Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Planks Would You Want In a Platform of a Political Party?
An anonymous reader writes "I am the Technology Manager of the Justice Party (sorry, no relationship to the Avengers). We are currently working on our Platform (version 2.0) and I would be interested to know what people in the science and technology field would like to see in a platform of a political party. For example, we are considering planks that relate to Open Government (data) access, science and maths promotion, space industries, promotion of open source, dealing with SOPA/ CISPA laws, improvement in user privacy and much more. Give us your comments so we can help build a more tech-savvy America."
Don't know where you live, but AFAIK all states allow insurers to charge for insuring smokers. You are not paying for their habit. The insurance company has every incentive to offer healthy people the best rates they can.
Your high premiums have more to do with soaring costs on the care delivery end, which have more to do with ever more expensive techniques being invented and used with no cost-benefit analysis. Hell, they don't even do benefit-benefit analysis (drugs are not compared to eachother to determine if the new one is even worth prescribing).
Who ever claimed that is wrong. Descriminatory pricing for some things are being removed, but not politically unpopular "choices" like smoking.
Most of the supposed increase in premiums from Obamacare are from disallowing declining to insure those with preexisting conditions or writing those conditions out a plan. But many of the people who cannot afford care and are uninsured are just showing up at hospitals once the illness gets bad enough, so you are already paying for them, and the law would actually attempt to stop them from freeloading.
The way the law is supposed to prevent this from causing premium increases is by forcing people to buy insurance preemptively rather than waiting until they are already sick. The preexisting condition part of the bill turns into a total disaster if the mandate goes away. (There are some alternatives, but TBH they don't solve the problem of people walking into hospitals uninsured. You either have to decide to let people die, or find some way to force people to pay for the services they are recieving.)
^ Post of the Day
+10 Internets to you, sir or madam. Just don't edit them with Emacs.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Look at Israel for a good example of this.
Look at all the countries that don't have that problem. It seems like Israel is a bit of a special case. Also, a parliamentary system could easily have more trouble than a non-parliamentary system like ours, because in a parliamentary system you need to form a (often coalition) majority to form a government. In the US system minor parties could only swing things on a vote-by-vote basis.
Anybody who knows Israeli politics better than me please feel free to correct, but AFAIK the reason Israel has such a big problem is that their two big parties, Labor and Likud, both have a large but not quite majority vote. Hence they have to scramble to get small parties to join a coalition so they can get a majority and form a government. This gives the small parties power out of all proportion to their representation, as they hold a trump card.
As to the smokers, that may be true but the point is I still have to pay for their medical costs...
NO
YOU
DON'T
I smoke, and because I do, I pay a higher health insurance premium than a non-smoker with similar health stats. Stop spreading that damnable myth.
Conversely, fat people really do burden the healthcare system unnecessarily, and they are not required to pay an increased premium. You want to bitch, bitch about that.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Your sense of morality may have come from your religion, but your religion got it from a human, probably the parents of whoever made it up who got it from their parents and so on as humans developed it over time. I disagree with you and I think you will find that the vast majority of values you hold are shared with families and people of all faiths or the lack thereof, and that there is plenty we can agree upon to base a legal system without involving a deity.
If you're waiting for 100% agreement on anything you'll be waiting a long time, but I think you underestimate the proportion of people worldwide that would agree on whether murder, stealing, fraud, deception etc. should be subject to legal penalty, the broad circumstances under which the penalties should apply and the relative seriousness of crimes.
I just don't see how you can go through life with so little faith in the humanity of your fellow man.
Nullius in verba