Slashdot Mirror
Obamacare Exchanges Months Behind In Testing IT Data Security
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"The federal government is months behind in testing data security for the main pillar of Obamacare: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1. The missed deadlines have pushed the government's decision on whether information technology security is up to snuff to exactly one day before that crucial date, the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general said in a report. As a result, experts say, the exchanges might open with security flaws or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.'They've removed their margin for error,' said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. 'There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.' The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance."
By the history of large government IT projects, this is pretty well normal. The DOD, IRS, and just about every large department has had anything from minor to major disasters when setting up or updating systems.
I think too much of this is due to government bidding requirements that put too much emphasis on who you know more than what you know. I have seen too many stories where competence is the last thing looked at for contractors.
"hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance."
Why would anyone provide a social security number to be used for medical purposes?
Obamacare failing doesn't serve anyone's interests. And it won't succeed. Its too poorly set up to do anything but fail.
So if you want socialized medicine... this will only make your idea appear stupid or your political allies too inept to execute such a plan.
If you don't want socialized medical care this will effectively give it to you anyway... but it will be even more expensive... badly run... and generally all the negatives will be more negative.
So lets not do this... kill it and restart the debate on it. Does that mean the supporters will have to ACTUALLY get support for their program this time instead of sneaking it through? Yes. But they should have done that in the first place and this is so screwed up in large part because they broke the rules.
I know what the supporters are going to say... that they followed the letter of the law. Possibly by the narrowest possible definition. But you know damn well that you broke the spirit of the law in half getting there.
That said, that isn't the point of my post. My point is that indifferent to all that, Obamacare is unfixable. It needs to be put down like a rabid dog and THEN we can evaluate what our options are after that. But causing American insurance premiums to double is not in any one's interest. Stop it.
If you care about the poor. Stop it.
If you care about jobs. Stop it.
If you care about the country. Stop it.
At this point, the only reason to support it is ego... aka fear of looking like a fool after investing so much political capital into the issue... or ignorance.
That's all that's left.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Obama health care plan is less ambitious than the health care plan propose by Richard M Nixon in 1974.
Health care was a lot less ambitious in 1974. That predates open heart surgery, organ transplants, joint replacements, most cancer treatments, MRI, CAT scan, and even the discovery that ulcers were caused by H. pylori.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Why is it that I'm seeing half the stories on Slashdot, after they spent a day or two on Drudge Report? Especially ones that are only slightly "News for nerds" material?
Are that many /.ers closet Drudge readers?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Obama health care plan is less ambitious than the health care plan propose by Richard M Nixon in 1974.
Health care was a lot less ambitious in 1974. That predates open heart surgery, organ transplants, joint replacements, most cancer treatments, MRI, CAT scan, and even the discovery that ulcers were caused by H. pylori.
And your point is? If your point is that we'd have been much better off if we'd started UHC in 1974 I completely agree, but it's hard to change the past.
social security number = ID and citizenship check
Forcing successful people to pay for insurance for the dregs of society is just wrong.
Exactly, that's why I love public health insurance. I don't have to buy a 3rd yacht some insurance exec whose daddy got him a cushy job. I get better health care and CHEAPER then I ever got with my garbage "high end" health insurance in the states. Yeah I may pay a bit more than a poor person(and probably pay some of their share), but not having to support worthless execs means that it is cheaper than that private garbage.
Before mouthing off about costs, how about do a little research? Like the fact that the US spends roughly 2x as much(as a % of GDP) than any other industrialized nation(who all have public health insurance) and yet the health outcomes are not any better for all that cash spent. Oh I'm sorry, did I use facts with a Republican? My mistake.
Monstar L
kill the bill with no replacement and sick kids may get cut off. AS well as others with Pre-Existing Conditions
Please explain what is so different about the USA that Obamacare-like systems work in pretty much the entire civilized world except the USA.
Is the rest of the civilized world so incredibly brilliant, is the USA so incredibly retarted, or is it just you?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Why's that? My brother is self employed and his insurance premiums have so far doubled under the "affordable care act". I don't know mine exactly only because I'm under a group policy through work, though with the numbers they post for what my insurance is worth, that's gone up by roughly $1000 a year and I'm single, early 30s, non-smoker, and at 5 foot 10 and 170 lbs, not exactly obese. As another data point, I'm currently working on my masters, and we are automatically enrolled in the campus health insurance plan and have to waive it. It was $798 PER SEMESTER! And it's not what I'd call great coverage. When I did my undergrad it was like 200 a semester, and I graduated in 2006. Not like it was eons ago.
I'd say calling obamacare a cluster is quite accurate so far. Seriously, can anybody come forward and say that their insurance premiums are cheaper now? I heard that the minimum coverage in cali was estimated to be something like 340 a month for a family of 4. Thats pretty much a BMW car payment. Not what I call affordable.
My point is it may have been more "ambitious" in terms of coverage of available care, but a _LOT_ less ambitious in terms of cost.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Let's face it: prevention is not profitable for the medical industrial complex. Waiting for things to be come an emergency means the costs are much higher and the hospitals (all most all owned by huge corporations) either get paid or write off the bad debt to offset taxes. Prevention just can't offer the revenue potential.
What's even dumber is the concept of state-level exchanges.
A primary driver of high health-care costs is the balkanization of healthcare across states.
Allow the voluntary harmonization of various states' health care codes, which would in turn allow insurance providers to offer the same plan in several states. The 'health care exchanges' offered in the Obamacare bill would have been a perfect opportunity to allow capitalism to work to lower costs and increase competitive pressures - this plan merely ossifies the state-level segmentation of the marketplace.
-Styopa
Before mouthing off about costs, how about do a little research? Like the fact that the US spends roughly 2x as much(as a % of GDP) than any other industrialized nation(who all have public health insurance) and yet the health outcomes are not any better for all that cash spent. Oh I'm sorry, did I use facts with a Republican? My mistake.
Take your own advice. One way Britain's NHS saves money is by not covering expensive anti-cancer drugs. It makes more sense, financially, to let women die from breast cancer.
Another cost savings is pushing off ophthalmology treatments and surgeries until after the patient has gone blind. Then there's no need for those expensive procedures.
What medicines and treatments does your chosen country avoid in order to save money?
Amusingly, despite the government=bureaucracy equation that many people seem to assume, one of the big benefits is how much less bureaucratic it is, too. When I moved from the US to Denmark, my health care got immensely simpler. In the US, I had to read tons of fine print to buy insurance in the first place; then fill out claim forms, separate ones for each provider (if you end up in a hospital you will be billed separately for the hospital bed, for the anesthesiologist, for the laboratory work, etc.), then lawyer about these on the phone as they were inevitably filled out incorrectly and various claims were denied until the second or third try.
Now everything Just Works and I don't have to fill out a damn piece of paper ever. Well, I had to fill out one: when I moved to the country I had to fill out an application for the health-insurance card. It took about 15 minutes, and came in the mail two days later.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
For one thing because we effectively subsides the rest of those systems and Obummer care is going to make the subsidy bigger; especially when they start to pull things like the tax on device makers out of it.
All of those systems effectively impose price controls on device vendors and drug producers. This keeps costs to the system down; meanwhile those companies extract super premium margins from American consumers (because demand for healthcare products is inelastic) which they turn around and fund their R&D with.
Essentially its the same free rider problem the individual mandate is designed to fix; except that the bill deliberately worsens it because it lines the pockets to the healthcare industry whom the statists needed to support their monstrous corruption of our formerly free society.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Affordable health care, as the fine print in the approved rate sheet linked to from NY Governor Cuomo's press release reveals, can mean annual premium of as much as $35k for a family of 3 (for a 'platinum' plan). So, Congress was no doubt relieved to learn last week that they won't be eating their own health care dogfood after all â" the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has decided to allow the government to subsidize coverage for its employees on the exchanges. If you're curious, plug your numbers into California's insurance cost calculator to get an idea of how you might fare!"
Forcing successful people to pay for insurance for the dregs of society is just wrong.
I'm pretty sure our definitions of "successful people" are pretty different. Statistically, it would be me who'd end up paying for trash like you.
Just as I'm most probably paying more taxes per trimester than your net worth so that you can live in a nice country.
Please explain what is so different about the USA that Obamacare-like systems work in pretty much the entire civilized world except the USA.
The only thing wrong here is your assumption that there are other Obamacare-like systems elsewhere in the world.
is the USA so incredibly retarded
This. Due to the massive cost increases in health care that Obamacare encourages, I'm not even sure it'll succeed in its alleged primary goal, improving health care coverage.
And the law is so bad that allies of the people who passed the law are trying hard to get out from being covered by the law. There's been a series of waivers of various provisions of Obamacare that went to allies of the President and certain congresspeople. I'm sure we all appreciate the passage of laws which are supposed to be for our own good and for which the allies of the people who advocated the laws are at least partially exempt.
Like hell you don't pay a damned thing. Ever heard of taxes? Worse, there's a lot of corruption here hiding massive healthcare failures, including huge numbers of people who are now dead who shouldn't be due to poor care. I wouldn't hold up the UK's socialised healthcare system as an example to follow.
Heart surgery was first done in the 50s.
Organ transplants started in the 1900s, but major organs like kidneys in the 1950s.
Joint replacement was a little earlier in the we were replacing hips by 1948.
They were less common, but by 1974 all those were happening.
Obamacare is the biggest disaster that ever has hit the United States.
Jesus, and neocons wonder why everybody scoffs at them. Ever heard of the Civil War, moron? Ever heard of the Great Depression, fool? Personally, I have my doubts that this will make my insurance or doctor bills cheaper but you guys are WAY over the top. I'd like to see the health insurance companies GONE and want a system like Canada or Europe. Of course, you neonuts would never allow that which is why we have this Obamacare clusterfuck.
As to fraud and abuse, you don't think it's happening with private insurance as well?
You know, I can't log in on this computer but I wouldn't mind if ACs couldn't post. So many fools...
Damn right, I think people should have the freedom to choose whether they want to eat or whether they want to keep the tooth to do that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
[citation needed]
What medicines and treatments does your chosen country avoid in order to save money?
Plenty of poor people (but not poor to the point where the government will help them) in the US avoid going to the doctor at all because they simply can't afford it; some of them die from otherwise preventable problems because of that.
When I moved from the US to Denmark, my health care got immensely simpler.
What a terrible comparison. I've also lived in Denmark, and though the quality is not bad, wait times can be very long in hospitals, and it can be very difficult to get care for "special" issues.
Additionally, the taxes in that country are untenable. If we didn't have a company helping to pay for our house, car, and various other unimportant tidbits we would not have been able to afford living there with our relatively large family (4 kids).
If you want healthcare that is, when it comes to serious things, worse than the US and want to deal with, among other things:
- Almost 60% income tax
- 25% VAT tax on virtually all items
- 200% tax on vehicles (200%!)
Then feel free to move there. Once the grace period for the tax help we received ran out, we left back to the US.
Odd. One has to wonder how does pretty much all of Europe manage to finance that. Is Europe a so much more powerful economy that they can throw such incredible amounts of money into their "socialist" healthcare, or how do they do it? And most of all, can the US copy it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Those kinds of cover ups exist here too. Private doctors working for a private hospital killed my grandfather. They misdiagnosed him repeatedly and failed to properly treat him even for what they misdiagnosed him with.
The likely difference here is that you will never hear of that case due to NDAs and settlements. The NHS can't do that, so you eventually hear about it.
The effective income tax rate (i.e. taking into account exclusions and the different brackets) is more like 35-40% for a middle-class family. You don't pass even a 50% effective rate until you're making well north of €200k/yr.
And note that this rate includes health-care, which in the U.S. is billed separately. It also includes university education, which in the U.S. is billed separately. If you add up what a typical American pays for [federal income tax + state income tax + payroll tax + student-loan payments + healthcare premiums/copays], it's higher than what most Danes pay if you're in a middle-class bracket. The comparison is even more favorable to Denmark if you're an entrepreneur: once you add in that self-employed Americans have to pay double payroll taxes (15.3%) and have to buy individual health insurance, Denmark starts to look a lot cheaper!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
[citation needed]
Only because you have no brain to figure out how to google. How hard is it to search for "NHS Blind" and click on the links that highlight problems?
some people think they have good plans and when they get sick they find out how bad they can be or they hit the cap and get kicked out.
I haven't had health insurance since the year 2000. Since then I don't think I have ever spent more than $500 in one year on doctor and hospital visits, well except one which was a motorcycle accident. It was almost $1500. But I was able to pay it at $100 a month for 15 months.
I'm late 40's now and little more than 2 weeks ago, I slid in some mud and fell off my bicycle. I fractured my wrist and separated my shoulder. The total medical bill was $175 at an urgent care facility only because I didn't have insurance. If I did have insurance, the bill would have been $1000 or more.
My Obamacare cost every month now is going to be $370 a month. I live almost paycheck to paycheck now. I have no idea where I'm going to come up with that kind of cash every month. Go starving I guess. It will certainly cut down on the obesity problem.
It was so sad and funny at the same time - during the London Olympics open ceremony, while they were riding bicycles around heaping praise on their awesome National Health Service, General Electric ran a commercial about how they'd donated a bunch of neonatal incubators to a hospital in London because the NHS couldn't afford it!
Awesome health care, indeed.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Campus health care is often a scam. The University is getting a kickback for signing you up. They want the cheapest plans for the employees they care about, not some grad students.
$340 is not a BMW payment, more like a normal car payment for a normal term loan. A cheaper BMW like the base 3 series sedan goes for $32550, a 60 month term at 1% interest would result in a $556.40 monthly payment.
Minimum coverage costs have gone up now that minimum coverage actually has to cover something. Some of those very cheap plans had low lifetime cost ceilings. Meaning when you needed it most, like you had a major medical problem, you would run out of insurance coverage.
If the exchanges are to be run by the states, why is the federal government responsible for their IT data security? The states want more flexibility and responsibility, let them manage that aspect on their own.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Because no one donates stuff to American hospitals?
That seems to contradict reality. Hospitals often get donations of money or equipment here in the USA.
the taxes in that country are untenable
That may be, but taxes pay for a lot more than healthcare. Total healthcare expenses in Denmark are less than 2/3 of what they are in the US (%/GDP). They also have universal coverage and few to no people going broke due to medical bills. Any way you slice it, it's we 'muricans who are getting ripped off. I'm in favor of "socialism" for health insurance not because of any ideological leanings, but because I'm a cheap bastard.
What will happen next is you will end up in the ER for a real medical condition, the hospital will write it off and I and other taxpayers will be stuck paying. If you are very lucky someone like my mother will get the hospital to transfer you from the ER to a regular bed and they will pay for your treatment as an act of charity. Then the hospital will have even more cost to write off and for the rest of us to pay.
If you are less lucky you will be treated only in the ER and released to die at home. Cheaper for the taxpayer, but clearly not the superior choice.
Where did you get these numbers? Their are low cost plans for those who cannot pay.
I think it's perception. They {the government} seem to be quite good at implementing programs that we believe continue not to work... but to them, I think their continued failed implementation is exactly what they intended on in the first place.
You assume that the single-payer systems in the "entire civilized world except the USA" are even remotely close to what the Affordable Care Act established.
They aren't. The Affordable Care Act (panned as Obamacare) requires individuals to purchase private health insurance or pay fines (Sorry, a "tax" according to the Supreme Court) to the Federal Government.
If we wanted to do what other countries had, we would have erased the language "65 or older" from the existing Medicare statute; but there's no way that the health insurance corporations would have allowed that to get through the House of Representatives.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Scandinavia is where things work.
Scandinavia is magic! Of course nothing like UHC could work in US, any more than it could work in the rest of Western Europe, or Canada, or Japan or Australia or ... uh wait, I meant it couldn't work in 'merica. Yeah, that's it, the rest of the developed world is magic. What a shame 'merica isn't.
The only article that even seems to come close is one from the Daily Mail. As usual they do not cite their sources nor do they get commentary from anyone but an alarmist charity.
How about some actual citations?
The Daily Mail has had people make up stories to fit their viewpoint.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/173261/daily-mail-reporter-cant-explain-how-false-report-got-published/
I don't see people flying from around the world to get medical care in the UK, Canada, or other places where the government pays.
Sarah Palin apparently did:
“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn't that ironic?”
I do see them flying from around the world to get medical care at the Mayo, at Mass General, at Johns Hopkins, at Sloan Kettering, at MD Anderson, at the Cleveland Clinic, at Dana-Farber, at, well you get the idea. Nationalized, rationed healthcare is no problem while you are healthy. But when you get sick (and sooner or later you will), you face things like this:
This is mostly myth:
The most comprehensive study I’ve seen on this topic — it employed three different methodologies, all with solid rationales behind them — was published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs.
The authors of the study started by surveying 136 ambulatory care facilities near the U.S.-Canada border in Michigan, New York and Washington. It makes sense that Canadians crossing the border for care would favor places close by, right? It turns out, however, that about 80 percent of such facilities saw, on average, fewer than one Canadian per month; about 40 percent had seen none in the preceding year.
Oh and old people routinely go to both Canada and Mexico to get cheaper drugs. Either way, what you "see" is hardly scientific evidence.
The other option of course being what we have in the USA that people simply die from lack of treatment.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/insurance-24-year-dies-toothache/story?id=14438171
Before you claim that man was stupid try to remember the pain he was in. No one makes good decisions in that kind of state.
Obamacare is progress, and that's a good thing. There's too much money involved to suddenly shut down the private health "insurance" system. This is a good first step. After Obamacare, it'll be easy to eventually migrate everybody into Medicaid or Medicare, and it'll be finished.
I don't respond to AC's.
From a purely precedent standpoint, the OP is at least somewhat correct. This is the first time in the history of the US that any government - federal, state, or local - has been given the power to force a citizen (with the threat of fines and arrest) to purchase a commercial product. It was very obvious that Obama wanted to make this a precedent - he didn't take the easy way out and claim it was a tax, he wanted it to be clear that this was a new power for government.
Think about it a little - what other things can you think of that a citizen is required to do by a government as a result of being born and NOT as the result of a personal choice?
* Must you have a SSN? Nope. You are not required to apply for one.
* Do you have to pay taxes? If you choose to not work, no job, no income, no taxes (I assume your family is willing to support you).
* Do you have to attend public school? No, you can be home-schooled or just not attend (your parents might get in trouble if the gov't knows about you, or you could've been born at home).
The only thing I can think of is that males of a certain age must register for the draft. That's literally all, except now you must also buy insurance.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Take your own advice. One way Britain's NHS saves money is by not covering expensive anti-cancer drugs. It makes more sense, financially, to let women die from breast cancer.
Because we all know that private health insurance companies never refuse or deny people certain treatments, right? What a ridiculously silly complaint especially when insurance companies are terribly about trying to deny coverage and play all sorts of games to weasel out of paying even what they claim to cover.
That's not true at all. We don't hear about it because a government body was set up under the last government with the remit to hide failures and prevent them coming to light, under the euphemism Care Quality Commission. The Commission has two jobs, (1) to cover up its own failings and (2) to cover up its own failings. It also occasionally provides cursory inspections of hospitals, failing to publish the truth about poor practice at any available opportunity.
The only reason we're hearing about it now is because of some very brave relatives. Also remember that UK FOI is much weaker than US FOI.
Nationalized, rationed healthcare is no problem while you are healthy. But when you get sick (and sooner or later you will), you face things like this:
Since when do private insurance companies not ration care? Many have yearly and lifetime limits on coverage amounts. Many will deny or try to weasel out of paying for covering treatments. It's quite easy to find numerous cases of people dying because their insurance company denied them coverage.
I wouldn't hold up the UK's socialised healthcare system as an example to follow.
Neither would I. The only country it seems to do better than is the US. Look at the "Expenditure on Health (% of GDP)" towards the bottom of this article. See the big outlier? That's the US. We have plenty of fraud too, including the institutionalized kind (aka for-profit health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals). We also kill lots of people by not giving them medical attention until they can justify going to the emergency room.
I've known from the beginning that Obamacare was never planned to succeed. This past presidential election was solid proof of that. The whole point was to create a perception of need where one did not previously exist. Even Romney was talking about "replacing" Obamacare, while anyone who was likely to oppose increased government involvement (generally conservatives or libertarians) who has been paying attention wanted to know why it needed replacement at all.
The government I'm sure is thankful that most Americans only pay attention to politics enough to know that they hate the guy who has the opposite letter behind his name and are so scared of him that they'll vote for "their guy" whether they like/believe in/want him or not.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
As with almost any IT Project if you have a few high up officials determined to make your project fail, they will find a way to make it fail.
These exchanges should have started development right when the law was passed. However with all political posturing and moving from court to court, and the right bashing it left and right. It made it hard to get the project going. Why start the Supreme Court will knock it down.
So in essence due to politics, not that the rule was good or not, but because of the back stabbing nature of our current political climate. Is why these things didn't come into play.
If the owner doesn't want the product, unless they are of good moral code, they will find a way to make it fail so they can say I told you so.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For one thing because we effectively subsides the rest of those systems
How generous of us. Being a cheap bastard though, I propose we adopt their system and stop getting ripped off.
We don't ballyhoo our [non-existent] National Health Service to the world as the pinnacle of Socialism while accepting charity from a country we look down our noses at for being uncivilized and barbaric with regard to health care.
It would be like us claiming our system is perfect in the face of Obamacare while accepting donations of chicken bones and rattles from Amazonian witch doctors.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I don't think I suggested anywhere that the US healthcare system is good. I'm simply suggesting that the UK system is a terrible example to use. Perhaps Denmark, Norway and others would be better.
The English do not tout the NHS as the pinnacle of Socialism. Most of them rather not use that last word at all.
I think your image of this is warped by your sources of information. I suggest you try visiting England.
Problems with your argument:
- GP didn't say what party (if any) he was affiliated with;
- Obamacare does nothing to enforce a ceiling on health care costs-- it just forces you to a lowest-common-denominator pool if you can't afford it,
- The GP didn't say the current system was OK, so you've created a false dilemma by claiming that if he doesn't like Obamacare, then he must be OK with the status quo.
- Obamacare is not single-payer, so claiming that we will get results similar to nations with single payer is supported by nothing.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Sometimes private companies do deny treatments, and I find this immoral. But we have a legal system in place to punish them. When the NHS lets you die because cancer treatments cost too much, the subject has no recourse. The government is supreme, and holds the power of life and death over you.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Single-payer would be a lot better, but with the current state of the Republican party, we can't have nice things. You sound like you're part of the problem, with your total misunderstanding of how poor people currently get health care, total lack of understanding of how elections work, and revolting view of poor people as "the dregs of society."
The current system is a bigger clusterf**k than anything you're imagining.
which they turn around and fund their R&D with.
They'd like you to believe that. And it seems that you do. Sure, some do some R&D. But all use a lot of that money for fat bonuses for their execs, and other dubious purposes such as advertising. I have not heard of insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield doing any research at all. Those who do, don't do much basic R&D. Instead they lean on publicly funded institutions of higher education for that. They get a free ride there. What good is the heavy advertising they do for name brand drugs? Why are these ads aimed at patients? Most patients are not medical professionals. Then, what of the money they spend on "intellectual property" to "protect" their precious drugs? Some of the monies that should be spent on our health goes towards lobbyists whose jobs are to persuade or bribe government to shore up monopolies and destroy competition. And the whole thing is aided and abetted by people like you who blindly believe in Big Pharma and friends.
Formerly free society? You talk like our current health care system is some paragon of competitive efficiency. It's not. It's full of fraud and waste. It's dirty pool. Price controls? There's an excellent method of price control: Competition. Too bad there isn't much competition, not that there's scope for it in all areas. But where there could be competition, there isn't. A person who needs emergency medical treatment obviously has no time or opportunity to comparison shop. Such people are the perfect captive consumers who routinely get bilked. It is no coincidence that our care is geared towards emergencies and not prevention. Obamacare has a lot of flaws, not least thanks to Republican attempts to deliberately screw it up. But it's a start. The medical community has only themselves to blame for bringing this upon them. They've had decades to demonstrate the effectiveness of the current system. Instead, they've abused their position of authority, their power, to bleed us all.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I live in America and have health insurance. I envy those who don't have health insurance; usually in my experience health insurance companies will deny or "accidentally" not process claims properly leaving me holding the bag and I consequently have to fight the insurance company tooth and nail for several weeks (or in some cases months) to get them to recognize their error and pay out, and meanwhile the doctor is still waiting for his money.
Sometimes I'll be all fine and dandy but end up getting a surprise medical bill in the hundreds from a year ago because the insurance company took its sweet time to deny the claim.
I'd drop my health insurance because its worthless (what good is it if I end having to pay hundreds of dollars in doctor's bills anyway?) but because of the so-called Affordable Healthcare Act I'll end up being a criminal if I don't buy that executive his third yacht.
I have high blood pressure, among other things, and my family is concerned about my health but I think it's detrimental to my health just trying to get healthcare itself so I no longer go to the doctor because it's too much stress to deal with.
Like the fact that the US spends roughly 2x as much(as a % of GDP) than any other industrialized nation
and why is that?
We went from slightly high priced to nearly 2x everyone else.
Mandated insurance is why. What the hell does anyone care when the co-pay is 50 bucks for a 200k surgery. That changed over time (now you pay 10-50%). PPO, HMO those acronyms ring any bells? They should. I pay nearly 8k a year in health costs (today, before any obamacare kicks in). My employer picks up most of that cost. But I pay the taxes on it. Meaning *I* pay 8k. It just never hit my bank account so I never missed it. They even make it look like 'you only pay 5 dollars a month for it'. But the real costs are right there on every check. Some companies hide it for accounting reasons.
The reason costs have spiraled out of control is there is no real economic check/balance going on. Basically we threw money at the 'problem' and doctors/hospitals/insurance companies raised their prices accordingly. As they are for profit centers. I know if my patients came in wanting a 30 dollar exam but suddenly they were all willing to pay '50' yet I could get an extra 150-300 from someone else for a bit of paperwork I would raise prices too.
This is simple econ 151 stuff. Demand curve went upwards supply curve stayed the same.
We did not end up with national healthcare. We ended up with mandated insurance. 'Obamacare' is not about helping the poor (it does that sorta) it is about slurping up more money into insurance companies who will give it to doctors/mega hospitals. Notice when it was going down they went from batshit insane how bad it was, too not a peep?
You have not seen *anything* yet. I conservatively estimate my insurance will go up 3x within 10 years. Just about like last time when it was mandated with PPOs and HMOs.
I would guess that most actual socialists who wanted actual universal health care are, like me, really disappointed with ACA. Far-right Republicans like to slam ACA as being "socialized medicine" when it's really just a massive handout to private insurance companies.
I am still amused by people that complain that ACA will suddenly put their health care decisions in the hands of bureaucrats. Apparently they don't understand how it works now.
The problem we have here is that the Europeans who cheered when Obama came to power are still his primary supporters. Obama now has more people opposed to his policies than for them in the USA, but the EU is still pulling for him. They assume, since Americans are all fat, violent ignoramuses who don't know what's best for them (other than voting Obama in, of course), that Obamacare must be some wonderful single-payer system. At least single-payer would only have government corruption to deal with. Through Obamacare, we get to have the worst of both government corruption and corporate greed. Whoever is in office while this abomination (or should I say, Obamanation) is in place gets to benefit from the graft, obscurity, and general immorality of the law and twist it to their own purposes.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
but not having to support worthless execs means that it is cheaper than that private garbage.
Are you aware of the expense ratios of private and non-profit insurance companies? I'd gather, no, because this information is publicly available, and the range is 3-7%. That's the amount of profit (vs. expense of payouts). So if you want to take the 'yacht cost' out of of those plans you'll save less than that.
Before mouthing off about costs, how about do a little research?
Agreed.
Like the fact that the US spends roughly 2x as much(as a % of GDP) than any other industrialized nation(who all have public health insurance)
Indeed. So perhaps you should look at why this is true. Research how rates are set in the US.
and yet the health outcomes are not any better for all that cash spent.
The medical outcomes are marginally better but cultural factors result in a wash or worse.
Oh I'm sorry, did I use facts with a Republican? My mistake.
Naw, don't worry about that, you're safe. FWIW, I'm a Democrat who cares about actually helping people with real solutions, not trying to incite class envy, but I'm well aware that the fascist RepubliCrats are very happy with the status quo.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You don't even know what a neocon is. Neocons like Obamacare. It resembles what was proposed in 1994 to counter Hillarycare (a single-payer system).
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Nothing is going to cost less than $370 unless you're already on public assistance. OK, the fine for having no coverage will cost less.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I would assume this fellow is, since he stated he would have to stop eating to pay that.
Then he could also pay the fine. Why there is no public option I still do not understand.
Go fly to the UK, Mexico, and India to one of their international hospitals to get treatment. They aren't the "local hospital" the internationals are coming, they are international hospitals designed for international customers. Oh, many of these also accept US health insurance. And for some procedures, the insurance company will actually encourage and pay for you and one other to fly, stay, and get the procedure done in a foreign country. That kind of says it all.
See how many people go to these places vs the US. And then figure out how behind the US is in patient care.
Don't get me wrong, we got the best medical facilities, and doctors in the world bar none. But that is all we got and the price tag that goes with it and it is all very inefficient. Most others have some thing that is 95% of what we got, at 50% of the cost or better. And also, they have options, they have services that are 50% of what we offer but at 1% the cost. We only have the best of the best of the best @ $$$$... and that's it.
Been there, seen first-hand the angst of people waiting for CAT and MRI scans for possibly life-threatening issues.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Most of them rather not use that last word at all.
Sorry for the double reply - so substitute Civilization for Socialism; same idea.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Honestly, I have never seen ONE Government IT or IS project that was not staffed by morons and run by bigger morons. Why the hell cant they hire people that have a clue? And on top of that hire people to manage it that have the balls and authority to tell any elected official to "DIAF" any time they suggest something stupid?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't get it.
Having people refuse to pay for charity care isn't profitable either, but at least with prevention there's less expenditure on health care in the long run. Also, around here one of the biggest health insurance companies is a non-profit.
I'm glad to see it's not working,
What's not working? The parts that are implemented are working just fine.
And why would you be glad? You want people to not be able to see a doctor? Really?
I don't respond to AC's.
Sigh, do some research. In case people wonder why I'm so opposed to conservatives, this ignorant tripe is why.
Sounds like you have a bad insurance company and or live in a state with inadequate regulation of the industry. Around here, mistakes like that are relatively few and far between. And BTW, I have a non-profit health insurer, so any yachts being purchased are minimal.
As for the blood pressure, get a better health insurer, I have no problem getting an appointment with mine. Just because some insurers are incompetently run, doesn't mean all of them are, and if you're being treated like that, call the insurance commissioner and file a complaint.
What? You're asking what's not working, when the article was clearly about things not working?
And regarding your parting comments, ah, the old fallacy of people not being able to see doctors without the government making it happen. Pure nonsense.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
social security number = ID and citizenship check
But it needs a proof of ID, or something like that, with a photo, I guess? Like a passport? Just the plain numbers are worthless, I hope?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Obamacare doesn't encourage massive cost increases in health care. Since the ACA was passed, my premiums have increased at the slowest rate in memory. In fact this year was the first year I can recall where my premiums didn't increase at all.
And with the incentives to lower costs and improve outcomes, that should continue. We haven't yet seen the increases in efficiency that come from the preventative care mandates. Those can easily take 10 years or more to fully materialize, depending upon the condition.
Then again, why bother with facts, it's not like somebody stupid enough to think that Obamacare was his idea is going to listen. It was a conservative proposal from the start.
Wherever did you live in the US where you had to fill out claim forms for your health insurance??
Hospital does the paperwork for all my insurance claims against the hospital, my Doctor takes care of it for my visits with him, when I go to get labwork done of any kind, the lab takes care of the paperwork.
Only place I can even think MIGHT make me do insurance paperwork is a Doc-in-a-Box....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I have seen the same thing here. Hell, I was pretty angsty as I waited for the CAT scan when they thought I might be bleeding into my brain. Turns out the hospital only had one and it was in use.
Supply is not unlimited anywhere.
It seems to be pretty much in the middle. In any case, it has to go up because we have a looming ageing population problem which implies more GDP spent on healthcare regardless of quality.
The difference there is that Amizonian witch doctor care is actually better and more effective than Obamacare.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
It's a technical problem. Not a structural problem.
And no, many if not most people cannot afford to see a doctor without government intervening to regulate the "health insurance" industry right now.
I don't respond to AC's.
That, and fraudulent claims made using a valid SS number. Its a huge, not well hidden side of the medical industry now.
As for the untested security inherent in exposing this stuff to the net, security people will tell you, repeatedly, that a breech of security WILL happen, when there is money to be made by exploiting it, it WILL be done. Even RSA probably has less than 2 years of usefulness left according to one announcement here in the last couple days that its possible the two factor system will be cracked in 5 years or less.
Hell, just that announcement alone will triple the number of people working on breaking it, so 5 years is likely to be an extremely optimistic view of its remaining effectiveness, which is why I wrote the 2 above.
When its been broken, then the system is wide open & will have no choice but to go back to cash & carry instead of this mandated to be administered fraudulently NHC system the ACA has become in record time.
Security, I'm sure all can understand is like pouring concrete. The question has never been "will it crack" but when, because its a 100% sure bet that it will.
Let anyone who thinks its secure go right ahead & sign up, but please do not be surprised when an audit of services rendered to that SS# disclose that 2 years ago, you had both hips replaced, and last year a knee. Done in the middle of the night I guess because as far as you know, those joints are, like mine at 78YO, not in too good a shape, complaining mightily at times but are damned sure OEM so far.
And the only way you'll ever slow that sort of fraud down is to bring back short ropes & some of Willie Nelson's tall oak trees. IMO there must be a penalty for actions that harm another, strong enough to either deter, or prevent a recurrence if judged guilty by your peers.
Cheers, Gene
--
A pen in the hand of this President is more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law abiding citizens.
you are of course aware of how much healthcare costs have risen as a result of Obamacare, right? And that subsidizing that increase is a lose-lose proposition?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Which is exactly what happens now. The difference is only when we get charged, not whether you get the bill or not.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
look at greece. the facts are that they cant afford it.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Awesome health care, indeed.
Anecdotal evidence which is easily trumped by, you know, actual research (key chart starts on page 18). It turns out that by any objective measure, the NHS gets better results than the US does: The UK is in the top 20, the US is competing with Costa Rica, Cuba, and Slovenia. And if you want to see really all-out socialized medicine, check out France, sitting comfortably as the best in the world.
A big part of what's going on is that your perception of health care is coming from your own experiences using it as someone who probably has a good job and decent insurance. It completely ignores the experiences of those who have a bad job and no insurance. The US has a health care underclass, and you aren't in it, so you don't notice how badly the people in it are treated.
I am officially gone from
Denmark's population is also ~5 million. There is no guarantee that the system there could scale to the entire United States. Most countries with actual efficient public medicine are more akin to a single state (eg. Canada is well down the efficiency curve at only 30 million) than to all the states combined. While the system may be more efficient for a combination of more than one person (eg. 1 million), scalability matters.
... much of the paperwork in the states is likely government mandated. Finally, the discussion here is about Obamacare, which is nothing like the model you're touting in Denmark. It does in fact seem to be worse than what it replaces, which is a funny way to move forward ...
Also, your claim about government = bureaucracy
Local, federal, and state goverments have forced people to sell their land. Federal goverment has forced men to quit their jobs,join the military and die over seas. A bit more extreme than making someone purchase health insurance.
The difference is when you have insurance the hospital gets paid and can charge everyone fairly. Rather than making me pay for the bills of others with $15 aspirin.
Non-citizens can have SSNs. All they need is to be legally able to work or even just go to school here.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Most states force car insurance. You can choose not to have a driver's license, but unless you live in a major metro area driving is a requirement to earn a living.
Interestingly, most Democrats mock Republicans for being too corporatist while being disappointed that the (Democrat) ACA is a handout to private insurance companies ... Choose your friends carefully, they may not be who they say they are. Truth is, both parties are responsible for the mess, and both parties are in love with money. As for why far right Republicans slam the ACA, you might want to read what they actually say - when discussing that to do about health care, they slammed socialized medicine, but most of the commentary nowadays is about how inefficient and stupid the ACA is, and that actual socialized medicine would be non-ideal but better than the system the Democrats have saddled us with ...
The other option of course being what we have in the USA that people simply die from lack of treatment.
I hope you realize that this happens in the "socialized system" too. Happens in Canada, happens in the UK, and so on. We have several shining cases of people being transferred around, and around, and around to different hospitals so they can get emergency life saving treatment...only to die in the ambulance after the 3rd hospital is shut down.
I don't know if it's funny or sad, that you guys in the US are just now catching on that this was a freaking disaster. I said that a few years ago, and the /. crowd blasted me for it. Stupid to ignore someone who lives under such a system already. Let me point out again, that in Canada the Health Act at the federal level can fit on a couple of 8x10 sheets of paper, in a standard font. What's that monstrosity down in the US now? 1200, 1500 pages or something?
Pft. Idiots, the entire lot of you for sucking at the great and grand idea that federal level control is the way to do it. State/Provincial control is the only way to do it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Many anonymous and modded up to +5 insightful with information that anyone who's followed the healthcare debate knows is false. I'm very dubious about the reasons this story was posted.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You forgot the 25% sales tax in Denmark from your calculations (sales tax a very regressive form of taxation). In the usa the average sales tax is 6%. What you are saying in essence is that the US should significantly increase taxes and then give people these services? so lets put this into better perspective: ... who saves anymore?). that means in the usa ... ... overall USA is less expensive the major difference is not in quality of care but in compensation when things do not go according to plan. The reason the USA doesn't have universal health care is quite simple ... malpractice to sum up the situation:
... and thus set by insurance companies (that charge significant amount for that malpractice insurance) that they will lobby for when they leave office. ...
A middle class family in the USA (most middle class have some form of health insurance and are paying lets say 400/month employee contribution) vs Denmark for comparison.
Net income of 66k USD (50k Euro) in the usa they will spend about 3k/month on taxable items (50% is housing related the rest is spent
3000 * 6% = 180
Denmark
3000 * 25% = 750
so you see you are paying significantly more for your health coverage then the average person in the USA
that 180 in sales tax in the USA is also going to subsides University, you can not compare the price of a private college to a state university for in state residents. The cost of instate is 8000/year * 4 years = 32000
Lets divide that number over a lifetime say 60 years of paying sales tax will be 45 dollars per month.
So now lets add 180 + 400 + 45 = 625 vs the 750 you are paying
Democrats make their money as trial lawyers and many of them made their fortunes on malpractice issues so a federal health care system would also mean no more malpractice claims in the 10s of millions of dollars but more in line with Denmark system:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/video/video-the-denmark-option/16126/
Republicans do not want a federal system they want it controlled by the state
so in short both Democrats in the USA and Republicans in the USA agree that Universal healthcare is bad for their pockets
Way to be pedantic. None of the things I listed were common health care tools. Look up the numbers for knee surgeries alone.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If one can look at Europe's huge deficits, debt, and unfunded liabilities - which are not even included in their debt numbers - and say they can afford it...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You think fraud and abuse are rampant in Medicare/Medicaid
These programs deliver more for less than the rest of the US healthcare system. (facepalm.)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Vote this man out of office
He isn't allowed to run for this office again anyways. American voters have no choice but to vote him out of office in November 2016. There is no opportunity to vote him out at any time before then.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Which was my point. You didn't get bypass surgery in 1974. Or rather, the vast majority did not. Organ transplants were sometimes successful, but rather rare. Yes, doctors were developing (and even implanting) joint replacements, but you had nothing like the number of knee replacements that have just exploded over the last decade. Health care by any measure is now more expensive: vs. GDP, per capital, absolute numbers, pick your metric.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It amazes me that libertarian health reformers -- while they have some good ideas -- are blind to the fact that "free" markets themselves have corruption and abuse. Government isn't an all-or-nothing affair. It is a question of whether the government solution has more or less corruption than the private solution. That is an empirical question, not an ideological debate. If the government solution has less corruption, then why prop up some corrupt plutocrat?
In Britain, doctors get paid for patients they have who do not visit. That's a financial incentive to keep people healthy. My health plan (in the US) gives free preventative services. I've lived in Australia and Canada, and they have vastly superior and cheaper healthcare systems than the US -- and that includes preventative services. But my US healthcare, whilst much more expensive, is vastly inferior to what I got in Australia (in particular)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Jesus, way to miss the point of my post. Were any of those things commonplace in 1974?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
because of the so-called Affordable Healthcare Act I'll end up being a criminal
Haha... you'll just owe the government about $100. Not quite the same as a felon, but I suppose if you refuse to pay...
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Sometimes private companies do deny treatments, and I find this immoral. But we have a legal system in place to punish them.
I would like to live on that world.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The difference is that police and education benefits the society as a whole. Forcing me to pay for your health insurance does not.
How does it affect me if you break your arm or due to your constant sucking down a 2 liter of Mountain Dew every day you get diabetes? It doesn't.
They guy who breaks into your house does affect me because it will lower my property value AND I could be the next house on the burglars list.
Besides, no where does it say you have to take responsibility for your actions. You can continue to get drunk every weekend (killing your liver), smoke weed every day or snort coke (wrecking your system in general), continue to eat Twinkies and Ho Hos (getting obese and possibly diabetes) and all other sorts of activities which directly affect your health but which I end up paying because hey, it's free health care!
You feel that health care is so important, you get a job which pays you enough to afford it. I shouldn't have to pick up your tab because you feel it's acceptable to leech off of others.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hospital does the paperwork for all my insurance claims against the hospital
True, and they charge the insurance company through the nose for it too. Administrative costs as 11x less in Canada.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
A dirty little secret of healthcare IT is that pretty much industry wide they are just as greedy/useless as the executives with the yachts at the payers that have been getting (deservedly) hammered in these posts.
I doubt it would have mattered when they started. I don't necessarily mean in house IT, mainly vendors. Every new government mandate that changes something with billing is just another excuse to gouge their customers.
Add up what you pay in taxes. Now add what you pay in healthcare. The total is more than what Europeans/Australians/Canadians pay.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I find it ironic that liberals will complain about income disparagy and make a remark like that. Poverty is the highest predictor of poor health most notably obesity. teeThe causal link is ridiculously strong.
Fellow liberals ran those studies to get people like you to shut the fuck up for making your "side" look bad. Cheap food has truckloads of sodium and saturated fats. Even a skinny person eating like that will get high bp. And staying skinny on a $100/wk food budget oddly enough is almost impossible. I know first hand, but now I can afford a gym and the spare time to prepare healthy food.
Also depression (which I'm the usa is staggeringly common ESPECIALLY when you're choosing between deoderant and toilet paper) magnifies the issue tenfold.
That's not even touching on alcohol issues. If you can get "fucking wasted" off 2 40s of steel reserve (roughly $4, personal experience) and ignore reality you're going to.
You know what "treat" is by the way? its off brand spam, and is a staple of many lower income families, one sandwich is 225% of your daily sodium intake.
Or ramen which is equally bad.
If you eat that shit growing up too...you're gonna be in poor health. This was my experienced growing up ina lower middle class family. Then again at 20-24 at 17k a yr. Which is not low enough to qualify for assistance. And college? The FAFSA covered 10k/year...Which is juuust enough for a sinhle semester at UTD. You might be able to get a 2 yr but a 4yr isn't gonna happen.
I ended up selling a plant to pay for my degree. This was 4 yrs ago, and things have gotten tremendously worse. Not for me...I broke out. But for everyone else in my previous situation. Go back to your brick house on white suburb lane and call people nigger on xbox please.
For the record I'm neither conservative or liberal. Conservatives wouldn't accept those studies as they are run by liberals.
it just forces you to a lowest-common-denominator pool if you can't afford it,
And it forces insurance companies to limit administrative costs to 20% (or give you a refund). And it forces insurance companies to compete for your business in a market place that makes it /much/ easier for consumers to see and compare.
No wonder the healthcare industry lobbied against it so hard.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Sorry for all the typos.../. Is extremely buggy on my phone.
Sure, but that is because we will spend any amount to stay alive and well. It cannot be a rational market. No matter the cost if you could make my tailbone like it was before I broke it I would pay that.
The medical outcomes are marginally better but cultural factors result in a wash or worse.
The US lags the rest of the world in just about every health outcome:
Those highly paid doctors, US has only 2.4 per 1000 people. OECD average is 3.1
US as 2.6 hospital beds per 1000 people, OECD average is 3.4
Life expectancy is about 1 year less than the OECD average.
Infant mortality in the US is about as bad as some of the poorer Eastern European countries, and richer African countries. Well behind the rest of the OECD.
And for this, the US pays about twice the amount per capita on healthcare!
But I'm sure any government interference would make the situation worse. Look at the rest of the world!!!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Additionally, the taxes in that country are untenable. If we didn't have a company helping to pay for our house, car, and various other unimportant tidbits we would not have been able to afford living there with our relatively large family (4 kids).
A few years ago I was in Finland drinking with some locals who were complaining that their kids were going to have to pay 50 euros a term at the University now and to see a doctor was going to cost them a 5 euro copay. They were pissed off that they were already paying 30% tax - why did they have to pay extra for education and health care?
I did not tell them about my 30% tax rate in the US and my six figure loans for my childrens' tuitions and what was taken out of my check for my share of the mostl company-paid health insurance. I realized that my free education and health care was out launching F18s in the Indian Ocean.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The government is supreme, and holds the power of life and death over you.
What are you talking about. You can totally sue the NHS for negligence. Get your head out of your paranoid ass, and smell what you are shoveling.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Very few people successfully sue an insurance company. So actually unless you're a multi-millionaire who can hire the best lawyers possible you're unlikely to get any legal recourse. But at that point you likely didn't need insurance. Oh and if you died you can't get any recourse either way.
Only if you own a car. Driving is a privilege. You can't compare the requirement of car insurance for the privilege of owning a driving a car, to the requirement to have health insurance.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
As an immigrant who's lived in the U.S. for over a decade, my impression is that a huge part of the explanation is due to the sheer size and complexity of the country.
The U.S. comprises a third of a billion people. Those people live in states, each of which has its own government, its own legislature, its own political interests, and an enormous interest in preserving autonomy whilst still being a part of the union. In effect, it is quite similar to the European Union but with the benefit of a history (as a union) that goes back an order of magnitude longer.
Populations of those states range from a few hundred thousand (Wyoming, Vermont) to nearly 40 million (California). The state of Texas is geographically so big that it takes 12 hours to drive across it.
There are dozens of stereotypes about Americans - the brash New Yorker, the backwoodsman from Arkansas, the huntin' and fishin' outdoorsman from Pennsylvania, the surfers from California, and so on and so on. The USA is such a big and diverse country that all those stereotypes are true; you just have to travel far enough to find a group that matches each one.
Consider that in the context of the "free speech" idealism. Americans have grown up knowing that they have the right to say anything, no matter how controversial, and they are passionate about exercising that right. The tenor of conversation is passionate and tends to violently expressed disagreement. This in turn has huge impact on the politicians who wish to be re-elected, and one of the biggest and most important factors is the debate of states' rights.
For one thing because we effectively subsides the rest of those systems
That is not true in the way you think it is. The healthcare industry (and drug companies) don't pay for R&D. The US government does through the university system. The drug companies do "research" but only to create markets and legal barriers and to figure out how to re-brand and face-lift their wares. It is a totally corrupt system.
For more information I recommend: The Truth About Drug Companies for the stomach churning details on what you are so wedded to defending.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
As opposed to the U.S., where you can just walk in and get anything done instantly? That wasn't my experience. I had to wait a long time for anything nonessential, even minor outpatient stuff. When I had a 5-minute "operation" to remove a mole, Kaiser Permanente couldn't find me anywhere in the schedule less than 4 months out.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I personally pay the health insurance for more than 20 people. I'm very aware of rising costs. I'm not aware of any connection between the Affordable Care Act and the price increases, though. Link, please?
I don't respond to AC's.
Most 3 series (as well as all other BMWs and other luxury makes) are leased, so payments are indeed around $300/month.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
GE donates stuff like this for the same reason that Microsoft donates software - market penetration. When those machines reach end-of-life, they're much more likely to buy one from GE as a replacement.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
True. In my case, my wife was in excruciating pain from an ulcer in an ER and it was a good 2-hour wait. This was in a highly rated hospital 1.5 miles away from the Microsoft campus close to luxury car dealerships.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
This is an insane response to a real problem greatly exacerbated by excessive government in the first place.
I truly believe these boneheads understand this is crap. They want it that way. Healthcare is just a ploy to further the totalitarian state.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
You should do some reading before you consider calling people "stupid", kid.
I don't respond to AC's.
You're an asshole. "Waste and fraud"? How about what we have now, where you can get a bill, and then, months later, another bill, with the provider claiming that the insurance company didn't cover this or that, and they want to rebill you?
And how is "waste and fraud" not 10%, 20% even 30% increases in premiums charged to companies, year in and year out, regardless of actual inflation? Hell, in FL, between '04 and '05, they cranked up my personal rate, along with all others on "individual" programs, 100%.
And their CEOs with *millions* or tens of millions in salary and "bonuses" for screwing us, and for screwing US businesses? What part of the "GDP" do they account for, and exactly what is it they "produce", beyond making their CEO and biggest investors rich?
No, fraud and abuse are nowhere *near* as rampant as Faux News and NewsMaxx and your blinder-vision makes you think it is, and it's *certainly* not the fraud the medical insurance industry is - how could it be, with the folks running it on government salaries (and the President makes what, $440k/yr?)
You're a fool.
mark "I want Medicare for *all*"
I'm right there with you, brother. We got left holding the bag for my wife's root canal several years ago by a combination of an office that did not duly attempt to collect on the insurance and insurance that failed to fulfil its obligation.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
"And the law is so bad that allies of the people who passed the law are trying hard to get out from being covered by the law. There's been a series of waivers of various provisions of Obamacare that went to allies of the President and certain congresspeople. I'm sure we all appreciate the passage of laws which are supposed to be for our own good and for which the allies of the people who advocated the laws are at least partially exempt."
Like most conservative memes, there's a tiny nugget of truth below a giant pile of bullshit.
Some employers received waivers in 2010-2011. The waivers were authorized by the law only for the transition period to ensure continuity (provisions of the law phase in over a 10 year period, with the biggest chances occurring during the first 4 years). They are no longer in use.
A non-partisan review of the waivers by GAO found no impropriety.
I don't see that your article and my assertion are mutually exclusive.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Too bad I'm neither a liberal or conservative. Then again, considering the after 9/11 the republican party's chants of "You're either with everything we do or you're a terrorist" garbage I'm not surprised.
The democrats can't agree on anything within the party much less with the republicans lockstep "Toe the party line or be tossed out to the wolves" mentality.
Health care in this country is a joke, Obama tried to change it, albeit his attempts to get the republicans to co-operate failed due to their sheer bloody mindedness and left us with the mess that is Obamacare rather than simply instituting a National Health Care Plan that would help everyone except the Insurance Industry who buys votes to keep themselves rich while destroying people's lives with overpriced health care.
Both parties are to blame for this mess. One has gone too far to the plutocratic right, the other too far to the unsustainable-utopian left....
The US lags the rest of the world in just about every health outcome:
Right, that's why it's important to distinguish between health outcomes and medical outcomes. The US health outcomes are only as 'good' as they are because the medical outcomes are somewhat superior. If the US medical outcomes were average, the health outcomes would be even worse.
But I'm sure any government interference would make the situation worse.
If you can't see the extant government interference in the healthcare market then you've never worked in healthcare and aren't paying attention. Look into CMS reimbursement rates and the HMO Act of 1973 for starters. After that, look at how the "justice" system has all the doctors scared out of their wits, often paying malpractice insurance premiums greater than their salaries. Follow up with the AMA's monopoly on medical school accreditation.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I don't think there are any hospitals with more than 1 CAT scanner. But for comparison, there are 34 CAT scanners per million people in the US, while there is 7 per million in the UK. I think they have it worse.
Ah yes, the old "but... but... but... CAR INSURANCE!" argument. That's to cover your financial obligation to someone else when you have a traffic accident. State required insurance doesn't pay for damage to your own vehicle, that's extra, and is often required by your loan company. (though Uninsured Driver insurance when someone else doesn't have insurance is relatively cheap to add)
If you have enough money, It should even possible to tie up the required minimum coverage in escrow without having to constantly pay an insurance company. (Unless the insurance companies have your state government in their pocket, of course.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
At least that is an attempt at treatment. I am speaking about someone dying because they had to decide between a painkiller and an antibiotic.
In the USA if left to the states the whole middle of the country would have no health care for those that could not afford it. Neither would the south.
I guess that depends on your goal. For example, the average US citizen pays $7,980 per person for healthcare. That's the highest of any country. The who report you gave says the the US is .838 efficient, while the average UK citizen pays $3,438 per person, but is 0.925 efficient.
Now who receives better care? Note, I said better, not better per dollar.
There are some good things about the US system -- such as superior cancer treatment. The medical outcomes are only significant insofar as you have access to them. As a middle class person, I had much more access to superior medical outcomes in Australia and Canada, and will be moving back to Canada for that reason. (combined with the fact that tax+healthcare in the USA > tax in Canada.)
/better/ healthcare from the public system because they were interested in making me better, and not "come back for more treatment". Which definitely happened a few times. In the public system in Australia, I received /treatment/, and there was no-nonsense.
... wait for it ...
I know something about the problems of government in US healthcare. To me it is merely an indication that the USA doesn't know how to govern itself. Problems in Australia are a small fraction of the problem in the US, despite having a mixed public/private system. And in Australia, I definitely got
My older friend has had a stroke and lost her speech and sensation/movement in half her body. That was 3 months ago. Fortunately she is in Canada and is receiving great care for $0. The treatment is daily no-nonsense, "this is what you need to do to get better", and she is so much better now it is amazing. And she continues to get care. And the total cost to society is a fraction of what the equivalent care would be in the USA.
Here in the USA my doctor said I should get an MRI for a fractured wrist. Okay, then what. The doctor clearly hadn't thought it through, and knew less about risk management. She was not getting any kick backs from anybody, but was just clueless to being a middle-class actor in the US healthcare system.
These are real-life illustrative examples that are buttressed by empirical data on heathcare systems world-wide. The US system is bloated, corrupt, hugely expensive, exploitative, and frankly dangerous at times. If the USA is ever going to have a good healthcare system, then they'll have to stop worrying about the evils of government, and start trying to do government better. That involves peeling back stupid regulations that prop up bad business practices, and it also involves
GOVERNING.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
How in the hell did this post end up at +5? It is a pile of uninformed nonsense.
Government at the state level have been forcing citizens to make certain purchases in the commercial market in order to participate in the economy decades. This includes things like auto insurance, disability insurance, pollution control devices. Massachusetts in particular has required individual citizens to purchase health insurance for years now.
The only novelty here was that the law was at the federal level, and contrary to your assertion, there is no threat of a fine or arrest. The Supreme Court's ruling specifically stated that the "fine" imposed by the Affordable Care Act was not a fine because it was a tax, and congress has the power to tax for any reason. Congress has a long history of imposing discriminatory taxes in order to encourage certain economic behavior. The penalty in the ACA is just one more example.
Just as you can opt out of many of the state level requirements by not participating in the economic activity that the various regulation affect, you also opt out of the federal requirements by choosing not to participate in the economy, or by simply choosing to pay the "fine".
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I can get UnitedHealthOne Saver 80 here in Illinois. Early 40's, non-smoker... $84.52/month. Not the best coverage, but it handles the catastrophic stuff which is all I really care about anyhow. Better insurance with lower deductibles are also available for $240.
I would consider myself very libertarian minded... What I've often said that I wouldn't mind seeing is a migration from currently federally paid for health care options (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, Federal Employees) to be migrated to a Federally Initiated non-profit health insurance company. The spending shouldn't go up, but it should allow for better management. From there, you could migrate the federally funded state level initiatives to said program and open it up to individual contribution. You could then allow for businesses to "sign up".
This would not be forced upon anyone not already getting federal benefits, but would allow for a baseline of competition. Much in the same way FedEx, UPS and others exist despite the USPS (whose own mismanagement, or inability to adapt not withstanding). This would force more competition instead of less, and allow for a baseline for anyone to buy into as an option.
From there, I would require all employers (of persons who work more than 10 hours a week) to provide health insurance at least as good as the baseline. None of the exceptions that are in Obamacare. And the reason for the 10 hour baseline, is the abuse of some businesses to have more "part time" workers to avoid providing coverage.
I know that some of these suggestions are far more about pragmatism than a libertarian idealogy... just the same, there are plenty of ways to provide broader coverage without a solution that makes things worse in reality.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Infant mortality rate is one of the most abused stats in arguments against the US healthcare system.
The biggest problem is that those rates are dictated by each countries own definition of an infant. In the US pretty much every live birth including births resulting from an emergency procedure where the baby has almost no chance of survival is considered and infant for the purposes of reporting. That is NOT the case in most countries including European countries such as Spain, France and even the UK to name a few. In many of those countries a infant must not only be born alive but also survive for at least a certain period of time. The US happens to be one of only a few countries that actually follows the WHO definition of infant for reporting death rates.
There are also issues related to high-risk births that are not factored in. Patients in the US are more likely to attempt top carry a high-risk baby to term, resulting in higher mortality rates when those infants do not survive. Also, in some countries abortion is strongly pushed as a 'treatment' for some birth defects to help keep their numbers low.
These issues, and many others, have been discussed in detail in various WHO reports about problems with reporting but most people tend to skip past the explanations and just look at the chart at the end.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
The difference is that police and education benefits the society as a whole. Forcing me to pay for your health insurance does not.
Follow this logic. We pay to educate, protect, and nurture citizens to adulthood. Why? As a country, having a large pool of versatile, healthy workers is a benefit. Why? Healthy citizens can work, pay taxes (fed/state income taxes, property taxes, gas tax, sales tax, FICA, etc, etc, etc), become consumers, etc.
What about reducing the time and cost of getting someone back to health? Most health issues can be resolved cheaply if addressed sooner. The sooner someone is brought back to health,the sooner they can return to contribute back to society and the less likely that a simple issue will cause permanent damage (a lifetime reduction in work output).
Of course, you're probably asking yourself: "How does this affect me?" Well, how are you affected by people being at their jobs? If your local auto shop has a mechanic get cancer, and he can't afford the treatment so it's go home and die time. Well how does it affect you that the shop went from 4 experienced mechanics to 3?
How are you affected by the fast food worker who was sick, but instead of getting help, he shows up at work to prepare *your* food because he can't afford to see a doctor and he surely can't afford to miss a day of pay.
How are your property values affected by the fact that there are two additional houses for sale in the neighborhood because the Smiths and the Jones had a family member get sick, couldn't stay at their job, couldn't keep their health insurance, and are forced to sell the house to make ends meet (or give it up since they can't make the monthly payments).
How does it affect me if you break your arm or due to your constant sucking down a 2 liter of Mountain Dew every day you get diabetes? It doesn't.
You seem to be under the impression that the only health issues people can be afflicted by are due to poor decisions or their own carelessness. You should look up how victims of the Boston bombing were covered for their medical care (many weren't and depended on donations), or the 9/11 early responders, or accident victims (before the insurance settlement comes in, many many months later), or perfectly healthy people who develop cancer, and so on.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
It's definitely not a rational market. Even with all the regulation and safeguards in place, people opt for long-shot treatments or "alternative" treatments all the time. But the fact remains that Nixon's plan called for nationalizing perhaps 8% of the GDP. A modern version of his plan would nationalize more like 16% of the GDP. Much of this is due to things that simply weren't possible in 1974, at least not with any scale or success.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How about if you improve your diet. Lay off the grains, starches, carbs, eat more healthy fats, vegetables and proteins. Health solutions to problems like yours don't come in a bottle, they come in plates.
Only I can judge you.
If we go by life expectancy, the UK citizen: They live about 18 months longer (80 years rather than 78.5 years). France and Canada do even better, around 81.5 years.
I am officially gone from
It is easier to move from a state than from a country.
And if it really worked that well, the other states would have adopted it without the federal government forcing it down our throats.
This insulting generalization is the reason people that nothing is getting done in Washington. This president has set back racial advances by years by allowing his supporters to continue to insult descent in this fashion.
If the Republicans wanted this health plan, they would have passed it when they controlled both the congress and the presidency.
Yes, some Republicans supported it as an alternative to Hilary's healthcare plan. If you want to go that far back, though, then you should be calling out the Clinton's and Obama for changing their stance on welfare reform, immigration, and gay marriage.
You need to get past thinking that saturated fats are the problem. The problem is that grains of all sorts, primarily wheat, dominate the diet of most Americans, and the poor more so. I eat all kind of fat (avocado, coconut oil, grass fed meat fat) and about 3-5 dozen eggs per week, lots of veggies, and a bit of fruit. Not a lot of fat on me, in fact I am thin. Look at the people on "Extreme Couponing" about 85-90% of them are obese, watch what they load up their carts with, then you'll see why we have an obesity problem in the US. For 99 cents you can buy a day's worth of calories (all from carbs), but that 99 cent will get you shit in natural fat calories or maybe 100 vegetable calories. Look at the studies, there was one where they walked into a supermarket to see how many calories they could get for a dollar, the results are what I just outlined. Their conclusion, it makes sense to be fat if you are poor cause that is cheaper. There's lots of books on why carbs make you fat, this is probably one of the best: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Science-Carbohydrate-Living/dp/0983490708/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375901922&sr=8-1&keywords=art+science+low+carb
another good one is:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375901961&sr=1-2
Only I can judge you.
You do understand that the only thing that's going to change is the way that some people buy insurance, right? That government is not going to have a bigger hand in healthcare than it already has? That the exchanges exist to allow people to buy individual insurance from the big private insurers like Blue Cross, Tufts, and so forth? That the 'public option' died an ignominious death before the ACA passed? That insurers are still free to charge whatever exorbitant premiums they like, so long as they spend at least 80 cents on the dollar on actual care and not executive bonuses? That insurers will still be free to assign whatever arbitrary "guidelines" they like regarding what THEY think is appropriate care (instead of, say YOUR DOCTOR)? That government subsidies to the poor so they can afford coverage are really just Medicaid reconfigured (in other words, the taxpayers were paying for their insurance ALREADY)?
The ACA makes some minor changes to the rules about when a private insurer can decline to insure someone (no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps on coverage, etc) but that's really about it. While it's not going to impact quality of care, it also isn't going to fix the thing that is REALLY wrong with healthcare in the USA: Companies and shareholders can make money off of other people having cancer. For-profit companies shouldn't be able to enter the healthcare market. Their profit motive (spend as little on care as you can) puts money in the pockets of the rich while denying prescription formula to starving babies.
If you read the phrase "Government takeover of healthcare" without instantly thinking "Well that's total bullshit" please punch yourself in the crotch.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Pointing out that almost every single point you made was blatantly incorrect is considered pedantic? ok, that's a new one to me.
No, pointing out that things sort of technically EXISTED when they weren't in common use is pedantic.
To point 1: In 1974, if your knee was really, really bad, they could sort-of, kind-of replace it. The prognosis was bad, anesthesia was dangerous, and recovery times were horrendous. The result is the procedure was not very common. Now if you are a candidate for surgery, the procedure is routine, safe, and recovery times are short. Hell, usually you are walking on it (painfully) the next day, and out of the hospital in 3 days. It's gotten so common that over 4 million Americans have them, accounting for something like 5% of the population over 50. The fact is, in 1974 "comprehensive" health care would have paid for a few hundred or maybe thousand knee replacements. In 2013, comprehensive healthcare has to pay for hundreds of thousands.
To point 2: My point is, better healthcare has led to increased usage and costs. It was cheaper for Nixon to offer comprehensive health care than it would have been for Obama. In 1974 most people lived with a bum knee, if they lived long enough to develop one, and now you get it fixed.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Fun Fact: You can't get coverage without agreeing to the fact that you may not get coverage, and the "appeals process" is all controlled by them too.
A company that is profitable doesn't have to raise prices. They may *want* to raise prices, but they certainly don't have to. "Obamacare" hasn't forced a single health insurance company to raise prices, because they're all still very, very profitable.
I don't respond to AC's.
Only if you can cover the legal fees, you buck-toothed jackass. In other words, no better than the USA, and probably worse because at least in the USA you have a good chance of getting a lawyer pro bono or on contingency. British law makes this more difficult.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
We do not nurture people to adulthood as a society. That is the responsibility of the parents.
If we're going to say the government is the be all and end all, then why not go whole hog? Let's say from the moment a woman gets pregnant we insinuate the government into her life. Everything she does needs to be monitored which means she can't smoke, can't drink (maybe once a month), can't do drugs of any kind without the government okaying it, has to be visited every week by someone trained in prenatal care and so on.
Once that's done, we'll monitor the kid until they turn 18, with everything they do kept in a nice, secure database somewhere which can be referenced later in life.
As we grow, we'll keep checking in with the government to let them know how we're doing. This will go on until we die.
Your health is your responsibility, not mine. If you believe that just because someone gets cancer, gets hit by a car crossing the street while talking on their phone or gets coated with shrapnel because of some whack job, then let's do it. Let's make government our protectors and we can all share in the grief of higher taxes without personal responsibility. We can all be protected from the vagaries of life's unpleasantness. We won't have to do a thing. We'll just sit back and let the government take care of us.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What you have might not be legal soon, unless you at least add an HSA. There are both maximum and minimum limits to coverage, outside of which you are fined (unless you're a government worker).
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I find it disturbing that you somehow have come to believe that a company should not make money. Also disturbing is the fact that you seem to think that the profits you describe are proportionate to the increases in insurance costs. Please take an accounting course or something.
Also, putting Obamacare in scare quotes just silly.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I never suggested a company should not make money. I said that your premise, that you apparently pulled out of thin air, that companies had to raise health insurance rates because of Obamacare, was wrong and I proved it was wrong.
The health insurance companies' profits are directly related to insurance cost. Profits = income - expenses. The primary income of a health insurance company are insurance premiums.
I don't respond to AC's.
your simplistic equation doesn't prove what you think it proves. Even if the increases in income and profits exist, that doesn't rule out an increase in expenses in any way, shape, or form. You seem to be looking for an argument that says the increases were disproportionate to the increases in expenses, which is an entirely different topic. Especially since the increase in profits is not directly proportionate to the increases in insurance costs people are seeing.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
As an Australian, I thank you for recognising our excellent mostly free healthcare system, that also alows some private coverage so you can see doctors of your choice. Hillary visited us way back to see how we did it so well, but I see there was no real will in The USA to change your criminaly cruel system.
46137
The fact that there were any profits at all show that price increases are not necessary. For a company to be "profitable" means that all of it's bills are paid. A company that is profitable doesn't *need* to raise prices. That's pretty straightforward. Sorry, but I can't explain it any simpler than that.
I don't respond to AC's.
I'm sure you can't. Especially when your reasoning is so flawed. I'm done here, I'm clearly playing chess with a pigeon.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Why's that? My brother is self employed and his insurance premiums have so far doubled under the "affordable care act". I don't know mine exactly only because I'm under a group policy through work, though with the numbers they post for what my insurance is worth, that's gone up by roughly $1000 a year and I'm single, early 30s, non-smoker, and at 5 foot 10 and 170 lbs, not exactly obese. As another data point, I'm currently working on my masters, and we are automatically enrolled in the campus health insurance plan and have to waive it. It was $798 PER SEMESTER! And it's not what I'd call great coverage. When I did my undergrad it was like 200 a semester, and I graduated in 2006. Not like it was eons ago.
I'd say calling obamacare a cluster is quite accurate so far. Seriously, can anybody come forward and say that their insurance premiums are cheaper now? I heard that the minimum coverage in cali was estimated to be something like 340 a month for a family of 4. Thats pretty much a BMW car payment. Not what I call affordable.
$798 for 15 weeks? I'd take that in a heartbeat. My employer's plan costs me $2,500 for that same time period.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
A good sign that I've made my point is that you've focused on correcting a fact that is not really germane to the larger conversation, and even stooped to ad hominem attacks.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
We do not nurture people to adulthood as a society. That is the responsibility of the parents.
I take it you've never heard of Child Services?
If we're going to say the government is the be all and end all, then why not go whole hog?
You mean why not go all slippery slope?
Your health is your responsibility, not mine.
Couldn't you apply the same logic to protection? "Can't afford a gun? Can't afford to protect your family!" How about education? "Can't afford an education? More jobs for *my* kids!"
That said, you asked what the benefits were, there they are. Your mechanic died due to lack of healthcare? Oh well, it's gonna take longer to get your car fixed and we're gonna have to charge extra to hire and train a new guy. Or do underpaid professionals not get sick in your world?
The main point is that society puts an investment in its citizens because *surprise* the citizens are part of the wealth of the country. If we lose 5% of our productive hours due to preventable or treatable illnesses, what would that do to our GDP?
Second point? Not everybody that gets sick deserves it and is a worthless human being. Get that through your head. Sometimes you're better off fixing something than throwing it away.
Let's make government our protectors and we can all share in the grief of higher taxes without personal responsibility.
Nice straw man. Just look at our current taxes + cost of private insurance (don't forget to include the portion your employer pays) vs what other countries with *better* systems pay in taxes + zero private, you'll see we're getting ripped off.
So to summarize, the problems with your arguments:
* You failed to address the facts presented (benefits of ensuring a healthy populace - see original post)
* You employed several logical fallacies (Slippery slope, straw man)
* You presented the same talking points (we get it, you don't want to pay for anything that would benefit other people) while failing to advance the discourse.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
I agree that the US has the worst of both worlds, but violence and murder is not the solution to better health. Markets and charity are much better deliverers of value.
I'm not even *allowed* to buy real health insurance and most everybody I know has the attitude "cost? Who cares, insurance pays for it." When we were shopping around for baby delivery options, one of the hospitals told us nobody had every asked before what the typical charges were for an uncomplicated delivery.
Since my State passed a law that made insurance unaffordable for my family, I've gotten pretty good about shopping. A recent ultrasound we needed was at a private no-insurance business that charged $277. The local hospital that "everybody goes to" was $900 for the ultrasound plus $400 for the radiologist to read it. Another local hospital blood lab wants $350 for a Vitamin D test, when I bought an entire panel of about 50 tests from a private lab for the same money.
GOVERNING.
Agreed, nobody is governing the markets here except special interests, lawyers, and insurance companies. But a bunch of know-it-all eggheads cannot have access to as much information as hundreds of millions of consumers all working independently and cooperatively. And the mandates? I live in a state that does not mandate car insurance and we pay 1/3 of what all the neighboring states' residents do and we actually have a lower percentage of uninsured drivers than states where insurance is mandatory and thus unaffordable. Competition can only lower prices when it exists. But, before long I'm sure we'll hear about forcing employers to provide auto insurance, pet insurance, and whatever else people might think is a "good idea".
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But a bunch of know-it-all eggheads cannot have access to as much information as hundreds of millions of consumers all working independently and cooperatively.
There is an embedded assumption that the consumers have access to information and real choices. Markets work great then. The US system gives you neither, and a twisted set of incentive structures which make people pay more for less.
To be clear, government rules are a huge part of the problem in the US.
Be aware of the confirmation bias as well. The rest of the developed world has better healthcase outcomes for much less than the USA. They involve many decisions made be government bureaucrats. Yet for some reason, it works much better than the USA.
You might think that the mandate will not bring down health insurance costs. If costs come down (which would halt decades of relentless rises) then I'm sure you can find some politically palatable reason if you want to. But it could also be because health insurance companies have to limit administrative charges, and compete in a market place that provides better information to consumers. And the mandate.
Who knows what will really happen. I hope the USA gets its act together, but its no skin of my neck, since I'm outta here and back to civilization in a few years. If you haven't worked abroad in an OECD country, then you may not know what I mean.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Obamacare doesn't encourage massive cost increases in health care.
Right. It increases the scope and extent of what health insurance covers and forces insurance companies to insure pre-existing conditions. It also attempts to force everyone into buying health insurance.
And with the incentives to lower costs and improve outcomes
Incentives which don't actually exist, let us note.
We haven't yet seen the increases in efficiency that come from the preventative care mandates. Those can easily take 10 years or more to fully materialize, depending upon the condition.
Or never. There are a few examples of useful preventative care such as immunizations and prenatal care. But IMHO its primary outcome is to expend some money to find expensive medical problems. I think that's why insurance companies haven't bothered with it.
It was a conservative proposal from the start.
Let's start by looking at the differences:
Stuart says that Heritage's version of the individual mandate contained "three critical features" that distinguish it from Obamacareâ(TM)s mandate: (1) it required people to buy catastrophic coverage, rather than more expensive comprehensive coverage; (2) it was primarily financed "through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucherâ¦rather than by a stick"; (3) Heritageâ(TM)s mandate "was actually the loss of certain tax breaksâ¦not a legal requirement."
So the most notable difference is that the individual mandate wasn't actually a mandate in the conservative proposals. Among other things, that doesn't create the constitutional conflict of the individual mandate.
The bit about catastrophic versus comprehensive health insurance is also important because paying for the latter just means that you're paying at least one middleman, the insurance company, in order to obtain routine health care.
Second, there's the insurance exchanges.
Feulner went on to argue that "the president knows full well â" or he ought to learn before he speaks â" that the exchanges we and most others support are very different from those in his package. True exchanges are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance. President Obamaâ(TM)s exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance."
And of course, there's the other non-conservative features like expansion of basic coverage and elimination of pre-existing coverage which aren't conservative ideas.
And we ignore the glaring fact that Obamacare was passed by a 2000 page bill with a lot more junk in it than some conservative ideas. Is requiring restaurant chains of a certain size to publish nutritional information a conservative idea?
Ya, and half of that is public spending (https://newshour.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/2012/10/02/US_spends_much_more_on_health_than_what_might_be_expected_1_slideshow.jpg). So your whole "put everything in the government's hands and all will go well" plan is kinda shot to shit there. They certainly haven't been very successful with Medicare/Medicaid. Sorry, are those those facts not working out for you anymore? Before mouthing off, why don't you look into the fact that cost controls have more to do with what and less to do with who is driving a system.
I can't say our healthcare system is very good. However I also don't think the AHA is a good idea in the least. The patient protection built into it is a good idea...however the implementation of the business mandate seems to heavily favour the rich not the poor. Among many, many other problems.
I agree something needs to be done, but I think heavier regulation on private industry is far preferable to public takeover. Everything the government takes over is miserable. The DMV, the IRS, the NSA, DHS, and the TSA all spring to mind. Granted none of these except the DMV should be handled by private industry. It doesn't do anything to the relevance of the comparison though. The government runs things extremely poorly across the board. Maybe if we want healthcare for the poor we should fix medicare and medicaid?
Why bother with 2 separate programs? Why not combine them?
All those questions/suggestions are just out of my ass, but I know beyond any doubt the government will make things FAR worse. Meanwhile my insurance company gouges the hell out of me in preparation for all of this. Obamacare makes it illegal, but if I can't afford the prices all of a sudden I get fined? This is as moronic as inspection and registration. Inspection doesn't even check most of the important things (breaks, steering wheel column, CV Joints, ball U-joints), and yet is 100% required at your expense, and a tremendous portion goes to the state. Same with registration. I remember driving around without inspection or registration current and getting a ticket. I felt like breaking down and crying.
I already didn't have money to get the registration or inspection in the first place (I bought a cheap car, I had no choice, it needed tons of work for inspection), and now I had to pay a fine that was basically 2 weeks of pay on top of it all. After already falling behind simply providing myself with the basic essentials? There was nothing to be done. A warrant was issued, and I served time to get rid of it. I was literally put in jail for being poor, and this is going to lead to more of that. A LOT more.
And don't say a car wasn't a requirement. If you've ever lived in Texas you are familiar with the drive most of us have in to work (mine was over 20 miles), and there is no public transportation in rural or semi-rural areas. Even if there was I have severe social anxiety and public transportation gives me panic attacks.
What if I had had to pile on another monthly bill on top of that? I didn't have health insurance which sucked, and I let a lot of stuff go I shouldn't have. However adding another even small another cost would have made my life a LOT more difficult. If I couldn't find $40 for registration for half a year how would I find $90 (the very lowest yearly amount possible) within that same year. You might say "well at least you would have gone to the doctor" which is a bs line of reasoning. Even after paying whatever the premium or it's equivalent will be I'm sure there will still be a co-pay. A $50 co-pay would have been enough to discourage me from anything short of life threatening.
I also can't help but feel suspicious of a program that's A) Apparently so bad it has to be mandatory, and B) Something congress exempted themselves from. I know they aren't "technically" exempted, but the exchanges they are required to buy from offer far better options.
Let's end the practice of hospitals pulling numbers out of their ass predicated on the expectation of haggling with the insurance company. That's creating waste as far as labour is concerned, and inefficiency. Anywhere else I so go free industry. But when it comes to dealing with people's lives this directly? Why is this a for-profit sector? Why don't we subsidize non-profit hospitals utilizing management from for-profit private industry proven to run both efficient and low-failure operations.
What if we put the money from obamacare into two agencies. One agency would do periodical audits to check if a hospital was up to standards - as is done now.
That's irrelevant!!! The correct test is whether the total cost of "premiums/healthcare expenses without Obamacare" is greater than or less than the total cost of "premiums/healthcare expenses with Obamacare PLUS the cost of Obamacare". Just because your premiums went down doesn't mean the ~200+ billion we're going to be spending as taxpayers per year on Obamacare isn't happening -- you'll be paying those expenses one way or another.
Pretty damn easy when they're allowed to demand whatever services they want and then just welch on the payment:
http://www.aapsonline.org/newsoftheday/001097
It's no surprise to me that more and more doctors are choosing not to take Medicare patients. Good luck "delivering more" when we eventually get to the point where no doctor wants to engage with your shady payment plan: http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-Reports/2013/July/29/medicare-doctor-issues.aspx
I was not aware of that exchange framework, it looks like an odd idea to me. Health is not something I want to put in the invisible hand of free market, there are too many externalities for it to handle the thing properly.
I was simply using it as an example. No one thing is a problem it's a combination of factors. The 2 foods I mentioned were treat (spam substitute) which contains massive amounts of saturated fats, and the other was ramen noodles. I don't know what ramen noodles are made from, but it's probably even worse than semolina as far as refined carbs go. Then fried in peanut oil. How about hamburger helper? Hamburger helper is essentially (enriched) semolina, low quality (most likely) ground beef, and a fatty sauce with corn syrup. This is literally a perfect storm of horrible health, and provides one of the highest calorie/$ ratings (which you're after if you're poor.) What I'm trying to say is that it's not one thing:
The saturated and trans fats in the sauce and ground beef can be turned into fat readily. All the foods you listed above contain mostly unsaturated fats. Your body needs fat of course, but too much is a bad thing. A single bowl of hamburger helper is too much. The saturated fat raises your HDL cholesterol and the trans fats both raise HDL and lower LDL. It also tends to contribute to obesity raising your tendency towards major health issues. Both of these have major negative effect on metabolism. Most of these foods also contain straight cholesterol.
As you said the carbs are very bad for you as well. In this case you have refined carbohydrates en masse. They further hamper your bodies metabolic ability. Not only that but foods high in the refined carbs have extremely high GI. The higher the GI the greater the ability to raise your blood glucose. An overworked pancreas can lead to diabetes, relative hypoglecemia, and a host of other issues. This also puts significantly more stress on your liver as it has to secrete more enzymes. Also, as you said they contribute greatly to weight gain. They severely impair your metabolic ability.
Then you have the corn syrup which has all the negatives of the carbs (it includes them) with the added negatives of sugar. So it is more readily converted to fat than the refined carbs (closer to the fats), but has all the pancreatic and liver implications of the carbs.
There is no one thing that is "the problem." Even if there was most of the food that provide cheap calories contain everything that could conceivably be considered "the problem." I know quite a bit about health and nutrition now. I learned about halfway through being poor, and it definitely improved my life. Not just being skinny again, but how I felt in general. Avacado is one of the greatest things in the world.
I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but most of the group I refer to don't have time to sit down and read a book. To an extent I had that luxury, but working 10 hour days in a blue collar job takes it's toll. You basically pay your bills online, eat some meager, quick meal (such as the above) and go to bed. I couldn't even imagine that situation with kids...and a single parent with a kid or kids..I don't even know how that's possible. Luckily I think those cases qualify for assistance at my previous income level.
[Random Advice]
Some really good foods if you're not quite broke, but close:
Hing: This has a savoury flavour reminiscent of MSG. Many use it as a salt replacement and studies show it is significantly healthier than either salt or MSG. You still need sodium and/or salt but this will help cut down on it. It's about $8 for a bottle of it, but it lasts for 6 months or better.
Avacados: One of the best calories/$ measures in any healthy ish food. Lots of vitamins and minerals per calorie. You can use it to raise the calorie content of relatively healthy, cheap, food.
Low Sodium Chili: One of the other best calorie/$ out there, and not terrible for you. It's a bit more expensive than ramen, but it's a lot tastier, and significantly healthier. Not exactly "healthy" but it's no hamburger helper.
Navy Beans and Lima/Butter Beans seasoned with a small bit of vegetable oil with hing in it
Replace pasta with rice it's a lot healthier. Not necessa
Free markets only operate efficiently when demand for the good/service is sufficiently fluid as to allow competition. However health care is not one of those markets due to barriers put up by the insurance companies themselves as well as the nature of the beast. I can shop around for the best deal on garlic bread without worrying about dying before I find a good deal, I cannot do so if I've just been shot. Therefore, like all common-good services where demand is incredibly unfluid(roads, military etc.) healthcare works best when managed by a government. The statistics support me on that one.
Monstar L
I agree with that. I actually made an Excel spreadsheet that compares the population, size, and population density of the European countries and the 50 states. If you want to download it, here is the link thru ADrive.com.
http://www.adrive.com/public/QRaYTq.html
It has each comparison on a separate sheet, with the states to the left and the countries to the right of a central column listing the value in descending order. The other two values are then to the right for quick cross reference. I even showed Russia two ways - just the European section, and the entire country spanning across north Asia to the Pacific.
It helps to show that many of the large European countries have a similar population density of our smallest and most dense states. If you then realize most of the countries also only have a few land types (coastal plains, rolling hills, medium size forests, part of a mountain range), it becomes more apparent that what works in one European country would not scale to cover the entire US.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
What makes you think dropping the req to 10 won't make the cheapskates cut hours even further? My wife works for the Dollar Tree and she only works 12 hours a week! The only persons getting more hours than her are the managers and I don't even think they get 40. They have lots of folks who work only one shift per week. A shift is 4 hours. Being the type of store it is, it requires practically no training whatsoever and they have a high turnover rate. It doesn't bother them at all it seems. They just get more bodies when someone else quits. Even if the law stated that if you had any employees at all, then the companies that already are douchebags will simply not have any employees- they'll all be independent sub contractors like I was way back in my DirecTV days (no bennies, paid cash). If the wording is changed to say "if you are a corporation then"....well then they just won't be corps. They can get around it all. Our system has too many holes and is too corrupt these days. I constantly say "I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
No, you haven't found an exception. Registering for Selective Service doesn't cost you anything. You just sign up and hope you never get drafted. But insurance? Nope that'll cost you real cash. So your original point still stands: They are forcing you to buy a particular product, even if you have "choice" in which company sells it to you. We should have went full on UHC.
To be honest, I promote such a style of coverage now- I practice it myself. I have insurance through work that is supposed to cover 80% and I am supposed to cover the other 20%+ deductible+ copays+ prescripts+ whatever the hell else they pull out of thier ass. I don't pay anything more than a copay necessary to get my prescription filled and that is only because otherwise they wouldn't give it to me. So if I do go, and luckily I don't have to very often, I just tell them to send me a bill that I promptly throw in the trash. I wasn't originally this way! I had honor and a sense of pride and right and wrong...but continuously getting fucked over by this guy, that gov, bad luck, etc has made me a jaded jaded man. This healthcare system is so horribly broken that in order to fix in now, I believe (and so do many others), that the only way it will get changed is for us to break it apart until it is nonfunctional. As it is now, it half way works for us, but works great for the guys running it. They get rich, we lose our house (due to the bills ask my granny about it!). So I encourage anyone and everyone out there to simply stop paying. Show up when you need it and ignore the bills. I'll get alot of hate for this, especially from you harrar, but I've got karma to burn. You'll claim I'm part of the problem and not the solution but you couldn't be more wrong- I'm gonna fix it, along with all the others who can't afford it, by tearing it down so our gov HAS to build something new. If it sucks too, as the ACA appears to do, then I'll break it too. Call it civil disobedience on a combined corp & gov level. I think I've heard you advocate civil disobedience before. JOIN ME!
It's a terrible example because one hospital fucked up and is getting overhauled because of it, and because of a Daily Mail article. Wonderful stuff. How about simply looking at the actual statistics of the NHS - the number of people treated, the quality of their care, and so on - and then draw conclusions. Focussing on a single case is only serving to make you look foolish.
Not just one hospital, there are six under investigation (that we know about). I expect there are a lot more. And don't shoot the messenger. The Mail was the first one I found . There were articles in the Telegraph, Times, Guardian, Observer and every other broadsheet, as well as on every major news station.
Interestingly, the whistle-blowers are the ones being singled out for punishment by people like you. Mustn't criticise this great symbol of Big State Socialism, must we.
http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2009/08/17/we-need-to-be-careful-when-comparing-us-and-uk-cancer-care/
Some employers received waivers in 2010-2011. The waivers were authorized by the law only for the transition period to ensure continuity (provisions of the law phase in over a 10 year period, with the biggest chances occurring during the first 4 years). They are no longer in use.
The waivers were inordinately granted to allies of the Democrats, particularly labor unions. Second, we have yet to see what future allowances will be granted these allies after waivers cease to be viable.
A non-partisan review of the waivers by GAO found no impropriety.
Whatever. It's an executive branch organization which makes it partisan as far as I'm concerned. I see also that the GAO is unionized, which in this particular case makes for a strong conflict of interest (the waivers above strongly favor labor unions over other sorts of organizations).
I didn't say it had to cost, I said it had to be a requirement as a result of being born.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
That government is not going to have a bigger hand in healthcare than it already has?
So you don't think that giving the IRS the power to enforce the insurance mandate AND ACCESS TO YOUR PERSONAL MEDICAL RECORDS isn't the government having a 'bigger hand'? That feels like the whole arm to me.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The land one is an individual case based on being a landowner. I'm talking about something that is a universal requirement of action required by virtue of being born, not results of previously-made choices. The draft is a good example - I knew I'd forgotten one.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You didn't get the main point and went off on a rant. NONE of the things you mention are required AS A RESULT OF MERELY BEING BORN! Get it?
The mandatory purchase of insurance is not a tax, it is a financial purchase required because you were born.
Even if the fine has been declared a tax, it is still a penalty by whatever name they need to use to make it constitutional. If I have no taxable income, or even better, no income at all, am I still liable for the penalty 'tax'? If the penalty is not based on income, then it's clearly not a tax as we know it. It would be the first federal flat-rate, fixed-value 'tax' on the books that I know of.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Late reply.
This will happen whether or not the insurance is available. That has to do with "un-bundling" that allows hospitals to operate as for profit facilities, rather than covering uninsured people. There is actually a good series of articles being written about it in, I believe, the NY Times, but I can't remember. NPR just did an interview with the author, though, who was a doctor prior to being a journalist. Very enlightening.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
At least that is an attempt at treatment. I am speaking about someone dying because they had to decide between a painkiller and an antibiotic.
That happens in Canada too, though more frequent in the UK.
In the USA if left to the states the whole middle of the country would have no health care for those that could not afford it. Neither would the south.
And people said the same thing about Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the entire east coast of Canada. Well, now Ontario(which was the economic engine of Canada) is no longer, it's Alberta. And all the rest on that. The biggest problem you guys in the US have is stifling regulations that prevent development of new businesses.
Om, nomnomnom...
According to a review by the New England Journal of Medicine most preventative care services cause an increase in medical expenditures NOT a savings (there are some exceptions). The reason is simple, if a preventative test for something that will only affect a small percentage of people is more widely used, for the few extra cases you catch there are far more cases where the tests were unnecessary.
Until such time that there is a general purpose catch-all test then preventative care cost savings is simply a myth.
And could you list off some of magical incentives to lower costs and improve outcomes?
I know taxing device manufacturers who work on razor thin margins is probably not going to help in the development of cheaper, more efficient technologies. The addition of mandatory coverage in the baseline policies for selective medical procedures/devices probably isn't going to help lower costs much. The fact the penalty is so low in the first couple of years that there is little to no incentive for healthy young adults to bother getting a policy, thereby filling most pools with the higher risk and more expensive older clients (which companies are then allowed to adjust rates for). There are the policies that promote off-shoring of workers, the hiring of non-citizen immigrants and the reduction in workers hours which could greatly reduce business costs but I doubt that would help the individual much.
The ACA is simply a terrible train wreck of a piece of legislation (as says one of it's primary authors). It should never have been passed. The healthcare system would have been better fixed using a piecemeal process where each bill could have been properly evaluated and costs/benefits properly weighed (some parts of the ACA would have passed this way with bi-partisan support). As it stands entire sections are being unconstitutionally ignored by the administration because of the problems they are causing and deadlines for implementation are being pushed back because they simply do not have the ability to meet them.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
I'm glad it is appreciated. It started out as a comparison of the sizes only, since I was always wondering how big the countries were in relation to a state, or which state was closest in size to whatever country, for example Germany is closest to Montana in size. Notice what the ratio of their population density is though.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I too grew up poor, but I wasn't too aware of it as kids tend to not be too aware of such things.
I completely agree with you regarding the almost inconceivable difficulties faced by those with long hours and kids to put healthy food on the table. My kids are finicky, I wonder if poverty makes all food look good. Mine are only attracted to crap food so if I was cool with pizza pockets, they would be loving it.
I completely agree about the avocado, even when buying organic at the farmer's market (cheaper than grocery non-organic btw), it is one of the cheapest sources of fat calories. Good quality cheese from exclusively grass fed cows is painfully expensive and so is raw milk. I think I could eat healthy relatively cheaply if I were to cut out the cheese and milk. Meat I buy by the half or whole cow but poor families probably couldn't afford to do that unless they pool their money and buy together.
You are missing a key point about wheat. It is all bad, whole grain, organic whole grain, sprouted organic grain, pasta, spinach infused pasta, bread, pizza... All of it, in all forms is bad. It is even possible that whole grains are worse because they have more of the unnatural proteins that they were mutated to. Maybe some of the ancient types (pre -1950's) are less bad, but they are still bad. Carbohydrates metabolize into sugars and frankly there is no required daily intake of grains if one looks at independent (non-governmental/non-corporate). Wheat Belly is another good book which goes into detail on why wheat is particularly bad. Modern wheat, even organic, comes from plants which are absolute mutants, which were mutated before controlled modification at the molecular level could be performed. The result is that completely uncontrolled changes to protein structures where induced. The safety of these monster plants was never tested for, they just started distributing them and since they are 10X more productive than the parent plants, a farmer would have been a fool not to fall in line.
Ramen noodles are made from wheat, and probably a healthy dose of MSG. Hamburger helper is 98% wheat (my estimate), in a 1/4 serving you get 110 calories, 5 of which come from fat, the rest are carbs.
So my point is carbs aren't required in a healthy diet, or in an unhealthy one. Corn isn't a paragon of healthy eating either, most of it is GMO.
Luckily, I am not in a place right now where low cost food is a requirement, hopefully I will remain in that state.
Only I can judge you.
Yeah but it's unrealistic to expect people to give up carbs entirely. If you work out a lot (as in me) or have a physically stressful job then you need carbs to not feel like shit 24/7.
I have yet to find any evidence that is convincing that GMO wheat is unhealthy simply by virtue of being a GMO. The only "study" I've seen uses extremely sloppy methodology over only 5 years, and "hammers the point home" with a bunch of pictures of completely unrelated disorders causing massive benign tumors. These are the same tactics PETA uses, and are equally disgusting and shameful. There has not been a single study done that has conclusively proven GMOs are bad. I welcome evidence to the contrary.
Either way people are going to eat noodles of some kind one way or another. Spinach noodles are as close as you can come to "healthy pasta" which is why I suggested it. I hope I don't ever have to use pasta to make my food stretch again, but for some it's necessary.
Personally if I don't eat at least some carbs I can't function. Personally I will become hypoglemic and it greatly reduces my mental function. This is not a short term thing, as the longest no-carb diet I've done was 8 weeks. I become ketonic as well, and was strongly advised by my doctor never to do it again.
Carbs are absolutely required, but not refined carbs. There is a big difference between a potato and hamburger helper/ramen. There is a massive difference between refined carbs in fried foods and the carbs in say apples. You may not eat carbs, but a lot of people do not feel even remotely close to 100% without carbs. Personally going without carbs would be a major issue, but even for people without blood sugar issues it would be. I've had A1Cs done and I'm not even pre-diabetec...I'm just predisposed to hypoglycemia for whatever reason.
Either way you can't eat fats and proteins as 100% of your diet. You can link me to whatever book from whatever doctor you wish, but they are a minority for good reason. If taken too far of course you can develop things like insulin resistance and obesity. Your brain needs carbohydrates plain and simple. Anyone that says anyone ONE thing is the problem in the context of health is wrong every single time. You can't completely dismiss fats as a problem in our society for one food. Maybe grains are the largest problem, but they are closely backed by fats and sugars. Lipids are more readily converted into lipids...and SIMPLE sugars are converted almost equally readily.
Health is a lot more complicated than just one factor. As to your body needing carbs here are two "relatively trusted" sites that give more info:
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20081212/no-carb-diets-may-impair-memory
http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/carbs.html
It's not that your brain needs the carbohydrates, as it can get it's energy from glucose. It's the ketone and aldehyde buildup due to the much higher conversion energy that impairs you . Also GMO doesn't equal bad. In my experience (albeit with a higher predisposition) was minor shaking, confusion, and unbearable fatigue.
I agree corn subsidies absolutely need to end GMO or not. The excess is used for corn syrups of various varieties any of which is highly addictive. Sugar is not necessary for a healthy diet in any way shape or form.
Again, almost everyone is missing the big picture - I said it had to be a requirement as a result of being born, not as a result of anything else like owing a car/house/computer/etc.
Let me spell it out for you - Imagine someone born at home in the hills of West Virginia. The child's parents, for whatever reason, decide to home-school and provide all the necessities of life - shelter, food, etc, and the child does not choose to drive, etc. Once an adult, what actions must that person take or what expenses is that person liable for, BY LAW, by virtue of being born? All I can think of is register for the draft and be drafted if the person is male.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You need carbs right now because your body is not keto-adapted. You are essentially addicted to wheat and the sugar rushes from the other carbs. I can only make suggestions, read the books I recommended if you wish.
One develops insulin resistance and diabetes from eating carbs. The few doctors aware of the science are in the minority because there is no profit in healthy people. Don't forget that the concensus of doctors is driven largely by the pharmaceutical/agro-chemical industry.
I think you thinking too plain-and-simple, the few sugars and carbs your brain needs will be manufactured by your body.
Grains are the main problem by far. Sugars are no different than grains in the deleterious effect they have on the body. Fats on the other hand are what your body needs. Your brain is mostly fat and water, your nerves are sheathed in cholesterol. Without fat you will die. With less fat, you won't thrive. A true low-carb diet 20% sometimes 20% of the diet is what makes the body function normally, studies that don't go to this level aren't really studying keto-adapted individuals. Read the books I recommended then contact me if you still disagree. It is really hard to capture all of that info in a slashdot post.
Carbs put a very heavy load on the body to bring down the sugar spike else you die from high blood sugar. Fat is easily digested albeit more slowly and it is easily assimilated. Sugars are stored as fat because if they stay in the blood stream they will kill you.
Read the books or don't. WebMD is a shill for the pharmaceutical industry, I don't subscribe to their notions. Remember this, most Americans try to conscientiously follow the advice of their doctors and look how well that's helped with the obesity epidemic.
Only I can judge you.
So, harrar, you've had 2 full days to figure out how to respond, and still you are stumped.
Thanks for playing. Now go back to your bong. It doesn't matter anymore for you, since you can't think beyond the end of your fingertips anyway.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I've googled around a little bit, and it seems keto-adaptation is actually a thing. I've always thought ketosis (NOT ketoacidosis) was a bad thing..interesting.
I didn't go on a rant. I explained where you are misinformed.
If I have no taxable income, or even better, no income at all, am I still liable for the penalty 'tax'?
No.
From the ACA Wiki article:
Under the mandatory coverage provision, individuals who are not covered by an acceptable insurance policy will be charged an annual penalty of $95, or up to 1% of income over the filing minimum,[115] whichever is greater; this will rise to a minimum of $695 ($2,085 for families),[116] or 2.5% of income over the filing minimum,[115] by 2016.[18][117] The penalty is prorated, meaning that if a person or family have coverage for part of the year they won't be liable if they lack coverage for less than a three-month period during the year.[118] Exemptions are permitted for religious reasons, members of health care sharing ministries, or for those for whom the least expensive policy would exceed 8% of their income.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.