Not to confuse the issue, but wouldn't you be breathing pure oxygen?
Not that that would be any better. Sure, you could breathe, but plants couldn't, so life would be doomed. And, um, fire might be a rather large problem. (And by 'rather large', I mean 'You would be on fire, right now.')
Of course, the real problem is that argon is denser than oxygen, and although that's slightly less than 1% of the atmosphere, there's more than enough to cover the surface of the earth. I don't know how deep exactly, but the dense part of the atmosphere is 11km high, so 1% is like 110 meters, even pretending the atmosphere didn't get 'larger' farther out and ignoring the 1/4th that's outside that. Whatever it is, it's certainly deeper than the height of your head if you're anywhere near sealevel.
And, of course, you can't breath in argon either.
On the plus side, it would be easy to put out all those oxygen fires happening at high altitudes. Just need some big fans.
Hey, let him have his nonsense. In fact, encourage him to repeat that CO2 can't possibly be up that high, maybe other morons will start repeating it.
As we've actually measured plenty of CO2 up there, he'll look like the idiot he is. I mean, this isn't some debatable fact. We sent balloons and planes up that high, they measure CO2. Period.
In fact, now that I think of it, I'm suspecting this is some sort of crazy awesome troll trying to get a new meme into the denyosphere that there is no CO2 above ground level, making them look like total idiots. And now I've gone and ruined it. Let me try to fix.
To repeat: THERE IS NO CO2 ABOVE GROUND LEVEL BECAUSE CO2 IS HEAVIER THAN OXYGEN. TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS THE TRUTH ABOUT BOGUS CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it?
Tree ring predictions exactly match all other predictions until the 1960, at which point they went apeshit. Now, you do realize that if you remove tree rings from the historical climate records it makes no difference at all, right?
Oh, and actual scientists have known this for decades. In fact, they knew it almost as soon at it had happened. Scientific papers have been written about it. All temperature models mention it.
I have to suggest that anyone who is slightly shocked by this fact is, well, ignorant any climate chance science at all.
It's like a moon-landing denier arguing that Newton law's wouldn't have resulted in people actually reaching the moon based on their trajectory, and being startled to learn that, um, yeah, everyone knows Newton's laws aren't 100% right, and they've known that for almost 100 years, which is why NASA used Einstein's laws instead. Way to keep up with the relevant science, buddy-boy.
But congrats on actually figuring out what 'hide the decline' meant. Remember, through hard work and determination, you too can read out-of-context quotes and eventually figure out what everyone is talking about and the entire field of study already knows about and has repeatedly documented and written papers about.
Next on the list: Figuring out why computer scientists keep mentioning that computers aren't 'full' Turing machines, which will cleverly prove computer science is a lie!
when what he really said was that the observed data had a bit more than 5% chance of occuring if there was no warming
Actually, he said that, since the strangely arbitrary datapoint of 1995, the observed data had a 5% chance of occurring without any warming.
1995, of course, was deliberately picked by the questioner. As IICV said above, if you pick 1994, which would make more sense, as then it is 15 years to 2009, the last year of data, you don't have a 5% chance.
And actually use the full set of datapoints, and I don't mean 'disputable' datapoints like a thousand years old tree rings, but stuff actually measured by thermostats for the last 100 years, there is no chance at all that the temperature is just random fluctuation. (Well, okay, there's always some chance, but it's probably more likely for the entire planet to quantum teleport randomly to the orbit of Mars.)
Tellingly, the more educated "skeptics", who could easily have corrected this misperception, did not.
Not only did they not stop it, but someone, with a knowledge of statistical modeling, deliberately picked this question, and the year to ask about, just so they'd get someone reputable to say words that they can twist into 'Global warming doesn't have a 95% chance of being correct'.
Which is then easily misunderstood backwards to having a 95% chance of not having warming, as apparently the OP here did.
The anti-AGW side is not operating entirely in ignorance. There are plenty of people on it who are...but there are actual scientists in it, with actual skills, that go and create misleading questions like this on purpose.
they also know that the other theories aren't obviously wrong at all.
That, I think, is the real point there.
No scientific consensus is 'obviously' wrong. Period. Or they wouldn't be a 'consensus'. All scientific consensus agree 95% or so with that data at the time, even if wrong. (Aka, Newton's law of gravity, which is wrong, but everyone still uses it.)
From what I understand, the actual intelligent scientific skeptics of AGW think that climate warming might not entirely be caused by CO2, and, possibly, not entirely by human activity.
This isn't to say that humans haven't caused a lot of it, and it certainly doesn't lay any fears to rest about anything, because no scientist fucking denies climate change is happening, and it really will cause as much problems as people say.
I.e., we're driving over a cliff, and the general consensus is that shitty driving caused it, but there's one or two people who thinks we might have actually run over a nail back there and gotten a flat tire. That's the actual scientific dispute to the extent there is any. And they're saying 'It's possible we ran over a nail which made our bad driving even worse', not 'You're all wrong, we ran over a nail.'.
But all that means is we should act slightly different to fix the emergency problem that everyone agrees exists. It doesn't mean there's not a problem, it doesn't mean we can't do anything about the problem. In fact, if CO2 is having less of an effect than we think, we need to reduce CO2 a lot more to have any effect. (Aka, we have to get an even better driver with amazing skill to deal with a car with a punctured tire.)
You can tell the fucktards who focused on these emails, and claimed they were covering up a lack of global warming, are not serious skeptics. Everyone, absolutely everyone who's looked at the evidence, is forced to admit the earth is warming up, which will cause changes in weather patterns and all sorts of bad things. Anyone who disputes average increasing changes in temperature is, frankly, stupid.
The actual scientific dispute, the small minority but respected opinion, is that CO2 might not have done all of that. And, hell, most of those think humans did almost all of it...just with something besides entirely CO2. Methane, for example, or changing the reflectivity of the earth.
Sadly for them, it's really hard for those scientists to do research, because they've turned into poster boys for fucktards who think the earth isn't warming up. So they release a study that says 'Methane, not CO2, could have caused 15% of AGW', some right-wing newspapers turns that into 'scientist dispute that CO2 causes as much warming as claimed', and bloggers turn that into 'scientist disprove liberal global warming lobby CO2 claims', and suddenly they just 'proved' that 'global warming' doesn't exist.
The real question is what the fuck the right actually wants us to do.
We created a damn free market to encourage people not to pollute. People who pollute have to, not pay fines, but purchase credits from non-polluters at market value. Meanwhile, people who manage to reduce their pollution can sell their right to pollute to others.
It's not only a 'free market' way of doing it, it's the right's goddamn idea.
And not the right bitches and moans about how it's 'destroying' everything.
So what, we should drop all this free market stuff and...fine people who pollute, with arbitrary decreases in pollution required? Like car MPG regulations? That's what the left wanted to do in the first place.
Oh, instead, we should just give money to businesses? First of all, that's possibly the stupidest idea ever, but bonus points for being the right unable to hide the fact what that actually have a problem with is 'anything costing businesses money, and in fact we demand you give them assloads of cash', but, um, if we actually handed non-polluting businesses money, wouldn't that be exactly the sort of 'government handout' that the right rails about all the time? (To 'greens', no less.)
I have to suspect that if we actually decided to do that, the right would come up with some reason it doesn't like that, either. It'd be 'government subsidies to left-leaning companies' or something.
Cap and trade is an idea designed to keep the government out of the 'pollution market', designed by the right. Now, of course, they absolutely hate the idea. They hate the idea of anything that might cost any business any money at all.
I don't understand this sentence. I'm currently outside the US, so I don't hear much of the intermediate steps and debate, but have paying attention to what gets passed.
I don't want to explain the long and stupid story, but let's just say we could have added the public option with 50 Senates on board, and, tada, 50 Senators had signed up to add just that.
Magically, the public option didn't turn up in the reconciliation bill sent from the House to the Senate. (Even though it was actually in the original House bill.)
Senators had an out until the last second...they could assert they didn't want to make changes to the reconciliation bill because they didn't want to modify the bill and make the House pass it again. Sadly for them, they did have to make a change to the bill, an entirely unrelated bill, where upon it went back to the House.
They had the chance to pass it, with 50 (Plus VP) votes. 50+ Senators had signed a statement saying they would pass it. The House, of course, doialready had passed a public option,and it would presumably have no problem with doing that again. Obama had stated he liked it, in fact, the public option was part of his platform.
The stars had magically aligned where all the procedural nonsense that supposedly stopped the Senate Democrats from pushing the public option had vanished. No more '60 votes', no more 'we have to leave it out to pass health care' (This was the fix bill, the actual health care bill had already become law, or at least sent to the president.)
...and they didn't do it. Didn't put it in the bill. And they literally could not explain why they were not doing that. None of them can.
So, at this point, the Democrats in the Senate has been exposed as entirely unscrupulous, flat out, complete liars. Period. They were lying about 'wanting the public option but unable to do it'.
It's not often the veil comes off the process like that, where it's provable that people were pushing for things they didn't intend to have passed. Usually there's some excuse, some reason 'We couldn't pass it'.
And now Reid's running around 'Oh, we'll have a separate vote on that in a month or two'. Yes. A handy dandy 'requires 60 votes' vote so all you Democratic assholes can vote yes and pretend it was the mean old Republicans who stopped you.
The American public aren't total fucking morons, Reid. We understand what just happened. You're a soccer player who accidentally ended up alone, with the ball, and no goalie, in front of their goal, and didn't try for the kick. Yeah, we just noticed you're throwing the fucking game.
That's the best summary of the situation I've seen. I don't know why people aren't picking up on that. I guess the Democrats don't want to because it makes their bill look stupid, and the Republicans don't want to because it makes the obvious point that insurance agencies are leaches, not "value added" services, and they get lots of money from them.
15% of people are uninsured, and the collected cost from them is $86 billion, and total health care costs are about 2.2 trillion
Nononono. This is an example of the crappy statistics I was talking about before, how it's impossible to actually find useful ones.
The 2.2 trillion (That was in 2007, it's higher now) on 'health care' is what exits people's pockets for 'health care'.
However, as about 75% of health care is purchased through an insurance company or the government selling insurance, it has a non-insignificant amount of that removed by them. (Even Medicare has overhead.) I don't know how much private insurance removes, but the health insurance bill just passed requires them to spend no more than 15% (Or at least one of the earlier bills did.) on things besides health care, so the implication is at least that much is currently removed.
All the 'pundits' likes to quote context free stats, and it's incredibly annoying to actually try to figure out what's going on...but the 15% uninsured people are not purchasing just 4% of services from doctors and hospitals. Sure, they use less medical services...but a fourth less than their proportion should be? Really?
Half the problem is pretending that insurance companies are actual integral parts of providing health care, which is total, utter, complete nonsense that insurance companies like to promote.
You know those graphs that show 'spending vs. life expectancy', showing the US near the bottom? I wonder how much they'd change if, for medical spending, we just had actual medical spending on a chart, and then compared it to the current 'medical and insurance spending' chart. I suspect we'd do bad, but nowhere near as bad as before.
Again, no matter how I look at it, the number of uninsured people paying their bills in full is small. It must, by definition, be less than 15% of the population, and is estimated here to be less than 2% of the population.
Actually, your math makes it worse than that. If 2% of the cost of medical services was being paid out of pocket, it would be less than 1% of the population paying them, as they're paying at least twice, and probably three times, as much as the insured.
And, this has a very surreal conclusion: Uninsured people who pay for their own medical care, despite only being 13% of the uninsured population, are getting 25% of the uninsured care, and paying half the total cost! (When we already know only a third of the total cost is paid at all!)
I don't really know how your numbers are even supposed to make sense, but they don't really work in any logical way.
It's not you, it's the insane manipulation of facts by the insurance companies. You will never see an 'insurance overhead' wedge on a pie chart. Everyone is required to pretend, at all times, that paying insurance companies is part of the cost of 'health care', which we try to 'lower', but never actually look around and say 'Um, wait. This isn't health care. Health care is over there, at the hospital'.
And no, I have no explanation why it seems this bill will cost more than just paying for all the services rendered to the uninsured and still leave at least 5% of the population uninsured.
I suspect you mean you have no reasonable explanation, or no explanation that the voters would like.
I, too, have been unable to find anyone who can explain to me what services insurance companies actually provide that the government could not do better. They are not road construction crews, they do not operate cereal factories, and the government isn't even purchasing anything from them. They are handing out money, and, last I checked, the government can do that just fine. In fact, the government is going to hand us money (subsidies) to hand to them (purchasing insurance) to hand back to us to hand to the hospitals.
But there's a really good actual explanation for all that. It's just people don't like saying it out loud.
And I think it was very clearly demonstrated when the public option mysteriously did not come back even though the Democrats had to use reconciliation.
This is even dumber than it sounds. Because, um, when the fuck did optical cables get 'lens'?
To quote Wikipedia, a lens is 'an optical element which converges or diverges light'. If the end of your optical cable 'converges or diverges' light, it's broken. The end of an optical cable is supposed to pass light unaltered.
It's like talking about the 'lens' of your bedroom window. That is not a lens, you dumbass. Because light is going straight through, which is exactly, definitively, what a lens is not.
At least they're optical lens, instead of, I dunno, an electron lens, or a gravitational lens. Glad they clarified that.
Likewise, how does gold connector protect the end 'better' from being scratched? Wouldn't, um, some sort of material that is actually hard do a better job?
'Hey, that end piece is getting all scratched up, I better use one of the softest metals known to man to keep things away from it!'
Luckily, it's only gold-plated. Although knowing their logic, it's probably gold-plated mercury, for additional uselessness. Or gold-plated caviar. Hey, it's expensive, it has to be good!
Of course, this is meta-stupid, as the endpoint (not lens) of a TOSLINK is far enough inside the connector that you'd have to poke it with a paper-clip to scratch it anyway. Which gold would hardly protect against.
And that's on top of the normal idiocy about 'bad digital signals' that everyone else here automatically realized.
This is idiotic on so many levels it's a shining paradigm of dumbness. It uses incorrect terminology to propose non-functional solutions to problems that don't exist anyway, and even if they could be 'solved' that way, it would be less of a solution than just doing things normally.
Let's try this with cars:
'Jet-black styrofoam rear-view mirror covers protect the car from drifting into oncoming traffic due to the photon pressure from the sun.'
I, for one, am sick of people treating movies this way. If you're not going to commit to the screening, then fuck the hell off, and don't disturb the people who are watching the movie.
I'm with you.
It is entirely reasonable to throw on some movie in the background, I guess. I probably wouldn't do that, I don't like having distracting narratives running in the background while I'm trying to do things, I prefer music, but whatever, plenty of people seem to be okay with that.
If you do that, you, duh, wouldn't turn on the 3D.
The 3D is when you dedicate 2 hours of your life watching a movie. You turn the lights down, you get a snack and a drink, you get comfortable, and, oh yeah, you put on the glasses and push the 3D button. That's how I watch movies, minus the 3-D part. Hell, that's how I watch TV shows.
If you gain more people during that time than glasses, well, you probably paused the movie anyway, and you push the 3D button while it's paused and take off the glasses. It's not rocket surgery.
That said, I'm probably not buying 3D anytime soon. I watch maybe three movies a month on my TV, the rest is TV shows. And even the movies tend to be old-ish ones.
There's a rather idiotic break-even point on 3D TVs. I mean, if, every time you wanted to watch a 3D movie, you instead went to a theater and saw it in 3D, it would take years to break even....and that's assuming the experience is equal and you get your blue-rays for free.
Of course, the same thing can be said about any early-adopters of home theaters...but at least those had the advantages of at least having a bigger pictures, even if you were watching analog broadcast. But a 3D TV isn't going to show 99.99% of the stuff out there even slightly different than normal, and stuff isn't going to be remastered off original film into 3D.
Being the local 'nerd' for my family living in this county, (There are others nerds but they don't live nearby.) I have informed my family that, at any time they ever wish to purchase hardware, they need to schedule it for a day I am free, and I will ride with them to the store for the price of a fast food meal on the way.
I like going there, and usually have something I'd like there, it's 45 minutes away so I don't like to waste the gas, so if they'll take me and feed me, I'm glad to go.
I have also told them that, even if I'm not with them, under no circumstances, are they to purchase warranties, or cabling (Hell, if that printer really comes without a USB or power cable, I'll give them one! I've got plenty!), or any of the other 'needed' junk a store tries to foist on them. Even if someone specifically tells them otherwise.
Of course, this has gotten a lot better since a local Frys has opened, instead of having to go to Best Buy.
Seriously, fellow nerds, grow some spine, and help people at the same time. If your family is going to ask your help to setup electronics, and maintain their computer, the least you can demand is to help them buy the stuff so they don't end up getting scammed. If you're their damn IT department, you're in charge of purchasing also.
All I know is that the uninsured, like me, end up paying three times as much as the insured do when we do pay, and it rather pisses me off that everyone pretend the 'paying uninsured' don't exist, when we're the buttmonkeys of the entire system.
Perhaps the uninsured in total are a net drain on the system, as you said, it's amazingly difficult to find actual stats about 'Who actually pays what percentage, and how much health care do they use?'. I don't know.
But let's do some math. Let's say a hospital wished to charge $100,000 on average for a specific operation. Let's say they do 100 a year, so need ten million. And let's have 80 having insurance that covers it. (Yes, yes, people will insist the 'uninsured' rate is 16%, but at least another 5% is under insured and don't actually have functional 'health insurance' in any sense. It's probably closer to another 10%, in fact, but let's just go with 20% in total. Or, if you don't like that, 20% actually is the rate in my state anyway.)
80 of those people are insured, and 18 are uninsured and won't pay, and 2 are uninsured and will pay. I.e., 10% of the uninsured will pay.
So, 82 people paying, that comes out to $122k each.
Except no, the uninsured pay three times as much. So that's averaged over '86' people, or 116k for each insured, and three times as much for the uninsured.
Does it really seem worth it to even have different amounts? I mean, it saved the insurance companies 6k each, or 480k total or 5%...erm, wait. I can see that being worth it.
Now I'm not even sure what I'm trying to prove. I expected your assumption that almost no one uninsured pays to show it wasn't worthwhile charge different prices....but, um, it really is, even if only 10% of people at all are paying them.
If there are 'almost no' uninsured
people who pay the bills, if it's 10% of the uninsured, less about 2% of the population, a microscopic fraction...they are covering 5% of all medical costs.
And 10% is a very low number. It's impossibly, unreasonably low. If 33% of uninsured people are paying, it's covering the cost of all the uninsured.
If more than 33%, or more than 6% of the population, the uninsured are helping cover the cost of the insured.
By your definition, everyone has shitty insurance.
Heh. You said it, not me. I just thought it really loud. By definition, everyone on average has shitty insurance, as, on average, they have to be paying in more than they get from it.;)
But, seriously. You want to assert that people who have medical bills totaling over $10,000 who pay them are a 'minority', find something that says that.
Well, strictly speaking, of course they are, as uninsured people themselves are a minority. As are people who have private insurance and people who have government insurance. None of those groups are over 50% of the population.
But I assert that uninsured people pay the amount of the medical bills in this country roughly equivalent to their use of medical care. (This is a default assumption of proportionality, so I don't need to prove that.)
And I'm not letting you get away with that $10,000. I'm talking about on average, the entire thing. Oh, and you don't get to insert 'on time' in there. You know who else doesn't pay on time? Insurance companies. Except they usually demand the right to not pay any penalties.
I suspect, statistically, that the uninsured are less likely to pay, but pay much more when they do, and it does balance out. If you've got some evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it.
And good luck finding those statistics. For some public discussion-distorting reasons, almost all discussion about the cost of health care in this country pretends that paying for health insurance is somehow paying for health care, and no one actually calls up hospitals and say 'How much money did you collect from private individuals vs. insurance companies last year for how many patients?'
I may have been mistaken, but I thought that the AMA had oversight into the certification process for medical schools, and thus does have power over the number of new doctors.
I honestly don't know much about this, but checking, yes, the AMA does have half control over the LCME, who is in charge of accreditation of medical schools.
The rest of the control, however, is the hands of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which seems a much more logical group to blame for restricting openings into the medical field.
While doctors might vaguely benefit from not having as much competition in their field, at this point it's almost moot. They're still working the same amount and being paid the same amount...they're just seeing thrice as many patients, and nurses are doing the rest of the work.
It's hard to imagine they actually want this, or that a doctor's union would actually see 'providing almost no qualified people, so people have rig the system to use as much non-union workers as possible' as a good idea. (In fact, they clearly don't see it as a good idea, as the creation of PAs indicate.) At some point, 'union scarcity' turns into 'We're going to have to figure out how to do without those workers as much as possible'...and we hit that point around 1995. If it's the AMA doing it, it's mindbogglingly stupid.
Medical schools, OTOH, can keep upping their price if they don't have competitor schools. If there are 10,000 slots, and you have 1500 of them, you can charge a lot more than if there are 60,000 slots and you have 1500. Medical schools have no downsides, or at least not until they blow up the entire system.
So I have to blame the restrictions on medical schools.
But the reason I disagreed, I thought you were blaming them for restricting the number of doctors via their union, which didn't make any sense and is standard anti-union nonsense. But I was incorrect, you were asserting they are leaning on the accreditation committee, that makes more sense and is possible, although I'll keep blaming schools instead, or at least some combination of the two.
We both agree that the number of doctors is being kept criminally low by reducing the number of medical schools, and size of said schools. And, be i
Not a single person in all of history has ever died of not having insurance.
...they just die from not having the money to pay for their care out of their own pocket.
There's a Anatole-France-like quote somewhere in there.
And, incidentally, you're wrong. They're dying because they lack money. They're dying because they lack health insurance. They're dying because they lack a 30 kilogram bar of gold. They're dying because they lack a winning lottery ticket.
They're dying because of they lack any of those things, they lack anything they could use to pay for their care, and it's perfectly correct to blame their death on any specific lack I want to, because if they had that specific thing, they would not be dying.
Still, you might want to do some research to discover where that 45000 number came from.
I know where that number comes from. It comes from basic statistics. People who don't have health insurance have approximately a 60% higher mortality rate. (And this includes people who voluntarily don't have insurance, aka, they consider themselves healthy.)
You're hoping it came from some sort of subjective 'What did people die from, and could it have been prevented if insured?'. It did not.
It simply looked at people who were insured, and people who were not, and at what rate they died of medical problems. People who are not insured die at a much higher rate, period. It is not some subjective thing, it is not possible to argue with it.
Of course, this is slightly skewed because of rescissions, where insurance companies drop sick people from their rolls, so they become uninsured on the way to dying.
But that's a slightly surreal argument to use. 'They doesn't really count, lack of insurance didn't didn't cause their death, their eminent death causes their lack of insurance. They were going to die anyway, so we thought we'd make them poor as they did so.'
That's one of those 'I couldn't have murdered X, I was busy raping Y at the time' alibis.
The number of people with "medical bills" (not the occasional well-doctor visit, but actual problems requiring surgery or $10,000 a year in medication) who are uninsured and pay those bills on time is so close to zero it is considered zero for all the discussions.
This is incorrect. Approximately 15% of all health care is paid for out-of-pocket, which is roughly the same percentage as the uninsured, which is somewhere between 15%-20%.
Of course, some of the out-of-pocket stuff is paid by technically insured people with shitty insurance. Although as they're paying the same high rate I was talking about, it's probably fair to lump 'People who have insurance but have to for their own care' together with 'People who don't have insurance who pay for their own care' in this instance.
And, of course, like I said, that 15% of spending, because they're paying at a higher rate, is probably only actually paying for 10% of the care.
Private insurance, by comparison, pays 36% of health care expenditures. Slightly more than twice as much. And probably paying for 40% of the care.
Perhaps if you raised the amount to $100,000 a year, you'd be correct.
Why are these hospitals, in the free market, giving sub-standard care? Wouldn't the free market fix all that?
Hospitals don't operate in a free market. They operate behind the gatekeeper of insurance.
If the medical field actually operated in a free market environment, costs for 90% of the stuff would be actually competitive.
Emergency care and whatnot might still be expensive, because they'd hold a functional monopoly on that. (In most places, you can't plausibly make it to another emergency room.) But in general, they'd compete.
But if the insurance company that holds 70% of private insurance in the state says 'You will charge X for this procedure', and then Medicare comes along and demands the same price...well...that's what you've got to charge the insured.
You can make up a tiny amount of costs by upping the rates on the uninsured, but that, of course, can backfire as less of them pay the higher the bill is.
Why don't they just up the cost to cover competent care?
Because The Insurance Companies Have Near Monopolies And Threaten To Take Half Their Customers Elsewhere If They Don't Lower Their Rates For That Insurance Company.
Didn't you read what I said? It's called 'negotiating rates', and total morons think it's a good thing for insurance companies to do. Total goddamn morons looking at the problem backwards, thinking, essentially 'Hey, if the railroad that purchased all train lines near here demands to get coal sold to them at half price or they won't buy it here or ship it, that lowers the cost of coal, and this country is spending too much on coal!'
Um, no, dumbasses, that's a monopoly extorting another industry, which results in higher costs for everyone else as the second industry tries to make up the profit. Yes the railroad might resell you some coal cheaper, but, um, it's not a good thing in general. Free markets are good things for customers, abusive monopoly behavior is not good for them at all.
And, strangely enough, it's near impossible to find statistics on 'How much money is actually given to medical facilities and personal', vs. 'How much is given to insurance companies'.
The US does not spend 17% of its GDP on health care. It spends like 10% of its GDP on health care, and another 7% paying insurance company to stand there and pay health care bills. It's really inane.
And, hilariously, some of the actual increase in actual medical expenses is due to what you pointed out: Hospitals are rearranging care based on what they get paid by insurance for. Before, they'd charge X dollars to talk to a doctor, but insurance only pays X/2...but it will pay for testing which costs 3X, so if they can do that for every fourth patient...
But that the AMA artificially restricts doctors in order to keep t
The customer doesn't pay. Either they have insurance, and the insurance pays, or they don't have insurance, so they can't afford it and don't pay. Either way, the person using the service isn't cutting the check for it.
While I understand your point, perhaps you should read what I wrote more carefully before going off on a rant.
You see, there are those of us who do pay. Like me. No insurance, but we pay our bills.
I get very annoyed when people act like we don't exist, especially as, at this point, we're keeping the entire fucking medical system afloat, as insurance continually extorts lower and lower prices from hospitals, under the threat of taking all their patients elsewhere. As in most states insurance is a monopoly or possible a duolopy, it's a pretty serious threat. If one of the large insurance companies removes a hospital, it has lost 80% of their business.
This is called 'negotiating rates', and is seem by total fucking retards as a good thing, despite the fact that no one seen to ask 'Hey, wait a minute, if insurance is paying less...doesn't everyone else have to make up the difference?'. (In any other industry this is would be seen as anti-trust behavior, but health insurance magically gets an exemption from that law.)
Anyway, as to what you're talking about, it's not exactly what you say.
I mean, you're close, but you missed the reason that lack of liability is considered so important, and hence why we have all these automated tests and crap.
It's because hospitals have been running on such thin margins for so long that they've cut costs, and especially staff, to the bone.
So, instead of simply having twice as many doctors so the doctors can spend more time with the patient...well, the cost of the visit got capped, so doctors have to rush to see twice as many patients to make the same amount of money.
Which resulted in errors, a lot more errors. And resulted in hospitals, as they don't actually have the manpower to stop errors, attempted to fix said errors via process. I.e, testing this, testing that, etc. (Stuff they can still bill insurance for.)
I.e., the medical industry has been turned into a penny-pinching bureaucracy. Because their staff is almost nonexistence. Because they can't pay them. Because insurance has stripped them down to the bare bones.
Hospitals are being operated like a Taco Bell, 'How to make a burrito' on the wall because they don't want to actually train people. (Please note, I have no problem with Taco Bell.) Or, in this cause, because they have one damn trained person (a doctor) being shuffled between patients as fast as humanly possible and a bunch of gruntwork LP nurses and lab techs everywhere else.
Where it used to be 'RN comes in to get blood, doctor comes in with RN, gets medical history, etc', now it's 'LP runs in, gets medical history and blood,lab tech tests, doctor manages to glance at history and test, runs in, prescribes, runs out'.
Hospitals, because they can't actually pay for trained humans, are attempted to use said trained humans as little as possible, and instead attempting to run an assembly line where you maybe use of 3 minutes of an actual doctor's time.
Re:So why don't we try something else...
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Health Care Reform
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Please note that when the car insurance company is paying $3.75 a gallon, gas is actually costing the gas station $3.60 a gallon. At a profit of $0.15 a gallon, they can barely afford to operate, hence the overcharging of everyone else. They should be charging about $4.50, enough to actually pay staff and whatnot.
OTOH, they can hardly refuse to stop taking car insurance, as 80% of the people are insured and will totally ignore them otherwise. Regardless, some have managed to opt out of the system, usually charity gas stations.
Some more:
5. Because of people being unable to pay but needing gas, gas stations would be required to provide gas to everyone, so there are a lot of driveoffs, so gas stations are not only not breaking even, but actually failing.
6. Car insurance companies would demand you justify every single mile you put on the car, denying your claims on about half of them and forcing you to pay the cost of gas yourself. (At a magical reduced rate of, oh, $6 a gallon.)
7. Because they are unable to pay staff to actually operate the gas station, often they have no one on duty, and gas is just sorta slopped into the tanks by untrained gas truck drivers. Sometimes, gas stations blow up, and the insurance to operate gas stations has gotten very high, so some people think we should have some 'tort reform' to reduce lawsuits. (Whereas others thinks we should probably figure out a way to stop them from blowing up.)
More often than not, doctors will charge double what they do with insurance companies for cash / self-pay people.
Yeah, I was just baffled at his idea he was somehow saving money.
Well, yes, if he only gets $200 worth of medical services a year, it's cheaper than insurance...but if he had insurance, and used it, and insurance paid for that visit, it'd pay like $50.
Incidentally, who here thinks that people who've never had any actual medical problem (And $200 a year is, essentially, a sinus infection.) should have their kneecaps broken before being allowed to comment on what they imagine their 'insurance' will cover?
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Not to confuse the issue, but wouldn't you be breathing pure oxygen?
Not that that would be any better. Sure, you could breathe, but plants couldn't, so life would be doomed. And, um, fire might be a rather large problem. (And by 'rather large', I mean 'You would be on fire, right now.')
Of course, the real problem is that argon is denser than oxygen, and although that's slightly less than 1% of the atmosphere, there's more than enough to cover the surface of the earth. I don't know how deep exactly, but the dense part of the atmosphere is 11km high, so 1% is like 110 meters, even pretending the atmosphere didn't get 'larger' farther out and ignoring the 1/4th that's outside that. Whatever it is, it's certainly deeper than the height of your head if you're anywhere near sealevel.
And, of course, you can't breath in argon either.
On the plus side, it would be easy to put out all those oxygen fires happening at high altitudes. Just need some big fans.
Hey, let him have his nonsense. In fact, encourage him to repeat that CO2 can't possibly be up that high, maybe other morons will start repeating it.
As we've actually measured plenty of CO2 up there, he'll look like the idiot he is. I mean, this isn't some debatable fact. We sent balloons and planes up that high, they measure CO2. Period.
In fact, now that I think of it, I'm suspecting this is some sort of crazy awesome troll trying to get a new meme into the denyosphere that there is no CO2 above ground level, making them look like total idiots. And now I've gone and ruined it. Let me try to fix.
To repeat: THERE IS NO CO2 ABOVE GROUND LEVEL BECAUSE CO2 IS HEAVIER THAN OXYGEN. TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS THE TRUTH ABOUT BOGUS CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it?
Tree ring predictions exactly match all other predictions until the 1960, at which point they went apeshit. Now, you do realize that if you remove tree rings from the historical climate records it makes no difference at all, right?
Oh, and actual scientists have known this for decades. In fact, they knew it almost as soon at it had happened. Scientific papers have been written about it. All temperature models mention it.
I have to suggest that anyone who is slightly shocked by this fact is, well, ignorant any climate chance science at all.
It's like a moon-landing denier arguing that Newton law's wouldn't have resulted in people actually reaching the moon based on their trajectory, and being startled to learn that, um, yeah, everyone knows Newton's laws aren't 100% right, and they've known that for almost 100 years, which is why NASA used Einstein's laws instead. Way to keep up with the relevant science, buddy-boy.
But congrats on actually figuring out what 'hide the decline' meant. Remember, through hard work and determination, you too can read out-of-context quotes and eventually figure out what everyone is talking about and the entire field of study already knows about and has repeatedly documented and written papers about.
Next on the list: Figuring out why computer scientists keep mentioning that computers aren't 'full' Turing machines, which will cleverly prove computer science is a lie!
when what he really said was that the observed data had a bit more than 5% chance of occuring if there was no warming
Actually, he said that, since the strangely arbitrary datapoint of 1995, the observed data had a 5% chance of occurring without any warming.
1995, of course, was deliberately picked by the questioner. As IICV said above, if you pick 1994, which would make more sense, as then it is 15 years to 2009, the last year of data, you don't have a 5% chance.
And actually use the full set of datapoints, and I don't mean 'disputable' datapoints like a thousand years old tree rings, but stuff actually measured by thermostats for the last 100 years, there is no chance at all that the temperature is just random fluctuation. (Well, okay, there's always some chance, but it's probably more likely for the entire planet to quantum teleport randomly to the orbit of Mars.)
Tellingly, the more educated "skeptics", who could easily have corrected this misperception, did not.
Not only did they not stop it, but someone, with a knowledge of statistical modeling, deliberately picked this question, and the year to ask about, just so they'd get someone reputable to say words that they can twist into 'Global warming doesn't have a 95% chance of being correct'.
Which is then easily misunderstood backwards to having a 95% chance of not having warming, as apparently the OP here did.
The anti-AGW side is not operating entirely in ignorance. There are plenty of people on it who are...but there are actual scientists in it, with actual skills, that go and create misleading questions like this on purpose.
they also know that the other theories aren't obviously wrong at all.
That, I think, is the real point there.
No scientific consensus is 'obviously' wrong. Period. Or they wouldn't be a 'consensus'. All scientific consensus agree 95% or so with that data at the time, even if wrong. (Aka, Newton's law of gravity, which is wrong, but everyone still uses it.)
From what I understand, the actual intelligent scientific skeptics of AGW think that climate warming might not entirely be caused by CO2, and, possibly, not entirely by human activity.
This isn't to say that humans haven't caused a lot of it, and it certainly doesn't lay any fears to rest about anything, because no scientist fucking denies climate change is happening, and it really will cause as much problems as people say.
I.e., we're driving over a cliff, and the general consensus is that shitty driving caused it, but there's one or two people who thinks we might have actually run over a nail back there and gotten a flat tire. That's the actual scientific dispute to the extent there is any. And they're saying 'It's possible we ran over a nail which made our bad driving even worse', not 'You're all wrong, we ran over a nail.'.
But all that means is we should act slightly different to fix the emergency problem that everyone agrees exists. It doesn't mean there's not a problem, it doesn't mean we can't do anything about the problem. In fact, if CO2 is having less of an effect than we think, we need to reduce CO2 a lot more to have any effect. (Aka, we have to get an even better driver with amazing skill to deal with a car with a punctured tire.)
You can tell the fucktards who focused on these emails, and claimed they were covering up a lack of global warming, are not serious skeptics. Everyone, absolutely everyone who's looked at the evidence, is forced to admit the earth is warming up, which will cause changes in weather patterns and all sorts of bad things. Anyone who disputes average increasing changes in temperature is, frankly, stupid.
The actual scientific dispute, the small minority but respected opinion, is that CO2 might not have done all of that. And, hell, most of those think humans did almost all of it...just with something besides entirely CO2. Methane, for example, or changing the reflectivity of the earth.
Sadly for them, it's really hard for those scientists to do research, because they've turned into poster boys for fucktards who think the earth isn't warming up. So they release a study that says 'Methane, not CO2, could have caused 15% of AGW', some right-wing newspapers turns that into 'scientist dispute that CO2 causes as much warming as claimed', and bloggers turn that into 'scientist disprove liberal global warming lobby CO2 claims', and suddenly they just 'proved' that 'global warming' doesn't exist.
The real question is what the fuck the right actually wants us to do.
We created a damn free market to encourage people not to pollute. People who pollute have to, not pay fines, but purchase credits from non-polluters at market value. Meanwhile, people who manage to reduce their pollution can sell their right to pollute to others.
It's not only a 'free market' way of doing it, it's the right's goddamn idea.
And not the right bitches and moans about how it's 'destroying' everything.
So what, we should drop all this free market stuff and...fine people who pollute, with arbitrary decreases in pollution required? Like car MPG regulations? That's what the left wanted to do in the first place.
Oh, instead, we should just give money to businesses? First of all, that's possibly the stupidest idea ever, but bonus points for being the right unable to hide the fact what that actually have a problem with is 'anything costing businesses money, and in fact we demand you give them assloads of cash', but, um, if we actually handed non-polluting businesses money, wouldn't that be exactly the sort of 'government handout' that the right rails about all the time? (To 'greens', no less.)
I have to suspect that if we actually decided to do that, the right would come up with some reason it doesn't like that, either. It'd be 'government subsidies to left-leaning companies' or something.
Cap and trade is an idea designed to keep the government out of the 'pollution market', designed by the right. Now, of course, they absolutely hate the idea. They hate the idea of anything that might cost any business any money at all.
I just now found the perfect explanation of what I was talking about with the public: The Death of the Public Option: After Parade of Lies, Democratic Leadership Now Stands Naked
I don't understand this sentence. I'm currently outside the US, so I don't hear much of the intermediate steps and debate, but have paying attention to what gets passed.
I don't want to explain the long and stupid story, but let's just say we could have added the public option with 50 Senates on board, and, tada, 50 Senators had signed up to add just that.
Magically, the public option didn't turn up in the reconciliation bill sent from the House to the Senate. (Even though it was actually in the original House bill.)
Senators had an out until the last second...they could assert they didn't want to make changes to the reconciliation bill because they didn't want to modify the bill and make the House pass it again. Sadly for them, they did have to make a change to the bill, an entirely unrelated bill, where upon it went back to the House.
They had the chance to pass it, with 50 (Plus VP) votes. 50+ Senators had signed a statement saying they would pass it. The House, of course, doialready had passed a public option,and it would presumably have no problem with doing that again. Obama had stated he liked it, in fact, the public option was part of his platform.
The stars had magically aligned where all the procedural nonsense that supposedly stopped the Senate Democrats from pushing the public option had vanished. No more '60 votes', no more 'we have to leave it out to pass health care' (This was the fix bill, the actual health care bill had already become law, or at least sent to the president.)
So, at this point, the Democrats in the Senate has been exposed as entirely unscrupulous, flat out, complete liars. Period. They were lying about 'wanting the public option but unable to do it'.
It's not often the veil comes off the process like that, where it's provable that people were pushing for things they didn't intend to have passed. Usually there's some excuse, some reason 'We couldn't pass it'.
And now Reid's running around 'Oh, we'll have a separate vote on that in a month or two'. Yes. A handy dandy 'requires 60 votes' vote so all you Democratic assholes can vote yes and pretend it was the mean old Republicans who stopped you.
The American public aren't total fucking morons, Reid. We understand what just happened. You're a soccer player who accidentally ended up alone, with the ball, and no goalie, in front of their goal, and didn't try for the kick. Yeah, we just noticed you're throwing the fucking game.
That's the best summary of the situation I've seen. I don't know why people aren't picking up on that. I guess the Democrats don't want to because it makes their bill look stupid, and the Republicans don't want to because it makes the obvious point that insurance agencies are leaches, not "value added" services, and they get lots of money from them.
I suspect it's both parties doing the later.
This wasn't the government doing 'bad things'.
The entire setup was purposefully set up to allow corporations to claim whatever they want, and get 'certified' for it.
15% of people are uninsured, and the collected cost from them is $86 billion, and total health care costs are about 2.2 trillion
Nononono. This is an example of the crappy statistics I was talking about before, how it's impossible to actually find useful ones.
The 2.2 trillion (That was in 2007, it's higher now) on 'health care' is what exits people's pockets for 'health care'.
However, as about 75% of health care is purchased through an insurance company or the government selling insurance, it has a non-insignificant amount of that removed by them. (Even Medicare has overhead.) I don't know how much private insurance removes, but the health insurance bill just passed requires them to spend no more than 15% (Or at least one of the earlier bills did.) on things besides health care, so the implication is at least that much is currently removed.
All the 'pundits' likes to quote context free stats, and it's incredibly annoying to actually try to figure out what's going on...but the 15% uninsured people are not purchasing just 4% of services from doctors and hospitals. Sure, they use less medical services...but a fourth less than their proportion should be? Really?
Half the problem is pretending that insurance companies are actual integral parts of providing health care, which is total, utter, complete nonsense that insurance companies like to promote.
You know those graphs that show 'spending vs. life expectancy', showing the US near the bottom? I wonder how much they'd change if, for medical spending, we just had actual medical spending on a chart, and then compared it to the current 'medical and insurance spending' chart. I suspect we'd do bad, but nowhere near as bad as before.
Again, no matter how I look at it, the number of uninsured people paying their bills in full is small. It must, by definition, be less than 15% of the population, and is estimated here to be less than 2% of the population.
Actually, your math makes it worse than that. If 2% of the cost of medical services was being paid out of pocket, it would be less than 1% of the population paying them, as they're paying at least twice, and probably three times, as much as the insured.
And, this has a very surreal conclusion: Uninsured people who pay for their own medical care, despite only being 13% of the uninsured population, are getting 25% of the uninsured care, and paying half the total cost! (When we already know only a third of the total cost is paid at all!)
I don't really know how your numbers are even supposed to make sense, but they don't really work in any logical way.
It's not you, it's the insane manipulation of facts by the insurance companies. You will never see an 'insurance overhead' wedge on a pie chart. Everyone is required to pretend, at all times, that paying insurance companies is part of the cost of 'health care', which we try to 'lower', but never actually look around and say 'Um, wait. This isn't health care. Health care is over there, at the hospital'.
And no, I have no explanation why it seems this bill will cost more than just paying for all the services rendered to the uninsured and still leave at least 5% of the population uninsured.
I suspect you mean you have no reasonable explanation, or no explanation that the voters would like.
I, too, have been unable to find anyone who can explain to me what services insurance companies actually provide that the government could not do better. They are not road construction crews, they do not operate cereal factories, and the government isn't even purchasing anything from them. They are handing out money, and, last I checked, the government can do that just fine. In fact, the government is going to hand us money (subsidies) to hand to them (purchasing insurance) to hand back to us to hand to the hospitals.
But there's a really good actual explanation for all that. It's just people don't like saying it out loud.
And I think it was very clearly demonstrated when the public option mysteriously did not come back even though the Democrats had to use reconciliation.
This is even dumber than it sounds. Because, um, when the fuck did optical cables get 'lens'?
To quote Wikipedia, a lens is 'an optical element which converges or diverges light'. If the end of your optical cable 'converges or diverges' light, it's broken. The end of an optical cable is supposed to pass light unaltered.
It's like talking about the 'lens' of your bedroom window. That is not a lens, you dumbass. Because light is going straight through, which is exactly, definitively, what a lens is not.
At least they're optical lens, instead of, I dunno, an electron lens, or a gravitational lens. Glad they clarified that.
Likewise, how does gold connector protect the end 'better' from being scratched? Wouldn't, um, some sort of material that is actually hard do a better job?
'Hey, that end piece is getting all scratched up, I better use one of the softest metals known to man to keep things away from it!'
Luckily, it's only gold-plated. Although knowing their logic, it's probably gold-plated mercury, for additional uselessness. Or gold-plated caviar. Hey, it's expensive, it has to be good!
Of course, this is meta-stupid, as the endpoint (not lens) of a TOSLINK is far enough inside the connector that you'd have to poke it with a paper-clip to scratch it anyway. Which gold would hardly protect against.
And that's on top of the normal idiocy about 'bad digital signals' that everyone else here automatically realized.
This is idiotic on so many levels it's a shining paradigm of dumbness. It uses incorrect terminology to propose non-functional solutions to problems that don't exist anyway, and even if they could be 'solved' that way, it would be less of a solution than just doing things normally.
Let's try this with cars:
'Jet-black styrofoam rear-view mirror covers protect the car from drifting into oncoming traffic due to the photon pressure from the sun.'
That's why I don't wear seatbelts!
I, for one, am sick of people treating movies this way. If you're not going to commit to the screening, then fuck the hell off, and don't disturb the people who are watching the movie.
I'm with you.
It is entirely reasonable to throw on some movie in the background, I guess. I probably wouldn't do that, I don't like having distracting narratives running in the background while I'm trying to do things, I prefer music, but whatever, plenty of people seem to be okay with that.
If you do that, you, duh, wouldn't turn on the 3D.
The 3D is when you dedicate 2 hours of your life watching a movie. You turn the lights down, you get a snack and a drink, you get comfortable, and, oh yeah, you put on the glasses and push the 3D button. That's how I watch movies, minus the 3-D part. Hell, that's how I watch TV shows.
If you gain more people during that time than glasses, well, you probably paused the movie anyway, and you push the 3D button while it's paused and take off the glasses. It's not rocket surgery.
That said, I'm probably not buying 3D anytime soon. I watch maybe three movies a month on my TV, the rest is TV shows. And even the movies tend to be old-ish ones.
There's a rather idiotic break-even point on 3D TVs. I mean, if, every time you wanted to watch a 3D movie, you instead went to a theater and saw it in 3D, it would take years to break even....and that's assuming the experience is equal and you get your blue-rays for free.
Of course, the same thing can be said about any early-adopters of home theaters...but at least those had the advantages of at least having a bigger pictures, even if you were watching analog broadcast. But a 3D TV isn't going to show 99.99% of the stuff out there even slightly different than normal, and stuff isn't going to be remastered off original film into 3D.
Being the local 'nerd' for my family living in this county, (There are others nerds but they don't live nearby.) I have informed my family that, at any time they ever wish to purchase hardware, they need to schedule it for a day I am free, and I will ride with them to the store for the price of a fast food meal on the way.
I like going there, and usually have something I'd like there, it's 45 minutes away so I don't like to waste the gas, so if they'll take me and feed me, I'm glad to go.
I have also told them that, even if I'm not with them, under no circumstances, are they to purchase warranties, or cabling (Hell, if that printer really comes without a USB or power cable, I'll give them one! I've got plenty!), or any of the other 'needed' junk a store tries to foist on them. Even if someone specifically tells them otherwise.
Of course, this has gotten a lot better since a local Frys has opened, instead of having to go to Best Buy.
Seriously, fellow nerds, grow some spine, and help people at the same time. If your family is going to ask your help to setup electronics, and maintain their computer, the least you can demand is to help them buy the stuff so they don't end up getting scammed. If you're their damn IT department, you're in charge of purchasing also.
Hence, the attempt to mislead is intentional, but not especially severe.
Yes, it's one of those minor frauds.</sarcasm>
I don't know what the numbers are either.
All I know is that the uninsured, like me, end up paying three times as much as the insured do when we do pay, and it rather pisses me off that everyone pretend the 'paying uninsured' don't exist, when we're the buttmonkeys of the entire system.
Perhaps the uninsured in total are a net drain on the system, as you said, it's amazingly difficult to find actual stats about 'Who actually pays what percentage, and how much health care do they use?'. I don't know.
But let's do some math. Let's say a hospital wished to charge $100,000 on average for a specific operation. Let's say they do 100 a year, so need ten million. And let's have 80 having insurance that covers it. (Yes, yes, people will insist the 'uninsured' rate is 16%, but at least another 5% is under insured and don't actually have functional 'health insurance' in any sense. It's probably closer to another 10%, in fact, but let's just go with 20% in total. Or, if you don't like that, 20% actually is the rate in my state anyway.)
80 of those people are insured, and 18 are uninsured and won't pay, and 2 are uninsured and will pay. I.e., 10% of the uninsured will pay.
So, 82 people paying, that comes out to $122k each.
Except no, the uninsured pay three times as much. So that's averaged over '86' people, or 116k for each insured, and three times as much for the uninsured.
Does it really seem worth it to even have different amounts? I mean, it saved the insurance companies 6k each, or 480k total or 5%...erm, wait. I can see that being worth it.
Now I'm not even sure what I'm trying to prove. I expected your assumption that almost no one uninsured pays to show it wasn't worthwhile charge different prices....but, um, it really is, even if only 10% of people at all are paying them.
If there are 'almost no' uninsured people who pay the bills, if it's 10% of the uninsured, less about 2% of the population, a microscopic fraction...they are covering 5% of all medical costs.
And 10% is a very low number. It's impossibly, unreasonably low. If 33% of uninsured people are paying, it's covering the cost of all the uninsured.
If more than 33%, or more than 6% of the population, the uninsured are helping cover the cost of the insured.
By your definition, everyone has shitty insurance.
Heh. You said it, not me. I just thought it really loud. By definition, everyone on average has shitty insurance, as, on average, they have to be paying in more than they get from it. ;)
But, seriously. You want to assert that people who have medical bills totaling over $10,000 who pay them are a 'minority', find something that says that.
Well, strictly speaking, of course they are, as uninsured people themselves are a minority. As are people who have private insurance and people who have government insurance. None of those groups are over 50% of the population.
But I assert that uninsured people pay the amount of the medical bills in this country roughly equivalent to their use of medical care. (This is a default assumption of proportionality, so I don't need to prove that.)
And I'm not letting you get away with that $10,000. I'm talking about on average, the entire thing. Oh, and you don't get to insert 'on time' in there. You know who else doesn't pay on time? Insurance companies. Except they usually demand the right to not pay any penalties.
I suspect, statistically, that the uninsured are less likely to pay, but pay much more when they do, and it does balance out. If you've got some evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it.
And good luck finding those statistics. For some public discussion-distorting reasons, almost all discussion about the cost of health care in this country pretends that paying for health insurance is somehow paying for health care, and no one actually calls up hospitals and say 'How much money did you collect from private individuals vs. insurance companies last year for how many patients?'
I may have been mistaken, but I thought that the AMA had oversight into the certification process for medical schools, and thus does have power over the number of new doctors.
I honestly don't know much about this, but checking, yes, the AMA does have half control over the LCME, who is in charge of accreditation of medical schools.
The rest of the control, however, is the hands of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which seems a much more logical group to blame for restricting openings into the medical field.
While doctors might vaguely benefit from not having as much competition in their field, at this point it's almost moot. They're still working the same amount and being paid the same amount...they're just seeing thrice as many patients, and nurses are doing the rest of the work.
It's hard to imagine they actually want this, or that a doctor's union would actually see 'providing almost no qualified people, so people have rig the system to use as much non-union workers as possible' as a good idea. (In fact, they clearly don't see it as a good idea, as the creation of PAs indicate.) At some point, 'union scarcity' turns into 'We're going to have to figure out how to do without those workers as much as possible'...and we hit that point around 1995. If it's the AMA doing it, it's mindbogglingly stupid.
Medical schools, OTOH, can keep upping their price if they don't have competitor schools. If there are 10,000 slots, and you have 1500 of them, you can charge a lot more than if there are 60,000 slots and you have 1500. Medical schools have no downsides, or at least not until they blow up the entire system.
So I have to blame the restrictions on medical schools.
But the reason I disagreed, I thought you were blaming them for restricting the number of doctors via their union, which didn't make any sense and is standard anti-union nonsense. But I was incorrect, you were asserting they are leaning on the accreditation committee, that makes more sense and is possible, although I'll keep blaming schools instead, or at least some combination of the two.
We both agree that the number of doctors is being kept criminally low by reducing the number of medical schools, and size of said schools. And, be i
Not a single person in all of history has ever died of not having insurance.
There's a Anatole-France-like quote somewhere in there.
And, incidentally, you're wrong. They're dying because they lack money. They're dying because they lack health insurance. They're dying because they lack a 30 kilogram bar of gold. They're dying because they lack a winning lottery ticket.
They're dying because of they lack any of those things, they lack anything they could use to pay for their care, and it's perfectly correct to blame their death on any specific lack I want to, because if they had that specific thing, they would not be dying.
Still, you might want to do some research to discover where that 45000 number came from.
I know where that number comes from. It comes from basic statistics. People who don't have health insurance have approximately a 60% higher mortality rate. (And this includes people who voluntarily don't have insurance, aka, they consider themselves healthy.)
You're hoping it came from some sort of subjective 'What did people die from, and could it have been prevented if insured?'. It did not.
It simply looked at people who were insured, and people who were not, and at what rate they died of medical problems. People who are not insured die at a much higher rate, period. It is not some subjective thing, it is not possible to argue with it.
Of course, this is slightly skewed because of rescissions, where insurance companies drop sick people from their rolls, so they become uninsured on the way to dying.
But that's a slightly surreal argument to use. 'They doesn't really count, lack of insurance didn't didn't cause their death, their eminent death causes their lack of insurance. They were going to die anyway, so we thought we'd make them poor as they did so.'
That's one of those 'I couldn't have murdered X, I was busy raping Y at the time' alibis.
The number of people with "medical bills" (not the occasional well-doctor visit, but actual problems requiring surgery or $10,000 a year in medication) who are uninsured and pay those bills on time is so close to zero it is considered zero for all the discussions.
This is incorrect. Approximately 15% of all health care is paid for out-of-pocket, which is roughly the same percentage as the uninsured, which is somewhere between 15%-20%.
Of course, some of the out-of-pocket stuff is paid by technically insured people with shitty insurance. Although as they're paying the same high rate I was talking about, it's probably fair to lump 'People who have insurance but have to for their own care' together with 'People who don't have insurance who pay for their own care' in this instance.
And, of course, like I said, that 15% of spending, because they're paying at a higher rate, is probably only actually paying for 10% of the care.
Private insurance, by comparison, pays 36% of health care expenditures. Slightly more than twice as much. And probably paying for 40% of the care.
Perhaps if you raised the amount to $100,000 a year, you'd be correct.
Why are these hospitals, in the free market, giving sub-standard care? Wouldn't the free market fix all that?
Hospitals don't operate in a free market. They operate behind the gatekeeper of insurance.
If the medical field actually operated in a free market environment, costs for 90% of the stuff would be actually competitive.
Emergency care and whatnot might still be expensive, because they'd hold a functional monopoly on that. (In most places, you can't plausibly make it to another emergency room.) But in general, they'd compete.
But if the insurance company that holds 70% of private insurance in the state says 'You will charge X for this procedure', and then Medicare comes along and demands the same price...well...that's what you've got to charge the insured.
You can make up a tiny amount of costs by upping the rates on the uninsured, but that, of course, can backfire as less of them pay the higher the bill is.
Why don't they just up the cost to cover competent care?
Because The Insurance Companies Have Near Monopolies And Threaten To Take Half Their Customers Elsewhere If They Don't Lower Their Rates For That Insurance Company.
Didn't you read what I said? It's called 'negotiating rates', and total morons think it's a good thing for insurance companies to do. Total goddamn morons looking at the problem backwards, thinking, essentially 'Hey, if the railroad that purchased all train lines near here demands to get coal sold to them at half price or they won't buy it here or ship it, that lowers the cost of coal, and this country is spending too much on coal!'
Um, no, dumbasses, that's a monopoly extorting another industry, which results in higher costs for everyone else as the second industry tries to make up the profit. Yes the railroad might resell you some coal cheaper, but, um, it's not a good thing in general. Free markets are good things for customers, abusive monopoly behavior is not good for them at all.
And, strangely enough, it's near impossible to find statistics on 'How much money is actually given to medical facilities and personal', vs. 'How much is given to insurance companies'.
The US does not spend 17% of its GDP on health care. It spends like 10% of its GDP on health care, and another 7% paying insurance company to stand there and pay health care bills. It's really inane.
And, hilariously, some of the actual increase in actual medical expenses is due to what you pointed out: Hospitals are rearranging care based on what they get paid by insurance for. Before, they'd charge X dollars to talk to a doctor, but insurance only pays X/2...but it will pay for testing which costs 3X, so if they can do that for every fourth patient...
But that the AMA artificially restricts doctors in order to keep t
The customer doesn't pay. Either they have insurance, and the insurance pays, or they don't have insurance, so they can't afford it and don't pay. Either way, the person using the service isn't cutting the check for it.
While I understand your point, perhaps you should read what I wrote more carefully before going off on a rant.
You see, there are those of us who do pay. Like me. No insurance, but we pay our bills.
I get very annoyed when people act like we don't exist, especially as, at this point, we're keeping the entire fucking medical system afloat, as insurance continually extorts lower and lower prices from hospitals, under the threat of taking all their patients elsewhere. As in most states insurance is a monopoly or possible a duolopy, it's a pretty serious threat. If one of the large insurance companies removes a hospital, it has lost 80% of their business.
This is called 'negotiating rates', and is seem by total fucking retards as a good thing, despite the fact that no one seen to ask 'Hey, wait a minute, if insurance is paying less...doesn't everyone else have to make up the difference?'. (In any other industry this is would be seen as anti-trust behavior, but health insurance magically gets an exemption from that law.)
Anyway, as to what you're talking about, it's not exactly what you say.
I mean, you're close, but you missed the reason that lack of liability is considered so important, and hence why we have all these automated tests and crap.
It's because hospitals have been running on such thin margins for so long that they've cut costs, and especially staff, to the bone. So, instead of simply having twice as many doctors so the doctors can spend more time with the patient...well, the cost of the visit got capped, so doctors have to rush to see twice as many patients to make the same amount of money.
Which resulted in errors, a lot more errors. And resulted in hospitals, as they don't actually have the manpower to stop errors, attempted to fix said errors via process. I.e, testing this, testing that, etc. (Stuff they can still bill insurance for.)
I.e., the medical industry has been turned into a penny-pinching bureaucracy. Because their staff is almost nonexistence. Because they can't pay them. Because insurance has stripped them down to the bare bones.
Hospitals are being operated like a Taco Bell, 'How to make a burrito' on the wall because they don't want to actually train people. (Please note, I have no problem with Taco Bell.) Or, in this cause, because they have one damn trained person (a doctor) being shuffled between patients as fast as humanly possible and a bunch of gruntwork LP nurses and lab techs everywhere else.
Where it used to be 'RN comes in to get blood, doctor comes in with RN, gets medical history, etc', now it's 'LP runs in, gets medical history and blood,lab tech tests, doctor manages to glance at history and test, runs in, prescribes, runs out'.
Hospitals, because they can't actually pay for trained humans, are attempted to use said trained humans as little as possible, and instead attempting to run an assembly line where you maybe use of 3 minutes of an actual doctor's time.
Please note that when the car insurance company is paying $3.75 a gallon, gas is actually costing the gas station $3.60 a gallon. At a profit of $0.15 a gallon, they can barely afford to operate, hence the overcharging of everyone else. They should be charging about $4.50, enough to actually pay staff and whatnot.
OTOH, they can hardly refuse to stop taking car insurance, as 80% of the people are insured and will totally ignore them otherwise. Regardless, some have managed to opt out of the system, usually charity gas stations.
Some more:
5. Because of people being unable to pay but needing gas, gas stations would be required to provide gas to everyone, so there are a lot of driveoffs, so gas stations are not only not breaking even, but actually failing.
6. Car insurance companies would demand you justify every single mile you put on the car, denying your claims on about half of them and forcing you to pay the cost of gas yourself. (At a magical reduced rate of, oh, $6 a gallon.)
7. Because they are unable to pay staff to actually operate the gas station, often they have no one on duty, and gas is just sorta slopped into the tanks by untrained gas truck drivers. Sometimes, gas stations blow up, and the insurance to operate gas stations has gotten very high, so some people think we should have some 'tort reform' to reduce lawsuits. (Whereas others thinks we should probably figure out a way to stop them from blowing up.)
No, you see, other countries have a simple way to keep government services from sliding into inefficiency and corruption.
They don't elect Republicans.
*rimshot*
Thanks, you've been great, I'll be here all week.
More often than not, doctors will charge double what they do with insurance companies for cash / self-pay people.
Yeah, I was just baffled at his idea he was somehow saving money.
Well, yes, if he only gets $200 worth of medical services a year, it's cheaper than insurance...but if he had insurance, and used it, and insurance paid for that visit, it'd pay like $50.
Incidentally, who here thinks that people who've never had any actual medical problem (And $200 a year is, essentially, a sinus infection.) should have their kneecaps broken before being allowed to comment on what they imagine their 'insurance' will cover?
Wait a minute, did you just argue that all generations are the 'entitlement generation'?
You do realize that rather means you don't have a point, right? It's rather stupid to blame a problem on 'everyone' and pretend that's somehow useful.
Yes, because people are dropping dead left and right around me.
Yup. 45000 a year from not having insurance.