Where does the money go

James Arthur doesn't always observe this rule - though to be fair, he has b een brainwashed to the extent that he clearly can't know what he is talking about.

The government does set the minimum specifications for health insurance, as it does in many other areas. The health insurance companies aren't governm ent vendors (though presumably they have to be government-approved vendors, which isn't quite the same thing). They don't seem to sell their product a t a single fixed price either, and there's more than one of them.

James Arthur seems to think that if a market isn't a free as he'd like it t o be, including the right for suppliers to sell total rubbish products, it isn't free at all.

Which is to say that they have to meet high minimum standards than they use d to.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

That's not my understanding, my plan was grandfathered in until a date. then that date was moved until later, now they moved it again. At some point I will be forced onto Obamacare.

I'm going to visit my insurance agent.

Make me a list of questions I can ask.

1) Are there still private plans I can purchase? 2) If yes, How long will they be available? 3) 4) 5)

There's a lot of truth to that. My plan now pays (with the $2,496 increase I'm forced to pay each year since the ACA reg's became effective) for one physical per year, a colonoscopy, gynocare, mammograms, Mental health services, substance abuse counseling, Breast feeding support, supplies, counseling, contraceptive counseling and more stuff I don't need. Mikek

We know that he thinks that it is, but health insurance is one of those areas where the people selling the goods know a lot more about them than the people buying them.

I'm going to back off on one of the bronze plans offered. I've been reviewing the proposals I received. They offered three bronze plans, the plan with the highest deductible ($12,500) does pay

100% after the deductible, like the plan I have. So, it has a little higher deductible but it covers mental health and substance abuse, mine doesn't cover mental health and substance abuse at 100%. It's cost is $13,800 vs $7,752 that I now pay. The next plan has a $7,000 deductible, but after you make your deductible you pay 30% on everything. It's cost is $14,580 vs $7,752 that I now pay.

Mikek

At your age, you should be getting at least two Pap smear tests a year.

Is the colonoscopy considered "preventive" and covered 100% with no deductible?

--

Rick

That would be a first.

Yes, But I don't know how often and at what age they start.

Malevolent? Hey, you're the one who wants to mooch, and force other people into bad plans to pay for yours, that's not my thing.

You keep making statements about Obamacare, but quite obviously don't know the first thing about it. Yet, you feel fully comfortable forcing other people into it sight unseen.

That, of course, is complete, callous disregard for other people's choices and beliefs, and a tremendous presumption that you know better.

You wouldn't be supporting it or saying the things you're saying if you actually understood that Obamacare just adds expense, middlemen, and inefficiency to a system that had too much of those to start with.

You and I mostly have a big impedance mismatch. You're going on the most absurd ideas of what you imagine Obamacare does or should do, and I have a marked-up copy on my desktop, indexed, with five years' notes scribbled on it.

Cheers, James Arthur

:

g for

d is actually worse. We know that he thinks that it is, but health insuranc e is one of those areas where the people selling the goods know a lot more about them than the people buying them.

Mike has documented it unambiguously to his satisfaction, which is all that matters. Your lack of comprehension reflects on you, not Mike, nor does your befuddlement rationalize you commandeering Mike's choices.

It also doesn't matter--suppose Mike wanted to buy a worse plan (for whatever reason)? That's his business, none of yours.

Mike's savvier than you on this, knows what he needs and what works best for him from research and experience, and you don't.

health care insurers to sell a policy that they can walk away from when th e patient gets sick.

insurance now doesn't give that gratification.

I'll not waste bandwidth on your puerile sniping, but others might enjoy a small inventory of progressive media's pronouncements respecting Dear President's laser-like focus on the truth.

From my extensive collection:

LIE OF THE YEAR KEEP YOUR PLAN 37 TIMES REFERENCES LIST POLITIFACT PANTS-ON-FIRE *** A compilation of the 37 times Politifact found where Barack said you could KEEP YOUR PLAN

Lie Of the Year - If you like your plan, you can keep it

Obama, caught, walking it back, equivocating shamelessly

RATE SHOCK TALKING POINT LIE - POLTIFACT Rates are NOT going up slower 20

12

YOU'LL SAVE $2,500

Three Pinocchios - Barack's dying mom didn't lose her policy:

/18/gIQAdDd4KS_blog.html _______

"Americans buying the same coverage they have today in the individual marke t will see premiums fall by 14 to 20 percent compared to what they would pa y without health insurance reform and by as much as 3% for those who get co verage through their employers."

WaPo: Cancellations are unsurers' fault? Three Pinocchios.

Cheers, James Arthur

u

t

No. Your thing is to characterise universal health care - as practiced in e very other advanced industrial country - as centrally planned communism, an d write off properly comprehensive health insurance plans - that can't be c ancelled when they start costing the insurer money - as "bad plans".

The "mooching" involved seems to lie in the capacity of the patient to keep on getting insurance cover after they've developed a condition which is ex pensive to treat.

Few people seem to know the things about Obamcare that you find self-eviden t. Not knowing what you "know" about Obamacare looks more like evidence of having skipped right-wing nitwit brainwashing 101 - a sin you clearly haven 't committed.

The fact that he doesn't see it the way you do doesn't mean that he doesn't know enough about it to recommend it to other people. You'd like to think that this wasn't true - and like krw - you think that the world view that y ou have espoused is inarguably correct, but there's a real world out there, and you aren't connecting to it.

s

A complete and callous disregard for what right-wing nitwits think about th e choices and beliefs that should be open to other people, even those that don't share their delusions. And there's nothing tremendous about the presu mption that one knows better than a right-wing nitwit. Most of them don't e ven understand global warming or Keynesian economics.

Anybody who understands that Obamacare adds extra middlemen to the already administrator-heavy US system has to be out of their minds. The policies ar e being sold by the existing health care insurers. They are more expensive because the insurers can no longer practice certain inequitable tricks to k eep their costs down.

Obsessive interest can't be equated with understanding. Every one of your notes refers back to Bastiat's demented attitude to gover nment spending. You have yet to notice that Bastiat died in 1850, while Bis marck didn't introduce his Sickness Insurance Law until 1883. Since then ev ery advanced industrial country except the US has moved over to government regulated universal health care. The UK provides it for about half the cost per head of the US system, while France and Germany provide a service comp arable with what the fully insured in the US get for two-thirds of the cost per head.

Even Bastiat would now recognise that this is one area where government int ervention works better than under-regulated free enterprise, but he was cl everer than you are, and had had to invent his own right-wing nitwit ideas, where you had yours instilled at a Tea Party boot camp.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

ing for them and charge them double for something worse, like for Mike.

red is actually worse. We know that he thinks that it is, but health insura nce is one of those areas where the people selling the goods know a lot mor e about them than the people buying them.

It would, if he had perfect comprehension of every aspect of both sets of p olicies. In reality, his attention is fixed on the fact that the new policy is more expensive. Apparently it covers treatment of mental health problem s, which he's convinced he doesn't need. He may be right, but he does post here which does suggest he might be wrong.

I'm not commandeering Mike's choices - the US legislature did that. I'm jus t saying that there may be more going on than he - or you - want to see.

You forget that public health isn't just about the health of the individual - fundamentally it's about infectious diseases, and the aim is to get ever ybody into the habit of going to the doctor as soon as they feel sick. That the patients mostly have non-infectious diseases is inconsequential - they can't be relied to ascribe their symptoms correctly.

That's why universal health care is a really good idea, and the current US system a potential disaster. The early spread of drug-resistant TB in the U S could have been an actual disaster, but you woke up in time to prevent it assuming plague-like proportions. Other advanced industrial countries didn 't have home-grown drug-resistant TB.

You and Mike would both like to think so. So far the evidence is rather les s than conclusive.

or health care insurers to sell a policy that they can walk away from when the patient gets sick.

ng insurance now doesn't give that gratification.

a

Sure he said something that didn't turn out to be true. Presumably he hadn' t been correctly briefed on the proportion of existing health policies that were inadequate and couldn't be renewed once the new legislation was in fo rce.

He didn't go into Obamacare with the intention of getting rid of inadequate health insurance policies, and presumably he wasn't made aware that this w as going to affect a substantial number of existing policies.

What he should have said was that "If your health policy was worth having, you can keep it. If you've been sold a pup, you are going to have to pay mo re for something that works better". As a sound-bite it isn't great, but it would have given the right-wing nitwits a bit less to squall about.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

paid for

cover

drive, well

drive

way

You

it'll

have

working for

I really do not know how you get mean and malevolent from explaining things calmly. I have yet to see James Arthur wish ill of anyone. I suspect that the only other plans are those provided by major employers and they start getting phased out in 2016.

?-)

Also, because of the way Medicare is set up he cannot get any better price than what Medicare would pay. That rather limits what you can obtain with cash. He may get away with no copay though, that might be as much as 20% less than full cash. Of course Rick would also accept no recourse if the surgery was botched.

?-)

I imagine the mean and malevolent come from the political ideas that James Arthur champions. He wants the USA to have even more social- and income-ine quality than it already has, based on a daft Social Darwinist political phi losophy that's only attractive to people who have a lot more money than ave rage.

The USA is already the most unequal of the advanced industrial countries - only Portugal comes close, and it isn't all that advanced. The inequality m akes the USA a less than ideal place to live - even for the well-off portio n of the population.

ost_Always_Do_Better

James Arthur is fixed on the idea that the unfettered free market is the on ly way of distributing resources. The fact that unregulated free markets ca n't be relied to deliver optimal solutions in every situation escapes him, and stuff like Keynesian economics, which recognise it's occasional defects , are ignored as heretical errors. He actually goes a bit further - he's go t enough sense to see that global warming is real, but because the sensible ways of tackling global warming involving charging people for the right to dump CO2 in the atmosphere, which he sees purely as a government imposed t ax, he feels obliged to reject the scientific evidence on the basis that it 's all been invented by leftist scientists as an excuse to restrict the hol y free market.

Naomi Klein's recent book - "This Changes Everything" ISBN 978-1-84614-506-

3 - seem to take this kind of behaviour as central to the denialism industr y. I've only read the first hundred pages so far, but I don't expect that t he message is going to get more nuanced as I go on.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

This is pretty uninteresting because of work done by Vilifred Pareto a hundred years ago. His distribution has one parameter - an "alpha".

The rest is stamp collecting, as they say.

It's not that I don't care; it's just "well, that's that." There's nought to discuss.

To me, this makes this pretty close to Natural Law in the same way as gravity is Natural Law. All you can do is rearrange the seating a bit. There is nothing, anywhere that can make me believe the shape of the curve will be any different.

GINI coefficient is just a restatement of the alpha. A lower alpha means your country is poorer. Again, pretty much full stop.

We're Americans. We don't feel the same compunction about being ... reasonable about stuff like this. Probably because we've all been more comfortable for longer. Probably because our mythos is different.

And I was raised to believe that others having more than me hurts me not one whit. That's held up quite well. It doesn't.

And somewhere, there is a Redistribution Impossibility Theorem. The Charmely-Judd one...

I am sure we'll try, and as a person raised as a Johnson Democrat, I still *favor* all that Great Society stuff ( and think it has actual value - because, again of the flip side of Pareto - the marginal value of a dollar ) if for no other reason that it's *seemly*, and I'm pretty sure the monetary velocity of it all works out great.

Welfare is pretty much expressed in shadow vectors of all the market- matrix calculating going on and those shadow vectors sum to zero after a very short time. The economy views redistribution as an outage and routes around it, assuming many things that are probably true anyway.

But it's inconsistent with what can be measured. So I am inconsistent right along with it. Because being an American is complicated, and I suspect that net-net it reduces the overall entropy.

--
Les Cargill

James Arthur champions. He wants the USA to have even more social-

I think we have a very non-homogenous society, but I don't know how we compare in that respect to other societies. If we are more non-homogenous than others, does that make it more difficult for use meet the standard set above. Mikek

you

t

ay

bit

e s

ist political philosophy that's only attractive to people who have a lot mo re money than average.

- only Portugal comes close, and it isn't all that advanced.

the well-off portion of the population.

ost_Always_Do_Better

The book was written by a couple of British epidemiologists, and presents a lot of evidence that the US is a lot more unequal than other advanced indu strial countries - for a start it's Gini index is 0.48 marginally more uneq ual than China at 0.47, where most advanced industrial countries cluster ar ound 0.30 and Scandinavia gets down to 0.25 .

What "The Spirit Level" does is explore what correlates with high inequalit y, and discusses the likely causal relationships involved. You can get a fe el for the flavour of the book by noting that they replicate each of their between-country comparisons with the same comparison done between the 50 US states. The spread of inequality between US states isn't as large as it is between countries, but the correlations come out as much the same.

I'm not sure what standard you see as being set out in this thread, but hig her inequality societies do badly on most criteria. The book lists quite a few, as you could see from the wikipedia entry.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

You seem to think that we should meet a standard of being more equal, (distribution of wealth) I'm just wondering if our non-homogeneous society makes that a more difficult standard to meet. Mikek

PS. My reference point is watching my immigrant wife's family, start with nothing, speaking very little English and through hard work and the attitude that they will do better, rise to do better than 80% or 90% of the population. Then I also watch those that have all the benefits, except the attitude to do better, that never thrive.

--
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. 
http://www.avast.com