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US Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card
According to Wired (and no big surprise, considering the practicalities of implementing massive changes in medical finance), US lawmakers "are proposing a national identification card, a 'fraud-proof' Social Security card required for lawful employment in the United States. The proposal comes as the Department of Homeland Security is moving toward nationalizing driver licenses."
The awesome part about this is that it ought to cause the Tea Party types to blow a gasket. On one hand, you have the federal government making ID's that will make it tougher for undocumented aliens to get work, so finally all of those high-flight jobs mowing lawns and manning the grill at fast food restaurants will be safe for Real Americans(tm). On the other hand, you have the federal government making ID's that will allow them to do... Well, whatever wacky-ass conspiricy stuff the federal government supposedly does with ID's -- I'll have to wait for Glenn Beck to tell me exactly why it'll be such a problem, but I'm sure it will be. In reality, however, the big losers in any sort of forgery-proof national ID situation are going to tomorrow's 19 year-olds who won't be able to get into the bar with their "Hawaii driver's license" anymore. So really, this program only hurts the children.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Nice national ID cards for our safety and you know just to be on the safe side we need a DNA database too, to prevent people from misusing this program...and hey we need to start monitoring your internet usage to prevent people from pretending to be you and setting up appoitments or chaning your information.
Yeah its nothing to be worried about, Im sure it will be all OK.
"You just got the right to healthcare, but do you really want that going to illegal immigrants?"
That's actually a bizarre statement. The options are:
1) Illegal immigrants can pay for health care in the open market (potentially taxpayer subsidized).
2) We can pay for illegal immigrants to go to hospitals as indigent care (definitely taxpayer subsidized).
I don't really understand why people would go for #2. If I can choose 100% loss vs. even 95% loss, I'm going to go with the 95%.
I'll be glad when Obama is finally inaugurated!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
And that's exactly what the real native true blooded americans should have done when your ancestors waltzed on in pretending they had some kind of a right to be there.
Despite what you learn from fables in grade school, rights come from society. You have a right to life- but that right won't stop a bullet. You have a right to free speech- but that won't stop a bullet, or a broken jaw. Rights are an ephermal idea with no basis in nature. The only natural "rights" are the laws of physics. Rights only have any force when society organizes itself in such a way as to enable enforcement of them. The way it does so is via a government. Which does put government in an interesting dual position- its job is to enforce the rights of all, but its great power makes it possible for it to be a horrible violator of them as well. That's why it requires constant citizen oversight and correctional systems.
That also means what your rights are is a reflection of what society decides they should be. This list can expand or contract over time. For example, progressives believe that the right to life must include a right to health (or at least health care, which is as close as humans can come to a right to health) or else proclaiming such a right is meaningless rhetoric. And it looks like we just won that one. Sixty years ago blacks didn't have the right to go to a white school, only the lunatic fringe would argue against that now. 200 years ago you had the right to own the most powerful weapon of the day, I doubt many people would argue for the right of a private citizen to own a nuke now. Yet many people do argue for a right to own lesser weapons (guns), and society has mostly agreed on that. Seventy years ago you didn't have Miranda rights, now you do and have a right to be informed of them. Rights change over time, as society dictates. Nothing will change that, all you can do is argue for those that you truely believe to be important, such as free speech, be preserved or added.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You really ought to learn to argue this in a way that doesn't reek of xenophobia. There *are* legitimate criticisms of uncontrolled immigration, but when you argue it on the basis of "I've got mine" you turn people off. Immigration is still useful; this country, like most countries, is a Ponzi scheme of a sort. Without immigration our population would contract and the whole scheme would collapse. Limited, legal immigration maintains the necessary population growth while allowing time for services and infrastructure to expand to support the additional load. Unlimited immigration could mean overwhelming the existing systems before they have time to adapt. Striking a balance is important, but your xenophobia causes knee jerk opposition to your argument.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
What?!?! We have the highest per capita healthcare costs in the world!. Yes, higher than Germany, UK, Canada, and all the other "socialist" European countries.
Geez, educate yourself before you make a comment. It bothers the hell out of me when I see one of my fellow countrymen spewing out utter nonsense about foreign healthcare.
Ride the skies
It seems like a big part of the problem is expecting insurance to pay for everything health-related. This leads to a giant amount of overhead, which just adds to the cost of health care.
I don't file a claim with my auto insurance company every time I need to change the oil, get a car wash, get new tires, or replace a broken CV axle. I pay for it myself, and it's cheap (actually, dirt cheap because I do it myself). So why should I have some giant insurance company that I have to go through every time I visit a doctor for an annual check-up or an ingrown toenail or whatever?
Yes, I can't afford hundreds of thousands in medical bills. Similarly, I can't afford to pay the damages if I wreck my car and someone gets hurt. That's why I have auto insurance, to pay in case I do have a car wreck. That almost never happens, so my only communication with my auto insurer is my bill and policy renewals.
Why do we insist on having insurance companies pay for all our medical issues, which we then have to pay them for? This is all just make-work: huge companies that do nothing but process paperwork and shuffle money, taking some of it for themselves, and providing little value in the process (actually, they provide negative value in most cases).
What we need is catastrophic insurance, to pay for those things which don't happen often, and cost a fortune. Things like cancer, ER treatment, medivac helicopter rides when you're in a car wreck, heart surgery when you have a heart attack, etc. Then regular doctors' visits should be paid some other way, either out-of-pocket, or perhaps with socialized healthcare (paid directly by the government, not with a for-profit corporation acting as a middleman). Of course, the existing insurance companies wouldn't like that, because they're making tons of money by acting as a useless middleman, and their lobbyists are sure to "convince" Congresspeople of how important they are in any health care "reform" bills.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine In many states, you can indeed use lethal force without further provocation.
Why? Because diseases are communicable. And because keeping people healthy benefits everyone. And because it's the morally correct thing to do.
My former roommate was an ER nurse. At one of her jobs, she was the only nurse who spoke Spanish and, as such, treated a lot of the illegal immigrants that came in. She would complain to no end about how these people would come in with some gaping wound and only after treating that wound would she figure out that six other maladies including symptoms consistent with TB. Until she quit the job, she was taking a TB test a least once a month.
The thing is, when people don't have health care, they'll put off going to the doctor until it's unavoidable. Meanwhile, they're walking petrie dishes that interact with the rest of us and help spread disease. And by the time they do come in, their problems are worse and more expensive to fix than they would have been if they'd come in when they first noticed a problem. Sure, we'll attempt to bill them, but it's an almost futile effort. Unless we're ready to accept a health care system where people are denied emergency care unless they've got insurance, there's no way around this. If health care is universal and free, they'll get treated as soon as possible whenever they have something wrong.
Also, even though these people are likely doing menial work, keeping them healthy means they can continue to do that menial labor and we all benefit from that.
Lastly, some of us want to live in a world that's more compassionate than the selfish world that's typically the result of free-market ideals. If I'm fortunate enough to earn a comfortable living and others are not, I want to do my part to help them enjoy a more comfortable life. Not to the extent communism takes things, since that removes the incentive to work hard and try to improve your life, but defining a minimum standard of life to which everyone is entitled is not a bad thing. And I view access to health care as part of that minimum standard of life that I think everyone should have.