"If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you will do.
That was the first line of the summary. Really, can't slashdot get an editor? Or even someone with journalism experience who would know to read something over before putting it on the front page? This story could not possibly have been so time-sensitive that it needed to bypass some common sense editing.
We all know that your answers will promptly be sent to your local ObamaCare/GovernmentMotors/ACORN regional office, to ensure that you are signed up for your annual abortion. After all, how else would they be able to feed the insatiable appetite of the army of zombie alien anti-christs at the white house?
There are still some people reading slashdot who are not conservatives, convinced that the government is currently being run by the anti-christ and his army of evil minions (OK, at least one - me). We would appreciate if the editorial board at slashdot would tone down their conservative bend, at least a little bit, and go back to focusing on technology.
Not long ago, there used to be this kind of conservative spank-fest topics posted to the front page only every couple weeks. This is the second or third this week. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of other sources for conservative conspiracy theories; I don't see why slashdot needs to feed into that.
it's not a C64, it's a fancy schmancy C64 with 1541.
Indeed, we used the floppy drive as a replacement for our tape drive. We bought the tape drive to replace the manual punchcard-reader prior to that. And the manual punchcard-reader replaced the abacus that was previously used as an analog input device.
Do you want to know how we actually saw what was going on?
They are also taking advantage of the fact that most laptops seldom (if ever) move much. Many people buy them more to save physical space on their desk than they do to actually go somewhere with them.
... because nobody on the internet has ever portrayed themselves as someone they weren't. And no man has ever, ever, pretended to be a woman or a girl on the internet.
False. I simply know what "equal protection" is, and you do not. Pointing out a germaine fact is not being on a "high horse."
Pudge in this case you are wrong. You did not point out a germane fact - rather you attempted to shoehorn a fact that does not agree with your opinion into a classification in which it does not belong. I have laid out repeatedly parts of the gay marriage argument that are beyond "equal protection" issues. I have linked back to where I laid those out, and every time you discard them out of hand because they do not fit your assumptions and opinions.
I can show you the argument, but if you choose to either not read it or not comprehend it, then that is your failure and not mine.
[you] re-asserted that a discussion topic directly in line with something you said earlier was for no obvious reason "a tangent"
False.
Again, it is unfortunate that you cannot discern between your opinion and reality. I am sad to see that whenever something comes up that does not agree with your values and assumptions, even if it is directly in line with something you said, you close up and reject the argument. You have stated now that you do not want to discuss the difference between the government and its people - which I find odd for someone who writes so many politically-motivated journal entries here - however your assertion that it is somehow "tangential" to the discussion itself is nothing more than you using your own opinion to try to back down from something you don't want to discuss.
And on another matter that you either omitted or chosen to discard in your most recent reply
False
Any literate person could read back through this dialogue between us and find several topics that you either discarded completely (such as your baseless "tangential" claim) or omitted response from. And if we count the times where you offered only one-word responses, the list grows even longer.
do you agree that students are indeed free to not learn evolution?
That is completely irrelevant to anything I was talking about
You claimed before that "forcing creationism" is the same as "forcing evolution". I countered by giving you several examples where evolution is not forced.
Your hangup on whether either is ever "forced" is beside the point (a stupid point neither of us brought up in the first place, but that you are irrationally fixated on, even though you don't even understand it).
So since you made the claim before I entered the discussion, can you just answer the question? Do you agree that neither evolution nor creation are currently truly forced as part of the curriculum?
You appear to be either unable or unwilling to accept the fact that your own opinion is not the full and ultimate reality of the situation.
I have no idea what you're talking about; could you explain?
I'd be happy to. Start by reading back to your earlier comment where you responded to my pointing out that there is more to the gay marriage issue than just what you outlined, to which you replied
Bzzzzzzt. It's all of it.
I have since outlined specific issues that go beyond 14th amendment protections, yet you repeatedly reject them out of hand without considering the argument at all.
You are on a very high horse to insist that the entire argument boils down to only the components you wish you acknowledge in your own opinion. In the same post you wrote one-word responses to two other points as well, and then re-asserted that a discussion topic directly in line with something you said earlier was for no obvious reason "a tangent".
And on another matter that you either omitted or chosen to discard in your most recent reply - do you agree that students are indeed free to not learn evolution? We did have an exchange between us of
I have already described how you are free to not learn evolution if that is your choice.
Which is exactly equivalent to being free to not learn creationism.
And I would expect we can probably agree that most students are free to not learn creation as part of their education - if it is equivalent then we should be able to agree that students are also free to not learn evolution as part of their education.
Or will you instead opt to re-reverse your stance, and from your high horse claim that evolution is somehow "forced" as part of a universally-required curriculum?
It actually provides health care coverage to 38 million people that do not currently have it.
Actually, no, it does not. The bill is supposed to help them buy insurance - that is what the exchanges will allegedly be set up for. And for those two make money below certain threshholds, subsidies will be provided by the government. The government isn't providing health care coverage for much of anyone beyond who already has medicare / medicaid.
If you would have liked to have this choice, remember to vote out the people who insisted on denying you that option.
I fully intend to do so. And then when that doesn't work I'll take a job in a country that doesn't allow for-profit megacorps to make critical life decisions.
I understand that about half of insured folks are insured by non-profits.
Non-profit insurance is itself a lie. The so-called non-profit groups still make very tidy profits which they pay out to their top execs. They have managed to redefine what it means to be "non-profit" such that they can rake in money and yet retain the non-profit status and pay back almost nothing to the government (with the exception of the politicians who they buy).
Their "non-profit" status is the only lie crafted by the insurance industry that is more diabolical than "no-fault" (for automobile insurance). If you compared the books and activities of a "non-profit" insurance company to those of one who does not have that status, you'd be hard pressed to tell who was who.
And to further muddy the waters there are some companies - Blue Cross / Blue Shield / Blue Death in particular - who operate as both "non-profit" and not, under the same name.
But the 35million who dont who now will probably do think it is a change.
If you instead said "the 35 million who don't would like it to be a change, I would agree with you. This bill does not provide health care for them; rather it helps them buy insurance. In a civilized country the people who cannot afford it currently would be given an option for a single-payer non-profit system, however that simply is not the case with this bill. More people will get a small payment from the government to help buy insurance (from a for-profit company) that will be placed on a government program.
And of course that for-profit company will eventually, systematically, find a way to screw them.
Trust me, even in the UK with our crappy NHS it is still leagues ahead of the US system.
I don't doubt you on that for a second. On several important metrics the US system isn't even on par with Cuba.
The thought of being financially crippled unto the 3rd generation because the latest disease got to me makes me wonder how you can call yourself "civilised".
As someone who was nearly driven into bankruptcy (while still an undergraduate college student) by a for-profit insurance company, I know exactly what you are talking about. I don't consider the system here to be civilized or even the least bit reasonable. Unfortunately (their) money speaks louder than (my) words.
Most of the bill doesn't go into effect until 2014
That isn't what Fox News, the Tea Party, and various other conservative sources are trying to tell us. They want everyone to be scared into believing that this bill will bring enormous sweeping changes before lunch, and they want everyone to believe that all of those changes are evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.
Whether or not anything happens between now and the election means nothing
Wrong. If nothing happens, then it shows that the parties named above (and others) are needlessly fear-mongering. It shows that the hype and fear they are spreading is baseless.
This bill will make the cost of health insurance sky rocket
You must have failed economics. The insurance companies tell us that with more customers they can decrease the per-customer price, as it lowers the overall risk for the pool of customers. The only thing this bill does in the end is bring more customers to the insurance companies. If they are increasing the rates, instead of decreasing them, then they are either lying or cooking the books.
16,000 new IRS agents, 0 new doctors.
Do you have a source for that? No, of course not. If you had a source you would have given it - and you probably would have posted it under a name instead of anonymous coward. No go troll somewhere else; some of us would like to actually discuss factual information here.
Just watch as slashdot conservatives with mod points go bananas moderating any liberal or moderate comments into oblivion while moderating all the conservative posts through the stratosphere. It's a good thing we have a good mechanism in place to... oh, nevermind, we don't.
The average profit margin of hospitals is around 3.4%
I previously described this as the health insurance bailout act of 2010; I did not intend to imply that this would in any way improve the margins for hospitals.
Health care plans ring in at a whopping 4.4%
The insurance companies are either reporting the results of fuzzy math, or they have other operations that yield much better. If their margins were truly that low, they wouldn't be able to afford the absurd salaries of their top executives.
There is a marked difference between that and what I said. I said that this will bring change for almost nobody. For those 32 million, this bill does not provide insurance. Rather, it provides a mandate for them to purchase insurance. On top of that, it does not say "you must buy it or we will provide it", rather it says "you must buy it or pay a fee (at some undetermined time of some undetermined amount)". And on top of that there is nothing saying "we will ensure that you can afford to buy insurance" - the exchanges are not guaranteed to accomplish this.
Hence, in the end if you do not have insurance because you cannot afford it, you may find that you still cannot afford it.
the AMA, which still gets to limit how many people may enter the profession
That isn't entirely true. It is possible to practice medicine in this country without going through an AMA medical school. We have 28 schools of osteopathic medicine in this country; you can also obtain an MD or DO outside the US and then takes the boards here and practice medicine in the US.
I also know of another MD-granting medical school that opened in the past 2 years in Pennsylvania; and based on the size of entering medical school classes right now, the best way to generate additional qualified MDs for our country would be to open more schools.
the pharmaceutical companies
Indeed their profits will at worst (from their perspective) remain at the same level as before. Nothing in this bill changes that at all.
3) the bureaucracy, and 4) the congress.
I'm not sure how those benefit from this bill.
The Republicans set us on the road to financial ruin, and the Democrats have just floored the accelerator.
Indeed this has only further entrenched us in the existing system.
Congrats US citizens! You're on your way to a non-broken health care system!
We could only be so lucky. This bill by and large doesn't change anything. Most of us have health insurance that we purchase through our employers, provided by insanely profitable corporations. And for almost none of us will that change.
Unfortunately our government doesn't do change this year.
Now we will wait and see if the apocalypse that conservatives told us this would bring arrives. Reasonable people realized some time ago that this bill most likely won't change much of anything in their lives. If the Democratic Party had a publicity group that was worth a shit, they would take advantage of that when the midterm elections come in November (at which point this bill will be law for several months and have done pretty well nothing that the fearmongerers had told us).
Just replying so that people know not to take your post literally. Ambulances in the US will take you to the nearest hospital with appropriate facilities for your condition.
That varies regionally in the US. Who owns the ambulance you are riding in? If you were picked up by an ambulance run by a hospital, they will take to preferentially to that hospital. If the ambulance is owned by an insurance company, they will take you preferentially to an in-network hospital. If, by chance, you are in an ambulance for some very particular cause (as in, not a heart attack, physical injury, stroke, etc) that isn't handled by the partner hospital most closely related to that ambulance, then they might take you elsewhere.
So no, in the US you will not be taken to "the nearest hospital with appropriate facilities for your condition" in every case. The ambulance will preferentially want to take you where the odds of them being reimbursed for their expenses are the greatest. Even if they are a "volunteer ambulance corp" or an ambulance for a "non-profit insurance company", they still have costs to recoup as ambulances don't run on good deeds and angels wings.
We should consider who manages the emergency phone system. If you call and speak to a dispatcher, who trained that dispatcher? Who pays them? What kind of script do they follow on the phone?
It isn't too hard to imagine emergency dispatch becoming something similar to tech support - regardless of the country in question - where calls are themselves triaged and moved through levels until specific criteria are met. And for the Americans who think that this couldn't happen here, just tell me when the last time was that you were in an American emergency room and did not encounter a triage nurse?
You appear to be either unable or unwilling to accept the fact that your own opinion is not the full and ultimate reality of the situation. Hence you are on a high horse.
Nobody is "forcing evolution".
Obviously false. Most schools are required to teach evolution, and children in most of those schools are required to learn it.
You are quite simply wrong here. I already described several ways that children in schools can opt to not learn evolution. Nobody is forcing evolution; there are ways to obtain a high school diploma without studying the life sciences.
I have already described how you are free to not learn evolution if that is your choice.
Which is exactly equivalent to being free to not learn creationism.
Are you aware that in consecutive statements, you disagreed and then agreed with my statement? First I said that you are free to not learn evolution if you so choose and you baselessly asserted that to not be true. Now you are saying it is the same as being free to not learn creation.
forcing evolution in the schools
Have you just re-reversed your viewpoint on the issue? Please just pick one side and stick with it.
You could at least be honest enough to say that you do not wish to discuss the topic.
I did. I said, quite clearly, "I just didn't see any point in continuing that tangent." That is obviously saying I don't wish to discuss it right now.
Except that it was not a tangent. It followed directly from a statement that you gave in response to something I said. I even gave you a link back to what you said to me, in case you forgot what it was. It was not a tangent, so I do not see any reason to take the rest of your remark about some so-called tangent to be relevant to our discussion. If you can find a tangent that does not relate to the discussion, then let me know.
Just to figure out what you are trying to assert to be false I had to read back to my previous post.
Good. If you don't remember what you wrote, then it's easy to go back and find out what you wrote. Glad it worked out for you. I sometimes forget what I write, too. I write a lot of short responses, and sometimes people just quote them, and I need to go back and find out what I was responding to. No big deal. Preferable, IMO, than overquoting, as long as it is not difficult to find out that context.
If you can't come down off of your high horse enough to provide conversational background to what you are trying to disagree with to the point where your snippity remarks actually make some degree of sense then I will take that to mean you don't actually want to have this conversation. The very idea of "overquoting" is itself a judgment call that for some reason you seem to feel yourself qualified to make for both of us (as well as anyone reading this conversation); you seem to neglect that not all of us have fast connections to slashdot.
If your own opinion is that the entire problems nests there, then so be it.
It does.
Your own opinion says that. I presume others share your opinion. You have not been so kind as to say where that opinion comes from. I have already laid out the problems with your asserting your opinion to be the only correct view on the issue; yet you discard it. I am sorry that you are so narrow minded on the matter.
forcing "creationism in schools" is completely and utterly different from teaching evolution in schools
I didn't say anything about "teaching evolution." I said "forcing evolution."
Nobody is "forcing evolution". I am willing to agree that neither evolution nor creation are currently forced in schools.
And in terms of freedom, no, they are precisely equivalent. And that you STILL have not even ATTEMPTED to say how, in terms of freedom, they are in any way different, is prety solid evidence that you have no argument.
I have already described how you are free to not learn evolution if that is your choice. So unless you either have something in counter to what I said in that regards, then either you have no argument, you have an agenda towards seeing creation taught in school, or you are just being a prick.
That is not tangential.
False.
You could at least be honest enough to say that you do not wish to discuss the topic. I have laid out how it is directly in line with what you have already said - I even provided the link to where you said it. If you don't want to talk about it, just say so and move on. Don't try to create your own facts on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
For some of us when we see BC, Boston College is not the first location that comes to mind.
"If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you will do.
That was the first line of the summary. Really, can't slashdot get an editor? Or even someone with journalism experience who would know to read something over before putting it on the front page? This story could not possibly have been so time-sensitive that it needed to bypass some common sense editing.
We all know that your answers will promptly be sent to your local ObamaCare/GovernmentMotors/ACORN regional office, to ensure that you are signed up for your annual abortion. After all, how else would they be able to feed the insatiable appetite of the army of zombie alien anti-christs at the white house?
There are still some people reading slashdot who are not conservatives, convinced that the government is currently being run by the anti-christ and his army of evil minions (OK, at least one - me). We would appreciate if the editorial board at slashdot would tone down their conservative bend, at least a little bit, and go back to focusing on technology.
Not long ago, there used to be this kind of conservative spank-fest topics posted to the front page only every couple weeks. This is the second or third this week. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of other sources for conservative conspiracy theories; I don't see why slashdot needs to feed into that.
it's not a C64, it's a fancy schmancy C64 with 1541.
Indeed, we used the floppy drive as a replacement for our tape drive. We bought the tape drive to replace the manual punchcard-reader prior to that. And the manual punchcard-reader replaced the abacus that was previously used as an analog input device.
Do you want to know how we actually saw what was going on?
load "*",8,1
to start software, it isn't commodore 64. Case closed.
They are also taking advantage of the fact that most laptops seldom (if ever) move much. Many people buy them more to save physical space on their desk than they do to actually go somewhere with them.
... because nobody on the internet has ever portrayed themselves as someone they weren't. And no man has ever, ever, pretended to be a woman or a girl on the internet.
You are on a very high horse
False. I simply know what "equal protection" is, and you do not. Pointing out a germaine fact is not being on a "high horse."
Pudge in this case you are wrong. You did not point out a germane fact - rather you attempted to shoehorn a fact that does not agree with your opinion into a classification in which it does not belong. I have laid out repeatedly parts of the gay marriage argument that are beyond "equal protection" issues. I have linked back to where I laid those out, and every time you discard them out of hand because they do not fit your assumptions and opinions.
I can show you the argument, but if you choose to either not read it or not comprehend it, then that is your failure and not mine.
[you] re-asserted that a discussion topic directly in line with something you said earlier was for no obvious reason "a tangent"
False.
Again, it is unfortunate that you cannot discern between your opinion and reality. I am sad to see that whenever something comes up that does not agree with your values and assumptions, even if it is directly in line with something you said, you close up and reject the argument. You have stated now that you do not want to discuss the difference between the government and its people - which I find odd for someone who writes so many politically-motivated journal entries here - however your assertion that it is somehow "tangential" to the discussion itself is nothing more than you using your own opinion to try to back down from something you don't want to discuss.
And on another matter that you either omitted or chosen to discard in your most recent reply
False
Any literate person could read back through this dialogue between us and find several topics that you either discarded completely (such as your baseless "tangential" claim) or omitted response from. And if we count the times where you offered only one-word responses, the list grows even longer.
do you agree that students are indeed free to not learn evolution?
That is completely irrelevant to anything I was talking about
You claimed before that "forcing creationism" is the same as "forcing evolution". I countered by giving you several examples where evolution is not forced.
Your hangup on whether either is ever "forced" is beside the point (a stupid point neither of us brought up in the first place, but that you are irrationally fixated on, even though you don't even understand it).
Pudge, you are lying on that one, and you know it. You mentioned forcing evolution and forcing creationism earlier.
So since you made the claim before I entered the discussion, can you just answer the question? Do you agree that neither evolution nor creation are currently truly forced as part of the curriculum?
You appear to be either unable or unwilling to accept the fact that your own opinion is not the full and ultimate reality of the situation.
I have no idea what you're talking about; could you explain?
I'd be happy to. Start by reading back to your earlier comment where you responded to my pointing out that there is more to the gay marriage issue than just what you outlined, to which you replied
Bzzzzzzt. It's all of it.
I have since outlined specific issues that go beyond 14th amendment protections, yet you repeatedly reject them out of hand without considering the argument at all.
You are on a very high horse to insist that the entire argument boils down to only the components you wish you acknowledge in your own opinion. In the same post you wrote one-word responses to two other points as well, and then re-asserted that a discussion topic directly in line with something you said earlier was for no obvious reason "a tangent".
And on another matter that you either omitted or chosen to discard in your most recent reply - do you agree that students are indeed free to not learn evolution? We did have an exchange between us of
I have already described how you are free to not learn evolution if that is your choice.
Which is exactly equivalent to being free to not learn creationism.
And I would expect we can probably agree that most students are free to not learn creation as part of their education - if it is equivalent then we should be able to agree that students are also free to not learn evolution as part of their education.
Or will you instead opt to re-reverse your stance, and from your high horse claim that evolution is somehow "forced" as part of a universally-required curriculum?
It actually provides health care coverage to 38 million people that do not currently have it.
Actually, no, it does not. The bill is supposed to help them buy insurance - that is what the exchanges will allegedly be set up for. And for those two make money below certain threshholds, subsidies will be provided by the government. The government isn't providing health care coverage for much of anyone beyond who already has medicare / medicaid.
If you would have liked to have this choice, remember to vote out the people who insisted on denying you that option.
I fully intend to do so. And then when that doesn't work I'll take a job in a country that doesn't allow for-profit megacorps to make critical life decisions.
I understand that about half of insured folks are insured by non-profits.
Non-profit insurance is itself a lie. The so-called non-profit groups still make very tidy profits which they pay out to their top execs. They have managed to redefine what it means to be "non-profit" such that they can rake in money and yet retain the non-profit status and pay back almost nothing to the government (with the exception of the politicians who they buy).
Their "non-profit" status is the only lie crafted by the insurance industry that is more diabolical than "no-fault" (for automobile insurance). If you compared the books and activities of a "non-profit" insurance company to those of one who does not have that status, you'd be hard pressed to tell who was who.
And to further muddy the waters there are some companies - Blue Cross / Blue Shield / Blue Death in particular - who operate as both "non-profit" and not, under the same name.
But the 35million who dont who now will probably do think it is a change.
If you instead said "the 35 million who don't would like it to be a change, I would agree with you. This bill does not provide health care for them; rather it helps them buy insurance. In a civilized country the people who cannot afford it currently would be given an option for a single-payer non-profit system, however that simply is not the case with this bill. More people will get a small payment from the government to help buy insurance (from a for-profit company) that will be placed on a government program.
And of course that for-profit company will eventually, systematically, find a way to screw them.
Trust me, even in the UK with our crappy NHS it is still leagues ahead of the US system.
I don't doubt you on that for a second. On several important metrics the US system isn't even on par with Cuba.
The thought of being financially crippled unto the 3rd generation because the latest disease got to me makes me wonder how you can call yourself "civilised".
As someone who was nearly driven into bankruptcy (while still an undergraduate college student) by a for-profit insurance company, I know exactly what you are talking about. I don't consider the system here to be civilized or even the least bit reasonable. Unfortunately (their) money speaks louder than (my) words.
Most of the bill doesn't go into effect until 2014
That isn't what Fox News, the Tea Party, and various other conservative sources are trying to tell us. They want everyone to be scared into believing that this bill will bring enormous sweeping changes before lunch, and they want everyone to believe that all of those changes are evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.
Whether or not anything happens between now and the election means nothing
Wrong. If nothing happens, then it shows that the parties named above (and others) are needlessly fear-mongering. It shows that the hype and fear they are spreading is baseless.
This bill will make the cost of health insurance sky rocket
You must have failed economics. The insurance companies tell us that with more customers they can decrease the per-customer price, as it lowers the overall risk for the pool of customers. The only thing this bill does in the end is bring more customers to the insurance companies. If they are increasing the rates, instead of decreasing them, then they are either lying or cooking the books.
16,000 new IRS agents, 0 new doctors.
Do you have a source for that? No, of course not. If you had a source you would have given it - and you probably would have posted it under a name instead of anonymous coward. No go troll somewhere else; some of us would like to actually discuss factual information here.
Just watch as slashdot conservatives with mod points go bananas moderating any liberal or moderate comments into oblivion while moderating all the conservative posts through the stratosphere. It's a good thing we have a good mechanism in place to ... oh, nevermind, we don't.
The average profit margin of hospitals is around 3.4%
I previously described this as the health insurance bailout act of 2010; I did not intend to imply that this would in any way improve the margins for hospitals.
Health care plans ring in at a whopping 4.4%
The insurance companies are either reporting the results of fuzzy math, or they have other operations that yield much better. If their margins were truly that low, they wouldn't be able to afford the absurd salaries of their top executives.
32 Million people is "almost none?"
There is a marked difference between that and what I said. I said that this will bring change for almost nobody. For those 32 million, this bill does not provide insurance. Rather, it provides a mandate for them to purchase insurance. On top of that, it does not say "you must buy it or we will provide it", rather it says "you must buy it or pay a fee (at some undetermined time of some undetermined amount)". And on top of that there is nothing saying "we will ensure that you can afford to buy insurance" - the exchanges are not guaranteed to accomplish this.
Hence, in the end if you do not have insurance because you cannot afford it, you may find that you still cannot afford it.
the AMA, which still gets to limit how many people may enter the profession
That isn't entirely true. It is possible to practice medicine in this country without going through an AMA medical school. We have 28 schools of osteopathic medicine in this country; you can also obtain an MD or DO outside the US and then takes the boards here and practice medicine in the US.
I also know of another MD-granting medical school that opened in the past 2 years in Pennsylvania; and based on the size of entering medical school classes right now, the best way to generate additional qualified MDs for our country would be to open more schools.
the pharmaceutical companies
Indeed their profits will at worst (from their perspective) remain at the same level as before. Nothing in this bill changes that at all.
3) the bureaucracy, and 4) the congress.
I'm not sure how those benefit from this bill.
The Republicans set us on the road to financial ruin, and the Democrats have just floored the accelerator.
Indeed this has only further entrenched us in the existing system.
What exactly are the pro's and cons?
Pros
Cons
Congrats US citizens! You're on your way to a non-broken health care system!
We could only be so lucky. This bill by and large doesn't change anything. Most of us have health insurance that we purchase through our employers, provided by insanely profitable corporations. And for almost none of us will that change.
Unfortunately our government doesn't do change this year.
Now we will wait and see if the apocalypse that conservatives told us this would bring arrives. Reasonable people realized some time ago that this bill most likely won't change much of anything in their lives. If the Democratic Party had a publicity group that was worth a shit, they would take advantage of that when the midterm elections come in November (at which point this bill will be law for several months and have done pretty well nothing that the fearmongerers had told us).
Just replying so that people know not to take your post literally. Ambulances in the US will take you to the nearest hospital with appropriate facilities for your condition.
That varies regionally in the US. Who owns the ambulance you are riding in? If you were picked up by an ambulance run by a hospital, they will take to preferentially to that hospital. If the ambulance is owned by an insurance company, they will take you preferentially to an in-network hospital. If, by chance, you are in an ambulance for some very particular cause (as in, not a heart attack, physical injury, stroke, etc) that isn't handled by the partner hospital most closely related to that ambulance, then they might take you elsewhere.
So no, in the US you will not be taken to "the nearest hospital with appropriate facilities for your condition" in every case. The ambulance will preferentially want to take you where the odds of them being reimbursed for their expenses are the greatest. Even if they are a "volunteer ambulance corp" or an ambulance for a "non-profit insurance company", they still have costs to recoup as ambulances don't run on good deeds and angels wings.
We should consider who manages the emergency phone system. If you call and speak to a dispatcher, who trained that dispatcher? Who pays them? What kind of script do they follow on the phone?
It isn't too hard to imagine emergency dispatch becoming something similar to tech support - regardless of the country in question - where calls are themselves triaged and moved through levels until specific criteria are met. And for the Americans who think that this couldn't happen here, just tell me when the last time was that you were in an American emergency room and did not encounter a triage nurse?
If you can't come down off of your high horse
Impossible, since I am not on one.
You appear to be either unable or unwilling to accept the fact that your own opinion is not the full and ultimate reality of the situation. Hence you are on a high horse.
Nobody is "forcing evolution".
Obviously false. Most schools are required to teach evolution, and children in most of those schools are required to learn it.
You are quite simply wrong here. I already described several ways that children in schools can opt to not learn evolution. Nobody is forcing evolution; there are ways to obtain a high school diploma without studying the life sciences.
I have already described how you are free to not learn evolution if that is your choice.
Which is exactly equivalent to being free to not learn creationism.
Are you aware that in consecutive statements, you disagreed and then agreed with my statement? First I said that you are free to not learn evolution if you so choose and you baselessly asserted that to not be true. Now you are saying it is the same as being free to not learn creation.
forcing evolution in the schools
Have you just re-reversed your viewpoint on the issue? Please just pick one side and stick with it.
You could at least be honest enough to say that you do not wish to discuss the topic.
I did. I said, quite clearly, "I just didn't see any point in continuing that tangent." That is obviously saying I don't wish to discuss it right now.
Except that it was not a tangent. It followed directly from a statement that you gave in response to something I said. I even gave you a link back to what you said to me, in case you forgot what it was. It was not a tangent, so I do not see any reason to take the rest of your remark about some so-called tangent to be relevant to our discussion. If you can find a tangent that does not relate to the discussion, then let me know.
Just to figure out what you are trying to assert to be false I had to read back to my previous post.
Good. If you don't remember what you wrote, then it's easy to go back and find out what you wrote. Glad it worked out for you. I sometimes forget what I write, too. I write a lot of short responses, and sometimes people just quote them, and I need to go back and find out what I was responding to. No big deal. Preferable, IMO, than overquoting, as long as it is not difficult to find out that context.
If you can't come down off of your high horse enough to provide conversational background to what you are trying to disagree with to the point where your snippity remarks actually make some degree of sense then I will take that to mean you don't actually want to have this conversation. The very idea of "overquoting" is itself a judgment call that for some reason you seem to feel yourself qualified to make for both of us (as well as anyone reading this conversation); you seem to neglect that not all of us have fast connections to slashdot.
If your own opinion is that the entire problems nests there, then so be it.
It does.
Your own opinion says that. I presume others share your opinion. You have not been so kind as to say where that opinion comes from. I have already laid out the problems with your asserting your opinion to be the only correct view on the issue; yet you discard it. I am sorry that you are so narrow minded on the matter.
forcing "creationism in schools" is completely and utterly different from teaching evolution in schools
I didn't say anything about "teaching evolution." I said "forcing evolution."
Nobody is "forcing evolution". I am willing to agree that neither evolution nor creation are currently forced in schools.
And in terms of freedom, no, they are precisely equivalent. And that you STILL have not even ATTEMPTED to say how, in terms of freedom, they are in any way different, is prety solid evidence that you have no argument.
I have already described how you are free to not learn evolution if that is your choice. So unless you either have something in counter to what I said in that regards, then either you have no argument, you have an agenda towards seeing creation taught in school, or you are just being a prick.
That is not tangential.
False.
You could at least be honest enough to say that you do not wish to discuss the topic. I have laid out how it is directly in line with what you have already said - I even provided the link to where you said it. If you don't want to talk about it, just say so and move on. Don't try to create your own facts on the matter.