more EE Times nonsense

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Because your preconceptions blind you to many aspects of the discussion?

This is a necessary consequence of having universal health care. The rest of the civilised world doesn't find it oppressive, and it produces systems which deliver better health care than yours (averaged over the whole population) at two thirds of the price per head.

While the current American health care system is a model of perfection? Dream on.

Now tell us about your current health care system, which costs half again as much as anybody else's, and delivers worse health care - particularly for the uninsured 15% and the under-insured 20%.

So post the web-site. If you can't, you are a liar. You claimed the estimates came from the HSS, but they weren't to be found on the HSS web-site. My googling skills may be anaemic, but they were enough to demonstrate that you weren't telling the whole truth.

Several sources - none of which you can point to. Probably because they are even more obviously right-wing fruit-cakes than you are. I imagine that telling us who they actually were would shred what little remains of your crediblity.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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:-)

JF

Must you always be so tedious and lazy both? That's H-ealth and H- uman S-ervices, Bill, not H-igh S-peed S-teel.

Here:

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To everyone else, look below the LA Times' headline to their subtitle, and discard the AP's apologies and false comparisons--the meat is that Obamacare hasn't even started, but already tallies $311B more than advertised. That's an increase of 1/3rd, exactly as I posted.

That's pure deficit baby.

There's plenty more where that came from. This "revelation" only corrects part of Pelsoi-Reid-Obama's own accounting blunders, but still uses their own absurd assumptions--e.g. infinite revenue, super GDP growth, that no one will actually use the service, or be thrown into by employers--and with Obamacare only fully operational for the last two of those first ten years. Realistic assumptions make the thing double the disaster, and more.

If the President were a CEO, and Pelosi and Reid his executives, they'd all be in jail (rules relating to forward-looking disclosures, material omissions & misrepresentations, fraud, etc.).

The nation needs financial reform--we need to fire Congress.

I've thrown you all the bones I'm going to--our job is to amuse the group. Since you're an expert, why don't you lecture us all more about the Tea Party movement instead, its dark roots and designs?

_That's_ entertainment.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I received an email the other day stating that my VA health care may not be considered as insurance, even though I'm now 100% disabled.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

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I'm not familiar with the different veteran's benefit programs, but AFAICT your VA coverage should count as 'minimum acceptable coverage' under Sec. 5000(f)(1)(A) of HR3590, the 1st Intolerable Act of 2010.

So, at least you don't (and shouldn't) have to worry about the mandate, brother Michael. (I've quoted the text below)

Regular people who ever change jobs, of course, will be forced to buy the new, bigger, dumber, more expensive insurance.

HTH, James Arthur

--------------- HR3590 Sec. 5000(f) =91=91(1) IN GENERAL.=97The term =91minimum essential coverage=92 means any of the following: =91=91(A) GOVERNMENT SPONSORED PROGRAMS.=97Coverage under=97 =91=91(i) the Medicare program under part A of title XVIII of the Social Security Act, =91=91(ii) the Medicaid program under title XIX of the Social Security Act, =91=91(iii) the CHIP program under title XXI of the Social Security Act, =91=91(iv) the TRICARE for Life program, =91=91(v) the veteran=92s health care program under chapter 17 of title 38, United States Code, or =91=91(vi) a health plan under section 2504(e) of title

22, United States Code (relating to Peace Corps volun- teers).

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In fact, the total helth care bill is 35 trillion dollars, so the predcted increase is around 1%, which is well within the margin of error of this kind of estimate.

That's pure alarmism, baby, particularly when you note that the new legisation extends coverage to an extra 35 million people, roughly 11% of the US population.

Since the existing health care system is already a disaster, costing at least half as much again as comparable systmes elsewhere. The current extravagance swamps the relatively small additional cost of Obama's additions, and makes nonsense of your alarmist claims.

If you had any formal responsibility for the rubbish you post, you'd be in jail for fraud.

For the faults of the exisiting health care system, not for the limited reforms that Obama has managed to squeeze out if the presnet

- deeply flawed - system.

for

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Your reports say $311 billion dollars, not 2.5 trillion - where do you get the extra $2,2 trillion dloolars from?

Which does seem to involve posting unsupported and alarmist lies. =A0

The Tea Party is silly enough to be entertaining, but Europe has had more painful experieinces with irrational right-wing populists than the US, and we consequently worry rather more about the damage they might do if they - God forbid - ever acquired real politcal power.

The Germasn remember the Nazi's, the Italians remember the Fascists, and in the Netherlands we have less dramatic - but more recent - memories of the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, when Pim Fortuyn's assassination injected 26 of his lunatic right-wing followers into Parliment and government where they created havoc for a few months before the government fell; in the consequent elections only eight were re- elected, and none of the survived the next election.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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As usual, James Arthur doesn't pay any attention to the ways in which the bill will reduce health care costs.

As the Canadian studies point out, the biggest single estravagance in the US health care budget is the astronomical cost of administering the system - the US health insurance companies employ a lot more people to run their system than anyybody else finds necessary or useful.

The reason is obvious enough - with 20% of the population under- insured, it pays to have a host of clerks inspecting every last claim for payment for treatment. Every claim that they can reject adds to their profits, and when they can find some excuse to cancel the health insurance on some sick person they save even more money.

Obama's legislation forbids the health insurance companies from withdrawing insurance on the basis of pre-exisitng conditions, and the new "compulsory" health insurance should vastly reduce the proportion of the under-insured.

This is going to dramatically reduce the number of claims that the health insurance companies can reject,and the size of the corps of claim checkers that it is going to pay the health insurers to support. With fewer excuses to for the insurers to short change their customers, there's less money to pay the salaries of the people doing the checking and there are going to be many fewer of them.

This isn't going to slim down the health insurance companies to European or Canadian proportions, but it is going to be a big step in the right direction.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They brokered CDOs and profited on the transactions. But a broker maintains some inventory, and that inventory was exposed to loss if the bubble burst. Plus, they had groups that traded on their own. So it wasn't unreasonable to purchase hedges, especially as those hedges were priced absurdly low. What was unreasonable was to misrepresent horrible packages of trash as "diversified" AAA-grade investments and sell them to people who trusted them. GS was just a cog in a huge insane dynamic that went from strawberry pickers with $750K teaser mortgages up to the highest levels of Federal government... a dynamic that, apparently, nobody is planning to correct.

Keeping quiet and neutral is not the same as pushing "AAA" grade paper when they knew, or should have known, what was actually inside. That may well have been fraud. The packahes were so complex, so distanced form reality, that they were essentially impossible to investigate. People trusted the brokers and the ratings agencies.

The Greek debt thing is a similar case, an entire national economy being built on heaps of worthless and fradulent paper, and nobody noticing.

John

Change jobs? Our insurance company is already adding absolutely unnecessary "features" to our insurance plan because Obummer thinks it's a good idea.

The e-mail came from Cliff Stern's office. He is on the VA steering committee. They still can't give me a firm answer, since some politicians want to exclude some VA benefits from qualifying.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

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Easy there, James, i am on your side. I have noticed that you have been able to pin Bill far better than most of us most of the time. I really, really appreciate the way you have examined the scam.

Yep, have a copy of the engrossed bill.

Thank you some more, i am starting to use these parts of the text of the thing to discuss the nature of the bill in the workplace.

I am already seeing estimates of 1/2 more than advertised and up.

Of course, now that the CBO and others that do the arithmetic are not hobbled by totally unrealistic assumptions, better estimates are coming out. The cost will exceed 2 times more than advertised.

And about 15T the next two decades, bankrupting the USA.

It does make you wonder about the proberty of the ratings agencies that were prepared to stamp AAA on anything they produced without ever looking under the wrapper. GS defence seems to rely on CAVEAT EMPTOR.

Surely it is already self corrected. There is almost no possibility of getting insane loans any more - at least in the UK. Genuine businesses are finding it hard to borrow money and banks are offering near zero interest rates to investors (0.1% on my bank account balance) whilst ripping off businesses that they will loan money to. If you recall our little spat over Northern Rock at the start of the crunch (a private company that pursued the same reckless lending strategy to NINJAs as in the USA) and their depositors queuing out in the streets to get their money. Interestingly the now publically owned UK banks have just turned a profit and the taxpayer has now made a slight profit on the rescue deal. The UK borrowing figures are still eyewateringly high though.

I am pretty sure they knew what was inside. What is harder to understand is why their customers were prepared to take "AAA" ratings at face value when it was so obvious that they had the ratings agency in the pockets.

Unclear why - bunch of thieves the lot of them.

They do have a holiday industry. Quite pretty the Greek islands and lots of ancient historical sites to visit. You get fed up with roast goat and Greek salad after a while and retsina would make a fine varnish.

Regards, Martin Brown

Yes. The big rating agencies were competing for business, and were staffed by the people who weren't good enough to work for their clients.

And it seems like one could package up clusters of rotten liar-loan packages, BBB- stuff, and if you had enough of them in a CDO, it was "diversified" and became an AAA grade product.

Good reads:

As long as human personality is what it is, and lacking active damping mechanisms, we will continue to have destructive bubbles. Technology allows us to have bigger ones, more often.

That's what McDonalds are for.

John

Fits your stupidity to a tee.

Go ahead, Johnny. Eat McD for the next ten years every day. See if your arteries don't plaque up. Larkin is yet again... retarded.

I'm beginning to think that, for whatever reason, you simply aren't able to process all this, and that I was unkind to call you lazy. I'm sorry. I know you've been through a lot recently, and I hope you're feeling okay.

Here's the overview:

Rounding to one significant figure, Obamacare was billed as costing $900B, which was to be paid for by $500B in Medicare cuts and $400B in new taxes.

Since Medicare reimbursements are already so low that doctors see Medicare patients at a loss, many have criticized those cuts as unrealistic, especially since, in the same time as passing this Obamacare, the Democrats were passing a separate bill called the "Medicare fix" to reinstate those same "cuts."

So, after some jiggling, a number of people have calculated that most of the fictional "savings" don't exist, and, contrary to Obama's assurances, that the plan is net negative by quite a lot--it increases the deficit. I gave you 3 articles explaining that from various viewpoints. The one article you liked, from the LA Times, spins a hope-n-change headline:

"But an independent federal report says it will also drive up overall U.S. healthcare costs."

So, as I'd posted, the $311B is *excess* cost, above and beyond the $900B price tag that was advertised.

The AP article I cited

spins that as a fraction of total national spending: "The overhaul will increase national health care spending by $311 billion from 2010-2019, or nine-tenths of 1 percent."

but you have to understand that the increase is a) excess cost, b) as a result of this bill, and therefore c) properly attributed to this bill; IOW, as I'd said, the bill already a) costs 1/3rd more than the $900B Obama said it did, and b) there is no net savings from Obamacare--Obamacare costs more.

The few real reductions in Medicare spending come, roughly, from actual cuts in service that aren't fixed by the "Medicare fix"...

"The report projected that Medicare cuts could drive about 15 percent of hospitals and other institutional providers into the red, "possibly jeopardizing access" to care for seniors." --AP

What may have confused you is that there are three sets / categories of estimates of the cost of Obamacare. In the 1st set, all the figures above relate to a) the on-budget cost, b) to the federal government only, c) during the next ten years, d) during which Obamacare is really only fully operative for the last 2 years.

This set / category of estimates does not include the increased cost imposed on the American people of the higher premiums they must pay for mandated extensions in coverage.

A 2nd set / category of estimates in the vicinity of ~$2.4T figures are for 2010-2019, including the costs to Americans personally.

A 3rd set / category of estimates are out there that figure the cost of Obamacare itself--without including the cost to the public--is about $2.5T during the first 10 years it's fully operational (roughly

2017-2026, depending on who's estimating).

For a litany of reasons, the assumptions behind all 3 of these categories of estimates are absurdly low, and the actual cost in real life should be expected to be considerably more.

I hope that helps.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Sorry Joseph, I wasn't barking at you, but indirectly at Bill. I'd given him plenty enough info to go on, and didn't feel obliged to answer his accusations. He should do his homework before calling someone else a liar.

I actually research this stuff, I don't just make it up. Sometimes-- not often--I make mistakes, and I appreciate being corrected, but Bill was just grousing.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Read the books. You do read books?

John

I don't think I've eaten at a McDonalds in the USA in years. They can be comforting when you're in England and crave some USian food.

Lately we like In-n-Out for classic burger snacks.

John