Well, let's see, my choice is to still be alive five years after being diagnosed with cancer but not have health insurance, or be dead. Yeah, that's a tough choice.
Democrats wanted (and should have passed) a single-payer system.
If that is what they wanted, why didn't they pass it? They got essentially no Republican support for an idea that you claim is a Republican one (by the way, while the Heritage Foundation is often touted as a conservative think tank, it is not actually part of the Republican Party). Between the time the Heritage Foundation first proposed the individual mandate and when Obamacare passed, people who believe in the Constitution came to have greater influence in the Republican Party. Obamacare is controversial because the U.S. Constitution has no provision for the Federal Government to insert itself into healthcare. This may come as a shock to you, but there are a significant number of U.S. Citizens who would like to see the U.S. government return to being one that actually abides by the U.S. Constitution and when something is found that should be handled by the Federal Government that the Federal Government is not authorized to do, then Amends the U.S. Constitution rather than just redefine what the words in it mean.
The Democrats passed Obamacare over the practically unanimous opposition of the Republicans in both Houses of Congress, so, no, they don't get to blame Republicans for it. The reason that the Republicans, for all intents and purposes, unanimously opposed it was because they discovered that the overwhelming sentiment of the voters was to oppose it. The Democrats voted for it because they could not pass up the opportunity to take greater control of people's lives while they controlled the entire Federal government.
Why would anyone be "baffled" by what is going on? It is not like it would be unprecedented for the chief of a government agency to outright lie about something like this. On the other hand it would not be unprecedented for the "leaker" to turn out to be lying either.
Obamacare is not the "Republican's health plan" and it is not a compromise. It was passed with no Republican votes in the House and only one Republican vote in the Senate (and even then they had to play games since the version the House passed did not match the version the Senate passed and they had to come up with a way to pass the bill that they could get the House Democrats to accept past the Senate after the Massachusetts elected Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy--Scott Brown basically ran on stopping passage of the bill, Ted Kennedy was a lifetime supporter).
I am not familiar with the German system. I do however know that there are doctor shortages in the UK and Canada. I, also, know that in many areas in the U.S. there are few if any doctors accepting new Medicaid/Medicare patients and that some areas are have a shortage of doctors for any type of payment plan. I, also, know that doctors have been leaving the medical profession in larger numbers than new doctors are entering the field in the U.S.. It may be that it is possible to have government run medical care that provides good care, but none of the programs I am familiar with do so.
The U.S. may not have the best medical care in the world, but it is close. The 5 year prognosis for someone diagnosed with cancer is consistently among the best in the U.S.. A recent article I read on the subject of the 5 year prognosis for someone diagnosed with cancer in Germany expressed pride that for most cancers it was almost as good as that of the U.S..
The behavior you are suggesting would be perceived by the market as bad behavior and would result in Verizon suffering loss of market share. In addition, that might be a violation of existing laws and regulations. It would certainly subject Verizon to significant time in court defending the behavior.
Perhaps, but failing to reform the cost to become a doctor in the US, failing to do anything to reduce the cost of being a patient and "reforming" the insurance system so that all of it is more like the most broken part of the existing system does not seem like the way to go about it to me. Oh, and increasing the paperwork involved in providing treatment and forcing doctors to put everyone's medical records on the Internet don't seem like such great ideas either.
So, basically, you are saying that you are OK with there not being enough doctors to treat everyone. That some people are just going to have to do without because there are not enough people willing to go through the hard work of becoming a doctor just for the joy of being treated like a government slave.
Well since you seem to think that part of the problem with the U.S. medical system is how we train our doctors, perhaps it would have been wise to start reforming medical care in the U.S. there, rather than on how they practice medicine?
I always love when people promote something as a solution to a problem, then when a problem with their solution is pointed out, say, "well, the real answer is x." If the base problem with U.S. healthcare is how we train our doctors, why didn't they start reforming there?
And where are you going to get the doctors who will work for that "maximum price"? Currently there are not enough doctors to drive the price down below what you consider "price-gouging", do you really think that setting maximum prices is going to somehow encourage people to become doctors (not to mention the additional paperwork that is going to be necessary)? What incentive do you intend to provide people to do the hard work necessary to become properly trained doctors?
The reason he does that is that the first person to create add-ons for Craigslist that made it more "usable" tried to migrate users away from his site. They were almost successful.
You are apparently unaware that the U.S. currently has a shortage of doctors willing to take Medicaid patients. There is reason to believe that as current doctors retire, not enough doctors are being trained to replace them. There is currently a shortage of nurses in most areas. Who do you think it is that is running those private practices that you think are "price-gouging" their customers? Most private practices are owned and run by doctors. How exactly are you going to find a cheap alternative to "price-gouging" private practices if all of the doctors go into private practice rather than work for those "cheap alternatives"? Are you going to make private practice illegal? Are you going to require them to accept what the government pays? In either of those cases, how are you going to keep them in business? If there were enough doctors willing to work for "cheap", why have they not competed the "price-gougers" out of business?
Why would the rule follow to the other chunks of spectrum? The rule is specifically a product of conditions the FCC put on the sale of the spectrum that Verizon uses for 4G. Verizon knew those conditions when they bid on that spectrum. No such conditions existed in Verizon's agreement with the government under which they purchased the right to use the other spectrum. Therefore the government has no legal basis to impose restrictions on how they charge for its use (at least in this particular manner.
This does not mean that we cannot blast Verizon for such charges. It just means that the answer is not federal regulation. Not everything that is wrong to do, should be illegal to do.
What are you talking about? North Korea is China-heavy. South Korea is one of the capitalistic giants of the world. It is proof that capitalism encourages democracy (South Korea was a military dictatorship that evolved into a democracy as its middle class expanded as a result of its capitalistic economy--partially imposed by the U.S. on the government as a condition of defense against North Korean aggression).
Our life expectancy is 42 (50th for new borns) in the world falling behind Cuba and Chile, Our child mortality rate is one of the highest in the industrialized world.
That is partly because most of those countries that rank ahead of the U.S. don't count infants that die in the first 24 hours as live births, while the U.S. does. Many countries throughout the world count infants that die in the first 24 hours as "stillbirths" rather than as live births. That means that children that die within 24 hours of birth do not count towards the life expectancy in those countries, while in the U.S. they do.
Interestingly, one of the countries that has a higher life expectancy than the U.S. is Japan. Yet, Japanese-Americans have a higher life expectancy than those that live in Japan.
I believe everyone should be provided healthcare by the state, because I don't think we can trust private entities to resist the temptation to charge more and more for healthcare services (because they know we HAVE to pay it...)
So, you want to start conscripting people to be doctors, nurses and other medical professionals? Otherwise, you are still trusting private entities to not "charge more and more for healthcare services," because if private individuals do not go into the medical professions, how exactly is the state going to provide healthcare?
So, why are you an immigrant to the U.S., since you believe that the federal laws, which Arizona law merely authorizes Arizona Law Enforcement Officers to enforce, are "plainly discriminatory and largely driven by old white men angrily brandishing guns?"
Except that there is no legal basis for such an extension. Verizon bid on and purchased those other bits of spectrum without any similar condition, retroactively imposing one would not be right, or fair, and would be one more step towards the law not meaning anything. And if you think big companies like Verizon would suffer more than individuals under a system where the rules for behavior change according to what those in authority think is "right" and/or "fair", you really need to study more history.
What they did was tell firearms dealers to sell several thousand guns to various suspicious purchasers that the gun dealers reported to them and were not going to sell to until the ATF told them to do so. The ATF then followed the purchasers until one of two things happened. Option one: the purchaser passed the guns off to someone else, at which time the ATF agents wanted to follow the guns, but were instructed by their superiors to continue following the original purchaser who no longer had the guns. Option two: the guns were transported into Mexico, at which point the ATF could no longer follow them and did not bother to inform Mexican authorities, or even the ATF agents working in Mexico.
Many of the purchasers that the ATF told gun dealers to sell to against the gun dealers judgement were people it was not legal for the gun-dealers to sell to. So, if the ATF had not instructed the gun-dealers to sell to these individuals, they would have been unable to purchase the guns. In addition, there is significant evidence that many of these guns were purchased with money provided to the buyers by other federal agencies. Based on what is known and the attempts at coverup by the Justice Department there is reason to believe that the money was provided to the purchasers for the purpose of buying guns to give to Mexican drug cartels. Quite simply in the matter of Fast & Furious the Justice Department is either criminally negligent through incompetence (there was no plan in place that provided anyone with the least ability to reason to think that the guns could be tracked to high level criminals) or outright criminal (they knew there was no way to track the guns and willingly placed them in the hands of dangerous and violent criminals in the hopes that they would turn up at crime scenes).
There are two reasons you don't hear about home-made firearms being used in crimes much. The first is that it is easy enough to obtain a manufactured firearm that relatively few criminals bother to make their own gun (although if gun-control legislation made it significantly difficult to obtain a manufactured firearm, there would be a major increase in home-made guns. They just aren't that hard to make). The second reason is because a story about a home-made firearm does not promote the story line that legitimate gun ownership should be restricted, which most of the news media is strongly behind.
That is as may be, but it has no bearing on the discussion about a story about large sections of India being without electricity and suggestions for how they can most easily avoid it happening again.
Um, those assault weapons that flood into Mexico for their drug war are being sent there by our very own ATF for the purpose of ???(they claim it was in order to track them to the bigwigs with the drug cartels, but, since they weren't actually tracking them, that is not very believable).
Improvised firearms have been made by pure amateurs for years. The fact of the matter is that most people don't want a gun bad enough to take the risks involved in making their own. However, the whole problem with gun control laws is that people who want a gun for criminal purposes aren't really bothered by those risks (they want the gun to reduce the risk of an already high risk activity).
Guess what? In countries where people are worried about where their next meal is coming from they don't care about "externalized" costs. People don't really care that it will cause them health problems in 10 years when they aren't sure they will have enough to eat to live to the end of this year.
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Well, let's see, my choice is to still be alive five years after being diagnosed with cancer but not have health insurance, or be dead. Yeah, that's a tough choice.
Democrats wanted (and should have passed) a single-payer system.
If that is what they wanted, why didn't they pass it? They got essentially no Republican support for an idea that you claim is a Republican one (by the way, while the Heritage Foundation is often touted as a conservative think tank, it is not actually part of the Republican Party). Between the time the Heritage Foundation first proposed the individual mandate and when Obamacare passed, people who believe in the Constitution came to have greater influence in the Republican Party. Obamacare is controversial because the U.S. Constitution has no provision for the Federal Government to insert itself into healthcare. This may come as a shock to you, but there are a significant number of U.S. Citizens who would like to see the U.S. government return to being one that actually abides by the U.S. Constitution and when something is found that should be handled by the Federal Government that the Federal Government is not authorized to do, then Amends the U.S. Constitution rather than just redefine what the words in it mean.
The Democrats passed Obamacare over the practically unanimous opposition of the Republicans in both Houses of Congress, so, no, they don't get to blame Republicans for it. The reason that the Republicans, for all intents and purposes, unanimously opposed it was because they discovered that the overwhelming sentiment of the voters was to oppose it. The Democrats voted for it because they could not pass up the opportunity to take greater control of people's lives while they controlled the entire Federal government.
Why would anyone be "baffled" by what is going on? It is not like it would be unprecedented for the chief of a government agency to outright lie about something like this. On the other hand it would not be unprecedented for the "leaker" to turn out to be lying either.
Obamacare is not the "Republican's health plan" and it is not a compromise. It was passed with no Republican votes in the House and only one Republican vote in the Senate (and even then they had to play games since the version the House passed did not match the version the Senate passed and they had to come up with a way to pass the bill that they could get the House Democrats to accept past the Senate after the Massachusetts elected Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy--Scott Brown basically ran on stopping passage of the bill, Ted Kennedy was a lifetime supporter).
I am not familiar with the German system. I do however know that there are doctor shortages in the UK and Canada. I, also, know that in many areas in the U.S. there are few if any doctors accepting new Medicaid/Medicare patients and that some areas are have a shortage of doctors for any type of payment plan. I, also, know that doctors have been leaving the medical profession in larger numbers than new doctors are entering the field in the U.S.. It may be that it is possible to have government run medical care that provides good care, but none of the programs I am familiar with do so.
The U.S. may not have the best medical care in the world, but it is close. The 5 year prognosis for someone diagnosed with cancer is consistently among the best in the U.S.. A recent article I read on the subject of the 5 year prognosis for someone diagnosed with cancer in Germany expressed pride that for most cancers it was almost as good as that of the U.S..
The behavior you are suggesting would be perceived by the market as bad behavior and would result in Verizon suffering loss of market share. In addition, that might be a violation of existing laws and regulations. It would certainly subject Verizon to significant time in court defending the behavior.
Perhaps, but failing to reform the cost to become a doctor in the US, failing to do anything to reduce the cost of being a patient and "reforming" the insurance system so that all of it is more like the most broken part of the existing system does not seem like the way to go about it to me. Oh, and increasing the paperwork involved in providing treatment and forcing doctors to put everyone's medical records on the Internet don't seem like such great ideas either.
So, basically, you are saying that you are OK with there not being enough doctors to treat everyone. That some people are just going to have to do without because there are not enough people willing to go through the hard work of becoming a doctor just for the joy of being treated like a government slave.
Well since you seem to think that part of the problem with the U.S. medical system is how we train our doctors, perhaps it would have been wise to start reforming medical care in the U.S. there, rather than on how they practice medicine?
I always love when people promote something as a solution to a problem, then when a problem with their solution is pointed out, say, "well, the real answer is x." If the base problem with U.S. healthcare is how we train our doctors, why didn't they start reforming there?
And where are you going to get the doctors who will work for that "maximum price"? Currently there are not enough doctors to drive the price down below what you consider "price-gouging", do you really think that setting maximum prices is going to somehow encourage people to become doctors (not to mention the additional paperwork that is going to be necessary)? What incentive do you intend to provide people to do the hard work necessary to become properly trained doctors?
The reason he does that is that the first person to create add-ons for Craigslist that made it more "usable" tried to migrate users away from his site. They were almost successful.
You are apparently unaware that the U.S. currently has a shortage of doctors willing to take Medicaid patients. There is reason to believe that as current doctors retire, not enough doctors are being trained to replace them. There is currently a shortage of nurses in most areas. Who do you think it is that is running those private practices that you think are "price-gouging" their customers? Most private practices are owned and run by doctors. How exactly are you going to find a cheap alternative to "price-gouging" private practices if all of the doctors go into private practice rather than work for those "cheap alternatives"? Are you going to make private practice illegal? Are you going to require them to accept what the government pays? In either of those cases, how are you going to keep them in business? If there were enough doctors willing to work for "cheap", why have they not competed the "price-gougers" out of business?
Why would the rule follow to the other chunks of spectrum? The rule is specifically a product of conditions the FCC put on the sale of the spectrum that Verizon uses for 4G. Verizon knew those conditions when they bid on that spectrum. No such conditions existed in Verizon's agreement with the government under which they purchased the right to use the other spectrum. Therefore the government has no legal basis to impose restrictions on how they charge for its use (at least in this particular manner.
This does not mean that we cannot blast Verizon for such charges. It just means that the answer is not federal regulation. Not everything that is wrong to do, should be illegal to do.
If I were a betting man, I would put my money on you being pretty annoyed in the not too distant future.
What are you talking about? North Korea is China-heavy. South Korea is one of the capitalistic giants of the world. It is proof that capitalism encourages democracy (South Korea was a military dictatorship that evolved into a democracy as its middle class expanded as a result of its capitalistic economy--partially imposed by the U.S. on the government as a condition of defense against North Korean aggression).
Our life expectancy is 42 (50th for new borns) in the world falling behind Cuba and Chile, Our child mortality rate is one of the highest in the industrialized world.
That is partly because most of those countries that rank ahead of the U.S. don't count infants that die in the first 24 hours as live births, while the U.S. does. Many countries throughout the world count infants that die in the first 24 hours as "stillbirths" rather than as live births. That means that children that die within 24 hours of birth do not count towards the life expectancy in those countries, while in the U.S. they do.
Interestingly, one of the countries that has a higher life expectancy than the U.S. is Japan. Yet, Japanese-Americans have a higher life expectancy than those that live in Japan.
I believe everyone should be provided healthcare by the state, because I don't think we can trust private entities to resist the temptation to charge more and more for healthcare services (because they know we HAVE to pay it...)
So, you want to start conscripting people to be doctors, nurses and other medical professionals? Otherwise, you are still trusting private entities to not "charge more and more for healthcare services," because if private individuals do not go into the medical professions, how exactly is the state going to provide healthcare?
So, why are you an immigrant to the U.S., since you believe that the federal laws, which Arizona law merely authorizes Arizona Law Enforcement Officers to enforce, are "plainly discriminatory and largely driven by old white men angrily brandishing guns?"
Except that there is no legal basis for such an extension. Verizon bid on and purchased those other bits of spectrum without any similar condition, retroactively imposing one would not be right, or fair, and would be one more step towards the law not meaning anything. And if you think big companies like Verizon would suffer more than individuals under a system where the rules for behavior change according to what those in authority think is "right" and/or "fair", you really need to study more history.
What they did was tell firearms dealers to sell several thousand guns to various suspicious purchasers that the gun dealers reported to them and were not going to sell to until the ATF told them to do so. The ATF then followed the purchasers until one of two things happened. Option one: the purchaser passed the guns off to someone else, at which time the ATF agents wanted to follow the guns, but were instructed by their superiors to continue following the original purchaser who no longer had the guns. Option two: the guns were transported into Mexico, at which point the ATF could no longer follow them and did not bother to inform Mexican authorities, or even the ATF agents working in Mexico.
Many of the purchasers that the ATF told gun dealers to sell to against the gun dealers judgement were people it was not legal for the gun-dealers to sell to. So, if the ATF had not instructed the gun-dealers to sell to these individuals, they would have been unable to purchase the guns. In addition, there is significant evidence that many of these guns were purchased with money provided to the buyers by other federal agencies. Based on what is known and the attempts at coverup by the Justice Department there is reason to believe that the money was provided to the purchasers for the purpose of buying guns to give to Mexican drug cartels. Quite simply in the matter of Fast & Furious the Justice Department is either criminally negligent through incompetence (there was no plan in place that provided anyone with the least ability to reason to think that the guns could be tracked to high level criminals) or outright criminal (they knew there was no way to track the guns and willingly placed them in the hands of dangerous and violent criminals in the hopes that they would turn up at crime scenes).
There are two reasons you don't hear about home-made firearms being used in crimes much. The first is that it is easy enough to obtain a manufactured firearm that relatively few criminals bother to make their own gun (although if gun-control legislation made it significantly difficult to obtain a manufactured firearm, there would be a major increase in home-made guns. They just aren't that hard to make). The second reason is because a story about a home-made firearm does not promote the story line that legitimate gun ownership should be restricted, which most of the news media is strongly behind.
That is as may be, but it has no bearing on the discussion about a story about large sections of India being without electricity and suggestions for how they can most easily avoid it happening again.
Um, those assault weapons that flood into Mexico for their drug war are being sent there by our very own ATF for the purpose of ???(they claim it was in order to track them to the bigwigs with the drug cartels, but, since they weren't actually tracking them, that is not very believable).
Improvised firearms have been made by pure amateurs for years. The fact of the matter is that most people don't want a gun bad enough to take the risks involved in making their own. However, the whole problem with gun control laws is that people who want a gun for criminal purposes aren't really bothered by those risks (they want the gun to reduce the risk of an already high risk activity).
Guess what? In countries where people are worried about where their next meal is coming from they don't care about "externalized" costs. People don't really care that it will cause them health problems in 10 years when they aren't sure they will have enough to eat to live to the end of this year.