Sudden Confusion

Could you send me a few thousand this week? I'm a little short after buying a house.

If it meant the difference between your starving to death in the street or not, I would if I had the means.

Well, OK, I'd probably first try to find some public resources for you that all of our taxes have already paid for that you might utilize, and after that I'd try to get others to chip in as well, but in the limiting case... yes.

And if you just bought a house, I'd probably like a lien against it too. :-)

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It's typical of James Arthur that when his grasp of logic - in the sense of the primary definition in Merriam-Webster

"a (1) : a science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration : the science of the formal principles of reasoning"

is questioned, he responds in terms of a secondary definition

"d : the arrangement of circuit elements (as in a computer) needed for computation; also : the circuits themselves"

A stupid man might conceivably have misunderstood the question. James Arthur is not that that stupid, but he is stupid enough to think that this kind of evasion is funny enough to justify it's dishonesty.

In fact he's making absurd claims about the possible consequences of Obamacare and chickening out of any kind of rational justification of his claims - very wisely, since his claims really are totally absurd.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Scarcely stunning, since that's always been the whole basis of insurance. The formulation does omit the other half of the contract, which is that you agree to pay for other people's care when they need it, in order to convert would would otherwise been a crippling disaster for an individual to a disaster which becomes survivable by virtue of support from the community defined by the other people paying for the same kind of policy with the same insurer.

Quite the reverse; insurance is a device to let the community cooperate to create a pooled resource that can - and will - be used to help particular individuals who have experienced unexpected and unpredictable misfortunes.

James Arthur now only needs to declare black to be white to prove himself as totally insane.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It's your view that government creates any problem that anybody can be bothered to identify. If creating problems was all that governments did for us, we'd all be living as isolated families, avoiding any kind of collaboration with other families because this would always involve some kind of rudimentary government, which would create more problems than it would solve.

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The difference between the US - who go in for over-diagnosis - and Europe, which doesn't, is malpractice insurance. European medicine is more "socialised" than US medicine, but that hasn't created any noticeable tendency to excessive testing or over-treatment.

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As opposed to surgeon, practice nurse or physiotherapist?

Prevention is cheaper than cure. More condom use means less sexually transmitted diseases and fewer pregnancies. Think of it as an investment, like clean drinking water.

Unplanned pregnancies can be expensive.

It might be better, but it doesn't seem to be practicable. Until we can actually offer a job - and a living wage - to everybody who could work, it would seem to be irresponsible to ignore the problems of those who can't find work.

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Obviously not.

Why would it be? Putting someone back together after they have been injured in a car accident involves a different order of moral imperative than filling in the gap in their life caused by the destruction of their car.

There's nothing nonsensical about free contraception, though theology- based opposition to contraception does have risible aspects.

James Arthur says $80, but that's probably b.s. too.

But - as you keep reminding us - you are already paying their costs, since the indigent can already get "free" medical care in the US, albeit from a system which is expensive to run.

James Arthur hopes that it won't be politically possible to tinker with it, so that his Tea Party fellow-travellers can get away with throwing the baby out with the the bath-water

In James Arthur's totally unbiased opinion.

As if the US constitution were sacred, as opposed to hopelessly antiquated.

The current Supreme Court is packed with reactionary judges - and judges, as a class, aren't the most liberal members of society, as they reminded us a few years ago, when they chose to ignore Jeb Bush's vote-rigging antics in Florida

Dream on.

But you still support the US constitution.

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What James Arthur "knows" and what's "true" aren't all that closely related.

The same mass perverse incentives that exist in Europe where the most expensive medical care system - in Switzerland (where they can afford it) costs 29% less per head than the US system.

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As if James Arthur would think anything else.

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And he doesn't see any necessity to heat his house in winter either. In other words he can't afford it.

A bizarre point of view. The proponents of universal health care don't see it as subsidising anybody - they've noticed (like James Arthur) that if the indigent get sick enough they get medical care even if they can't pay for it, and (unlike James Arthur) they've worked out that it's cheaper to get them into medical care when they first need it, rather than when they are sick enough to be in obvious and urgent need.

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Nobody like the current US medical insurance system. It costs half as much again per head as systems delivering health care of comparable quality in other countries, and leaves 17.3% of the population uninsured.

The only people who like your system are those who make a lot of money out of it. If there's any theft going at the moment it's by people who are selling your system as if was one that had something to offer.

The current US medical insurance system is a selfish lie, designed by people who purport to be selling health insurance, but are extracting at least half as much again per head for the service they provide as the equivalents institutions - offering comparable health care - collect in other countries.

Obamacare doesn't make your system any cheaper - the current insurers had to be bribed to keep them on side - but at least it's a move towards the more comprehensive systems that everybody else has which do happen to be cheaper, even when providing a comparable quality of health care to the whole population.

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James Arthur has - on his own - enough rancor, bitterness and ill-will to counter-balance several hundred thousand people who don't happen to be irrational about the subject. Happily, he's only got one vote, and he may lose that if his neighbours happen to notice that he's out of his mind.

Very charitable of them.

The old jokes are always the best.

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Actually, it's the Tea Party, but nobody in their right mind is going to confuse them with any "good guys".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No one needs to starve to get health care.

Typical leftist. The first stop for help isn't yourself, your neighbor, or even church. No, you turn to stealing from others using the government's gun.

You think there's something to lean on? I own two, now. ...and rent an apartment. :-(

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Not envy, just trying to understand the economics of a doctor's visit then and now. Between "when [the OP] was a kid" and now, the relative cost of a doctor's visit appears to have gone up in real terms (multiples of the minimum hourly wage). If today's doctors had a higher standard of living nowadays (Mercedes vs. Chevies), that would tend to explain why their visits cost more.

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Does your boss accept conclusions you have made without any reasoning behind them? No statement of assumptions, no evidence, just something you pulled out of your ass?

I hope not, anyways.

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It doesn't seem that hard to assess. If you point something north and give it a shove, it generally rolls north. The gov't set a number of forces in action that led us here.

An E.R. nurse I know gets patients in the E.R. who wait hours, get worked up, and seen by a doctor on our dime, seeking aspirin. She asked one why they didn't buy it across the street for a dollar. "Because then I'd have to pay."

I have my own views on all those subjects, the question is "why would I seek to impose them on other people?" Isn't that intolerant? Moralizing? Bigoted?

That's the point of insurance, but that's not Obamacare.

I'm more than happy to pay for my own broken leg. Why aren't you?

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Why presume?

You see, I just can't call it "downplayed." If someone lied about a product they sold you, they'd be in trouble. In SCOTUS, Obama's lawyers argued O-care amounted to regulating a person's financing of health care. If a finance company lied to you about the terms, cost, and interest rate of a deal, they'd be in trouble.

It simply is not okay to ram a policy through, one that people do not want--that _no one_ has had a chance to even read--based on misrepresentations.

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I too expect he'll be even more radical. With any luck we'll another batch of Democrat-Obamacare voters sent home this cycle, and we'll wind up with the magic combo that worked so well under Clinton-- gridlock.

There's far more paperwork for everyone concerned. As one example, a "health insurance return" has to be submitted for everyone to the IRS annually. Everyone's insured status has to be continuously monitored-- fine are due by monthly quanta.

More people doesn't cut costs--that's just more people to serve. Since many of those are subsidized or free, all that costs more.

As far as economies of scale, those are not achieved simply by making something bigger. Why not, for example, get rid of PCs and have just have one big national computer? It's like that, for a lot of exactly the same reasons.

The govt's web database has to include virtually every detail about you, including marital status, kids, tax returns, employment history, military service, and lots more.

Yes. But I'd consider other tactics too--passive resistance, etc.

On the one hand, Obamacare people say they're being compassionate, on the other, they say it needs doing to avoid "cost-shifting."

IOW, they want to be charitable, just not with their own money.

No!!! I meant YOU. Take responsibility for your vision. If YOU want it (whoever "you" might be), why not start it, make something, create something beautiful. That's positive. Destroying and stealing what other people have made and like, that's negative, intolerant, inconsiderate. And wrong.

If you have a better idea, MAKE it! The world will beat a path to your door. Don't take from others--build something.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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It's not sharing when you take people's toys and give them away. It's stealing. Or did you intend to give people their premiums back?

If people want to give their toys away, that's different entirely of course.

Obamacare is brutal. It's not a question of sharing toys--the people who want it have made it clear that they don't believe in sharing.

Resources are always limited--that's an economic truism. The question is always how to help / save the most people with the money available. Buying Sandra Fluke's recreational birth control may not accomplish that.

There's just a basic difference in that conservatives are inherently optimistic, confident they and any one else in a free country can do and earn whatever they need or want, just as long as they're allowed to.

Their counterparts believe you shouldn't feed the bears because that makes them dependent, but you should feed able-bodied people, and it doesn't.

That just isn't humane. Robbing people of their dignity, pride, and ambition is not humane, it's demeaning, de-humanizing, and results in less for everyone in so many ways. It creates division and resentment. It's not the tao, it's not the way.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Sure sounds like envy and illogic both.

I moved out on my own when I was 17 (probably illegal today), and got two full-time jobs for minimum wage (one paid $.25/hr more).

Not long after that I moved up and made more money as I proved myself (at a place making CP/M computers), and got more responsibility. This is the way of things. When I thought my pay unfair, I renegotiated.

My first car was a Porsche, used, bought when I was 19 or 20, with my own money, saved from working my two jobs. That was my college car.

My dad--the son of a missionary captured and imprisoned by the Japanese when Dad was 1 or 2, and who died on release when Dad was 5-- paid his way through to medical school with back-breaking manual labor, digging ditches with shovels and picks, and later walking high steel.

As a doctor he made half as much as his partner in the same office. Sometimes he got paid in plumbing work done, or home-baked pies. And always he got calls in the middle of the night from frantic new mothers with crying babies.

IOW we each earned everything we got. No one started rich or with special advantages, other than parents who loved us.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Your grandfather was a missionary, thus educated. That's an advantage. Your father was not only bright and dedicated enough to get himself into medical school, but also knew that it was possible. That's another advantage.

You may think that you earned everything that you got, but the key advantage - that you knew that you could get educated - was not something that either of you earned. It's only one aspect of the process of getting to be successful, and you could both have screwed the progression in any number of ways, but it does happen to be crucial.

Your aversion to "socialism" happens to involve endorsing a situation where lots of people who could be just as self-disciplined and dedicated as you and your father won't get the chance to demonstrate it because they were born into the wrong family and grew up in circumstances that made that kind of opportunity inaccessible to them.

You will have anecdotal evidence that some spectacularly talented and dedicated people have made it to the top despite starting off with every disadvantage. The problem is that it doesn't happen often.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You seem incapable of understanding what health insurance is designed to do, and how it works in practice.

Universal health care isn't "giving your toys away". It's setting up a society-wide system to look after everybody who gets sick.

The way the French and Germans do it costs - per head - about two thirds of what your less-than-universal system does, while delivering to everybody health care that comparable to what you delivered only to the fully insured. Your current system is a rip-off. Obamacare may not be any less of a rip-off - but at least it moves the system towards the kid of universal system that works better - and more cheaply - than what you've got.

The health insurance companies tha Obama had to bribe into compliance?

It's cheaper to give her free contraception than an abortion, and much cheaper than covering the costs of her carrying a child to term.

That isn't optimism - it's a self-interested rejection of reality.

The proposition that social security creates a dependency culture is a right-wing fable. Every right-wing nitwits believes it, but the only evidence they ever cite are occasional anecdotes. Not every lunatic is crazy enough to need to be institutionalised, and social security can function as "care in the community" for people who aren't entirely sane, but more generous social security doesn't create more lunatics.

Whereas letting them starve to death is humane as well as cheap.

Not as much division and resentment as letting them starve to death.

It's not your "tao" or your "way", but in practice adequate social security solves a lot more problems than it creates.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Since, by your logic, it was the Demoncrats that made your banking system blow up a US house price bubble, whose bursting created most of the problems now screwing up yur economy, one can see how you can think that.

It's partisan idiocy of the highest order, but once you've worked out how to organise the world on a basis that the Democrats wrong, the Republicans are right and bankers are blameless you seem remarkably reluctant to realise that your world-view doesn't have much to do with reality.

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And there is the point that self-diagnosis isn't exactly expert.

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How does having health insurance cover birth control amount to imposing a view on morality on other people? The people who have moral objections to birth control don't have to take advantage of that part of their health cover.

They may not like paying for it, any more that Joan Baez liked having part of her tax dollar spent on defence, or you like seeing part of your tax dollar going on social security, but democracy is all about the will of the majority.

In your unbiased and ever-so-non-partisan opinion.

Because he's paid for health insurance for years, which was intended to cover exactly that kind of unpredictable disaster?

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The Hoover Institution would share your point of view.

When it's honorary fellows include Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you can expect a fairly high level of right-wing nitwit non-thinking.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Cool story bro.

My point was that back when more people paid for the cost of health care out of their pockets, physicians didn't reach as far into it. You're in a place to confirm or deny this thought of mine, but you have yet to address it.

Compare what vets charge. Only 3% of pet owners have pet insurance, thus the vast majority forks it over from their own pockets. Not surprisingly, vets charge a lot less for their services than do human MDs. And, vets know if their bills are too big, the owners always have the option of euthanasia.

Of course, euthanasia is not an option for human medicine.

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If you're going to make up stories, make them more believable. No E.R. in the U.S. has dispensed an aspirin since 1973, after the Tylenol salesmen did their work. But you forgot to mention: Did these patients drive up in their Cadillacs, fresh from picking up their welfare checks?

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Of course it's an option, though you may have to self-medicate. In the Netherlands it's even legal. Whence Rick Santorum's utterly bogus claim that the Dutch murder their elderly

Our oncology professor friend in Australia insists that euthanasia isn't necessary if you do proper pain management - but enough morphine to keep you comfortable can impair lung function ... You really don't want your doctor to "strive officiously to keep alive" if you are in that situation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I never ask my boss to do so. I always provide the proper trail of standards, reasoning, and experience to support my positions (I have = maybe spent $10,00 of my own money buying standards mostly for workplace use). And not only with my boss but will all the people interact with in the workplace. =20 But this is Usenet, and i am not always interested, nor always capable of supporting myself in the same way here (but check my recent posts on USB standards). The variety of topics is much, much wider here in this ng alone than in my duties in the workplace.

?-)