deigned to take our freedom of choice are so competent.

Cheers, James Arthur

lth care

ing you with health care when you need it may be a liberty, but probably a less restrictive and potentially damaging one.

diseases have killed more people in plagues than wars ever did. The US medi cal health system is poorer defense against plagues than it ought to be - r ead up on drug-resistant TB in the US if you find this hard to accept - and it needs to be brought up to international standards

to Rick, if it improves the quality of the health care system in the proces s.

That rationale entitles 'society' to take anything from anyone, to any degr ee.

You're a flaming totalitarian, and it's showing.

On top of that, expropriating Mike's health care and giving it to Rick does not make a better system, but a much, much worse one.

mary justification for the existence of a health care system. I have remind ed you about this before, but you don't seem to have been sick recently and presumably have decided that you are invulnerable, along with all your far

-right-thinking friends.

What you've described is the justification for a sanitation system, representing an almost trivial cost. Sanitation has done far more to exten d life than any other factor. Antibiotics are second.

The suggestion the U.S. has to nationalize health care to avoid the plagues that have been wiping out American citizens, merits no response.

Cheers, James Arthur

te:

't pay

not

ducers.

ecognises that people don't shop around wisely when they get sick, so the f ree-market price pressure doesn't actually work.

gs up.

people being willing to spend any amount of money when they - or their near est and dearest - get sick, and I've got personal experience of being offer ed a "free market" operation at a fixed price which it turned out that I di dn't need.

efully

and

dy is in Mike's and my happy position of being able to say no. When my neph ew was lying in hospital with a cracked cervical vertebra and there was evi dence of pressure on his spinal cord, my brother was very happy to spend he avily on an operation that may not have been necessary.

does it

nefits

care.

r ward and had been for a day or so when the fact that there was pressure o n the spinal cord became obvious.

d judgements in what they perceive to be an emergency, but pressing medical situations aren't confined to the Emergency Room - the Emergency Room exis ts to recognise the patients immediate problems, and stabilise them well en ough to give medical staff enough time to examine the problem in detail.

ple who are agreeing to it feel themselves - correctly - to be in an emerg ency situation

ncy - can't shop around. The emergency doesn't necessarily go away once the immediate problems are stabilised, and the stabilised patient is rarely in a position to get a second opinion.

perfectly capable of shopping around, others need to be kept alive.

ever it was they were about to do until they can give you an answer - emerg ency reception staff are trained to save lives first and deal with patient requests later.

rue - and totally irrelevant. The state of emergency lasts until the patien ts condition is fully understood, properly stabilised and treated well enou gh that nothing exciting is likely to happen.

gency spending - restricted to payments for emergency care, in Emergency Re ception only. That isn't the way it works in real life.

tor would have been able to work out.

ospital care don't know what's hit them - and it can take a while for their doctors to find out - and are in no position to make rational choices abou t what should be done to them. Few patients would be enthusiastic about an emergency tracheotomy.

You extrapolated an anecdote to argue consumer shopping doesn't effect price pressure. It's dim.

Shopping reduces price, which drives costs. It doesn't have to be on-the-s pot or even real-time to be effective. You can shop in advance if you want, picking and preferring certain hospitals, etc.

There will always be circumstances and cases where you can't, but even those benefit from price pressure on the other cases.

Cheers, James Arthur

You yourself just gave an example of you, in pain, shopping in the ER (questioning the need for an MRI). q.e.d.

Cheers, James Arthur

Truly Mike--you, bustin' your back six days a week to pay for the things you and your family want, and too lazy to work more to pay so someone who isn't & didn't, can get it free? How selfish.

I was going to suggest that, but you beat me to it. Millions and millions of Americans are deciding O-working doesn't make sense, financially.

Socialism only works if you produce more than you personally need. They're depending on it. If you don't there's no excess to redistribute, and it flops.

Cheers, James Arthur

Worse! He's bustin' his butt to save for *his* future. Not only selfish but un-o-merican.

You can always borrow the needed excess and if no one will loan it to you, just loan it to yourself.

Yes, I did that one time, but only because my friend was there and *I*, in spite of the pain, was willing to talk to a doctor as if I had a right to question them. How many people do you know who would do the same in the ER?

I can assure you that 99.9% of the time patients in the ER just do what the doctor suggests or even asks them to do more tests and more treatment.

--

Rick

ties

bout weapons of mass destruction, and claiming that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, James Arthur is either grossly imperceptive or grossly parti san - I favour the latter explanation. James Arthur can be quite perceptive when finding evidence that appears to support his point of view.

it was pointed out here back then that Dubbya's case was less than substan tial - he's got no business complaining about Obama now. In fact - since he sounds exactly like a Republican apologist - it wouldn't be unreasonable t o suspect that his claims about Obama are somewhat exaggerated for politica l effect, much as Dubbya's were about Sadam.

Perhaps you didn't vote for him, but you certainly didn't complain when he lied to the country about Saddam Hussein.

Really? But you haven't provided a link to it. My impression is that there was never a shred of evidence suggesting that Irak had WMD at the time of t he invasion, and whatever evidence you may be thinking of is almost certain ly the product of wishful thinking by analysts deliberately generating nons ense that will go down well with right-wing nitwits. Nobody outside the US administration thought that the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Irak adduced at the time was remotely convincing, and nobody I've heard of found any convincing evidence that after the invasion.

Put up or shut up.

I'm not repeating anything, whereas your mantra about Obama's "lies" - whic h less partisan observers are prepared to blame on his being "misinformed"

- is been repeated in a large proportion of what you've posted for the last year or so.

to

That begs the question of whether it was ever going to be able to "stand on it's own" under the kind of government that the US could countenance. It's a cobbled-together colonial remnant which presents rather intractable prob lems. Obama at least had the sense to get out as fast as he decently could. Invad ing the place was a much bigger - and more expensive - error than getting o ut ever could be.

Who thinks that Obama is a deity? No doubt he has his groupies, but I'm not one of them. You'd be an anti-groupie, attributing demonic powers to someb ody whose only real misdeed is to have lead the Democrats better than any o f the Tea Party loonies could lead the tattered remnants of the Tea-Party-r avaged Republican Party

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Not as dim as your totally unsupported assertions.

Sadly, the practical test is the performance of the current US system, which is half again more expensive per head than it's obvious international competitors.

No amount of inspirational rhetoric about the benefits of the totally unrestricted free market is going to change that. The sick are anything but rational shoppers, and only an irrational ideologue would think otherwise.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

en

@yahoo.com:

e:

ealth care

o)

iding you with health care when you need it may be a liberty, but probably a less restrictive and potentially damaging one.

s diseases have killed more people in plagues than wars ever did. The US me dical health system is poorer defense against plagues than it ought to be - read up on drug-resistant TB in the US if you find this hard to accept - a nd it needs to be brought up to international standards

t to Rick, if it improves the quality of the health care system in the proc ess.

gree.

To any degree? That's a strawman argument, if ever I heard one.

You are a flaming totalitarian when it comes to conscription, but oddly unw illing to generalise from war to plague.

es

That's your impression - but the evidence of the French and German systems is that you are totally wrong.

rimary justification for the existence of a health care system. I have remi nded you about this before, but you don't seem to have been sick recently a nd presumably have decided that you are invulnerable, along with all your f ar-right-thinking friends.

It isn't. Locking away Ebola victims when they hit the USA might have been sanitation, but it wasn't done by the sanitation department, who lack the t raining and the tools to identify infectious disease victims, and can't rea lly be given unfettered rights to lock people away just because they might be sick.

Perfectly true, but totally irrelevant.

es

The German, Dutch, and French health care systems are government regulated and the private insurance companies that actually collect the health insura nce premiums are more closely regulated than their US equivalents, but none are formally nationalised in the way the the UK National Health system is. They are also half again more more expensive per head than the British sys tem, if still two thirds of the price per head of the current US system.

The critical difference - when it comes to crisis management - is that they are universal and the US system is not. When Katrina hit New Orleans, the private hospitals around the city saw no necessity to open their doors to t ake some of the load off the public hospitals.

It doesn't take nationalisation to instill slightly more public-spirited be haviour than was exhibited back then.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

p o

The usual strawman argument. If Obamacare was designed to extend health ins urance to people who couldn't afford it before, it can't - in the short ter m - make healthcare cheaper for everybody.

If it's seen as a step towards the better designed and more comprehensive s ystems operating in France, Germany and the Netherlands, there might be an eventual expectation of cheaper system, but a number of fat cats will have to get slimmed down before that happens.

Basically, James Arthur is campaigning to keep the fat cats just as fat as ever, with the long term aim of giving them even more cream to lap up in an even less well regulated system.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Joerg, after stewing on this, I don't think these three are the worst offenders, not exactly.

#1 is third-party payers, a pressure vessel shielding practitioners from price pressures. When the person consuming the care has no idea what it costs, they're unable to shop or compare based on value, and less likely to care.

Without that pricing-pressure, practitioners have very little incentive to work on their cost problems (e.g. tort fears), they just grumble and raise their prices.

We've got not just third-party (insurers), we've inserted fourth-party (employers) and now under Obamacare, fifth- and sixth-party payers (gov't, and taxpayers).

I agree that defensive medicine resulting from tort fears is a big cost, but it'll simply be tolerated as long as the third-party payer scheme separates customers and services.

Preferential tax-treatment for employer-based care is another layer on top of this--it's a gov't incentive that incentivizes 3rd-party payments.

Secret pricing is another roadblock--you can't shop for gasoline if the stations don't list their prices.

Just a few thoughts...

Cheers, James Arthur

You don't know how selfish, the two of us run the store 7 days a week,

10 hours a day, 363 days a year, although sometimes we take off an extra day and it's only 362 days. :-) Even though 80% of it is easy, meaning, while watching the store (boat) I can walk laps, surf on my computer, bs with the locals, etc, the fact that it is 7:30 to 6:30 daily is starting to grind on me. I do get days off, more in winter than summer, but always on call.

I've had retiring at 62 in mind for a few years, but 61 is starting to creep in. The problem is my wife has no interest in retiring, her personality is such that her positive feedback loop is business resulting in psychological well being. Surprised it doesn't oscillate, hmm, I guess it does, a daily cycle.

Went for 40 minute swim at the local college, sure feels good walking to the car after that. Started the swim class last Monday, trying to build up some stamina after being setback with back trouble for 5 years. You know work is getting long in the tooth, when it's hard to get out of bed at 7:15 to go to work, but jump out of bed at 5:30 to go for a swim. :-)

Mikek

Many, if they were spending their own money. Which was the point.

But it's ancillary--that's a small part of spending. We were just wasting time on Sloman's strawman.

Cheers, James Arthur