more EE Times nonsense

Absolutely true.

Just a few examples: bailouts, the health insurance mandate, GM, regulating CO2 (via the EPA), and home renovations (by the same), all are illegitimate, and illegal under our law.

We're to be surveilled in our financial transactions, homes, medical records, and so forth, categorized and tracked to an extent unprecedented in our history.

The President has compromised more civil liberties, seized without right more private property, gone farther beyond our Constitution than any President, ever.

He actively uses his office to pursue, slander, oppress, punish, and vilify any number of private citizens, opponents, private companies, and entire industries. It's unseemly.

And under the theories he operates, there is no limit to his power.

Barack Obama is the closest thing to a dictator this country has ever had.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Taxes will have to increase >60% to sustain the budgets Mr. Obama currently projects.

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In the one case I know of so far, 'S' called her insurance company and tried to get her 24-year old on her policy.

Insurance company: 'No'. S: 'But you have to, they passed that. It's the law." Insurance company: "Well, umm, we're not doing that. We don't think that's a valid law."

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On balance the new policies have to cost more--the new coverage has to cover all the things previously covered, plus more conditions, with fewer limits, by law with lower deductibles and co-pays. Inexpensive high-deductible policies are now illegal.

That simply costs more. There's no way around it, and there's no free lunch.

Here's how you /really/ improve health, and it has nothing to do with government anything--

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Hi James,

That strikes me as likely to be high, but I guess we'll just see...

I'm surprised an insurance company would take that stance ("we're just not going to play") rather than beginning to play while simultaneously challenging the ruling -- it's much riskier in terms of the punishment they might face if they don't prevail. Obama will likely toss their CEO in jail to serve as an example... ;-)

Agreed, although they did make an effort to try to minimize that increase.

Yeah, I kinda see the reasoning that caused this, but I think they could have done a better job with it. The diminution of HSAs (and probably their eventual elimination) doesn't please me either.

In some cases a 21-26 year old might be best off (strictly from a financial expenditure point of view) declaring themselves as independent and then just taking the "standard" government benefits policy.

Basically: Don't smoke, eat your fruits & veggies, exercise, and don't drink too much.

Good advice that's pretty timeless, certainly... although then you find other articles where, at least when it comes to cancer (which of course is very expensive to treat) the fruits & veggies don't seem to play much of a role:

---Joel

Illegal under your law? I haven't seen anybody bothering to sue. And Obama was a hot shot lawyer before he became a poltician, and should be able to work out how to get things done the way he wants without breaking any law, which is more than Dubbya could manage.

Funny that you didn't complain when Dubbya did this for real after

Any non-right-wing president.

That funny. I thought Karl Rove worked for Dubbya.

Whereas Dubbya just reserved the right to ignore bills he disagreed with

He's as close to middle of road as any president that you've had since Clinton, and you find this terrifying, you one-eyed partisan nitwit.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I based that guesstimate on the fact that last year Mr. Obama spent

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I disagree. There is nothing in the bill to reduce the cost or price of medical care or medical insurance, there are only additional requirements that perforce must increase both cost and price of care, and insurance. Further, ordinary policies must now subsidize both lower-income types, and the 10-15% previously uninsured.

So, the cost must reflect at least the same number of payers, paying for 10% more people, plus more coverage for more conditions. Hence the estimates of premiums rising 15-17%, initially.

The only line-items offering reductions I'm aware of come from actual reductions in services to people on Medicare and Medicaid.

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The most reasonable strategy is not to buy insurance until you need it; the penalties for a student without any income will be minimal, AFAICT (that part is particularly convoluted--I'm still unraveling it).

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Do all four and, on average, you'll add ten+ years to your life.

That's a zillion times more powerful than all of Obamacare's mumbo jumbo, at the cost of no one's freedom or treasure, and saves a fortune on medical care, all without government. In fact, all of these things are completely beyond government's power to give us, yet we're poised to spend trillions trying.

The most powerful, most effective things are those we do ourselves.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Mr. Obama was never a hot shot lawyer. He's only known to have worked on two cases, one for ACORN, to pressure banks into making more subprime loans. The other case was similar--can't recall the details offhand.

You really don't know anything about this stuff.

I'd give you examples of Obama's actions and ask you to cite the law permitting, but we both know you couldn't and can't. Or maybe you can--here's a softball:

Q1: What law allows the federal government to impose the insurance mandate? A1: Answer: none. They can't legally do it.

Q2: On what (faulty) legal theory is the insurance mandate based? A2:

Q3: If they can insist Americans buy insurance, what can't they insist Americans buy? A4: Nothing. By this theory, there is nothing that Congress and the President cannot compel Americans to do, or buy, at their sole discretion. Nothing.

Q4: How does this reality (A3) comport with the limited government meticulously promulgated by America's Founders, a requirement they thought essential to prevent usurpation of the Peoples' liberty, leading, ultimately, to despotisms and tyrannies? A4: It exactly contradicts that principle.

I disagree that tapping US calls to known terrorists in other countries--with subsequent judicial review--infringes on my civil liberties. That notwithstanding, Mr. Obama has endorsed and expanded that practice under the Patriot Act. So, again, you're wrong, and your beliefs are founded on wrong information.

Mr. Obama's measures will affect, monitor, and intrude on the privacy of each and every American citizen. Period.

Such as?

Ignoring or not approving a bill he disapproves of is a President's duty; that's not the same as, for example, confiscating a car company and dividing the spoils amongst your supporters.

Again, you speak from prejudice, and not from knowledge. Mr. Obama, in his tenure in Congress, had the most liberal, most partisan voting record of any Senator.

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Mr. Obama was to the left of all 99 other Senators. That's not middle- of-the-road, that's off the shoulder in the grass. Mr. Obama is well left of the Democratic party he's hijacked.

So, again, you're as wrong as it's possible to be--he's the left-most, as far left as they come. Not middle-of-the-road.

Mr. Obama does not represent even the majority of traditional Democrats, or their values. He's not what Democrats have historically stood for, he's something new entirely, something quite extreme.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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This is a trifle bizarre. There is a whole legistative base for social security levies, taxes and impositions, supporting stuff like old age pensons, disaster relief and retraining. Health issues - notably infectious diseases - affect the body politic, and health insurance is just another aspect of this.

A2: A law passed by congress and the senate.

That is the basic idea behind representative democracy.If the elected representatives pass the relevant legislation, the minority that doesn't like it is still bound by that legislation.

Amongst other bizarre ideas, like the right of the people to bear arms outside the context of a well-regulated militia. Your Founding Fathers were sloppy draftsmen, and create the MS/DOS of constitutional documents. Take a look at more recent constitutions sometime - your guys had a lot to do with drafting the current German constitution, and it is rather better.

In the opinion of a right wing conservative who probably thinks the the defence forces should be re-equipped with the Brown Bess musket, because that was what the Founding Father had in mind.

My belief was that you didn't complain when Dubbya did it, and only object to it being done by Obama ecause he isn't a Republican, so you aren't sincerely worried by the principle but are merely using it as an excuse to heckle Obama.

My belief would not appear to be founded on wrong information - your counter-argument is a trasparent attempt to ignore the basis of my objection by setting up an irrelevant staw man.

The car company went bust. If the government hadn't intervened, its creditors would have confiscated its assets, and rather more people would have ended up out of work, and the US economy would have got closer to the state that your ideas managed to create in the early

You've got some kind of ideological commitment to policies that are calculated to wreck the economy. Complaining that doctors won't do the blood-letting and cupping that your economic theory prescribes may strike you as rational behaviour, but it looks like sheer lunacy to people who don't share your delusions.

From your far-right-wing point of view. From a European perspective, he's a pragmatic fixer.

The US political spectrum runs from pragmatic to lunatic right wing. You really don't know a thing about left-wing politcal theory - most of you can't tell the difference between a socialist and a communist - and your media makes sure that your electorate is scared silly of anything that could be seen as actually left wing.

No more new than Tony Blair, and no more encumbered with traditional left wing principles than Blair was. You don't like him because he used the internet to raise the kind of money - and more - that Republicans get from their rich supporters and used it to buy the kind of electoral success that the Republicans used to be able to buy for themselves by outspending the Democrats.

Because Obama's money comes from a wider swathe of the population, his legislation is aimed more at keeping them happy than the legislation that you are used, to which was more aimed at a smaller population with more disposable income per head.

He's not showing much interest in narrowing the very wide gap between rich and poor which distinguishes the US from most other advanced industrial countries, and from that point of view he isn't all that left wing at all, and certainly not "extreme".

You aren't discussing his policies at all, just venting right-wing Republican political propaganda, very much in the Karl Rove tradition.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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This ignore the fact that US medical costs per head are half again higher than the - superior - German and French equivalents largely because US medical insurance administration costs are extravagantly high,\.

One of the effects of the new bill is to make it more difficult to for the medical insurance industry to save money by withdrawing cover from sick patients. The hordes of clerks who currently spend their time looking for excuses to cancel policies aren't going to have as many opportunities to save money, and the total number that the insurance companies can profitably deploy is going to go down in proportion, decreasing one massive source of adminstrative cost.

This may not show up in the simple-mind analyses that the medical insurance business feeds to sympathetic reporters, but it reflects and aspect of reality that more objective observers have been commenting on for years.

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So I did all of those things, and still got a calcified aortic valve that eventually needed to be replaced. Do-it-yourself open heart surgery isn't all that practical.

I had about seven years when I know that the aortic valve was getting worse and would eventually need to be replaced. This isn't typical of heart problems - as my youngest brother tells me, in 30% of cases, the first sign of heart disease is sudden death.

My father and my younger brother were in the lucky 70%, and got pain in the chest before the plaque in their coronary arteries broke loose and actually completely blocked the blood supply to part of the heart. My younger brother went from pain in the chest to a quadruple by=3Dpass in one week.

By virtue of my more healthier life-style, I've got a lot less plaque in my coronary arteries - one does seem to be 30% blocked, but surgeon who replaced my aortic valve didn't see any necessity to do anything about it, apart from making sure that I was on a cholesterol-lowering drug.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You aren't getting it. I'm not talking about the Patriot Act. I don't give a fig about the Patriot Act--it doesn't affect me. I don't call terrorists in foreign countries. It doesn't do the things I listed, and it doesn't track the private data of every single American citizen.

I'm talking about the mandatory medical insurance act, for starters-- that by itself is the greatest single encroachment on civil rights I can remember being enacted in my lifetime.

(The new amnesty bill being debated--there's talk of requiring citizens to carry biometric cards. Absurd. Why not just implant RFID? Technology isn't the answer.

Countries have known how to secure their borders since time immemorial. The truth is the immigration system isn't broken, as the President intoned today, it's being willfully violated by politicians, not enforced.)

I've discussed nothing but policy, in detail, citing the actual laws. I read the law and report what it says. You call that "right wing propaganda."

James Arthur

No, they aren't, and no, that isn't why we spend more. We also spend more on ice-cream than Nigerians--does that mean our ice-cream system is broken, in need of nationalizing?

That, actually, is already illegal. Look it up. It does happen occasionally if the insurance was gotten by lying.

It's also quite rare--not enough to explain any huge amount of money, but probably significant to an industry whose profit margin is just 2- odd percent.

The President went about touting a supposed instance of a cancer patient losing their coverage over previous acne. False. Yet he keeps touting it.

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I took a pill once, and it didn't help me. Therefore we shouldn't take pills?

Death is even more common a 1rst symptom than that, but that's for clogged arteries. Calcified valves fail slowly.

Good for him. My dad had the best health care in the world, was himself a fine physician, but even so died of undiagnosed coronary artery disease. (Slow clogging in his case, different from your family's sudden myocardial infarctions (plaque-spawned blood clots.)

He was 65. Dad did about half the right stuff for a third of his life. His dad? Also died suddenly. Age? 54. So, Dad bought himself more than a decade. I wish it were more.

In-theater for his angiography, I spotted a pal's blockage real-time on the fluoroscope-thing--that 3.5mm vessel was narrowed to barely over a hair's width, maybe 5% flow by volume, tops. He got bypassed. For free, basically, if that matters.

Me? Vegetarians have 10% the heart risk of the general population. My staying fit and lean, etc. lowers it even more. And I've been doing these for a long time, from an early age.

Heart disease is America's #1 killer, and everyone's got to die of something, but I won't die of that.

James Arthur