Ares was not going to create new technology. It would use rehashed technologies from Saturn and the Space Shuttle. This was expected to create a better program because the technology would be flight-tested and well-known. However, it would also obviously stop innovation into new motors and technologies. Ares fell behind schedule and went over-budget almost immediately. The escape mechanism was shown not to be effective. Ares I-X severely damaged the launch pad, didn't separate cleanly, and had a problem with the parachutes. You can argue that these problems would get fixed in due time, but if you weren't getting the benefit of a faster program, then there is less reason to abandon the development of new technologies.
Furthermore, the problems associated with the use of solid fuel propellants with manned flights has been pretty clear. They do not give as much performance as liquid-fueled rockets. This has lead to ARES V being so big that the launch infrastructure would have to be upgraded to deal with its girth. Solid fuels cannot be shut off in case of emergency. And when they explode, they explode. Liquid-fueled rockets may come apart, but cryogenic fuels such as LOx and LH2 do not explode when combined; it needs to be heated or otherwise ignited. For proof, look at the Challenger disaster. When the SRBs ran away and the fuel tank came apart, there was no explosion; the huge cloud was cryogenic fuel being mixed together. In fact, the crew cabin survived the separation even when detached from the rest of the Shuttle; a few astronauts survived until they hit the water.
Also, Ares was going to develop the Ares I for manned vehicles and Ares V heavy lift for cargo. Ares V never really got developed because Ares I fell behind schedule and ate up all the money. A better way would be to develop two medium-lift vehicles to simplify the development. Cargo heavy lift can be provided by industry or by scaling up a medium-lift design with SRBs like other designs.
The new program will focus on the development of lift technologies and boosters without a specific goal. The problem with specific goals and insufficient budgets is that you get rush jobs. If NASA had to put a man on the moon by 2020 but didn't have the money to do it, then we'd have an unwieldy mess that never gets anywhere. Moving the focus to getting the work done would be more productive. Then we can work on getting orbiters and interplanetary spacecraft together once all the heavy-lift has been done.
Is it controversial? Hell yes. Is it a good idea? I dunna; it's risky. But is an end to the US manned space program? No. It's a daring move that throws in all the marbles in the hopes that we trade a bad program to a better future.
Amongst other things, the United States of America makes and maintains the GPS satellites, researches life-saving drugs and antibiotics, awesome medical machinery like artificial hearts, stents, etc., contributes strongly to medical research, airliners such as the 787, microprocessors, operating systems, data services, hedge funds that sponsor cool startups, and really cool fucking missiles and bombs that can fly 1,000 miles by themselves to hit a camel. No one else can replace America in the near future. Just imagine the world without Apple, Pfizer, Boeing, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, and GE. Sound like fun?
Also, the American consumer actually contributes a lot to world consumption. Without the Americans, there may not be air travel as we know it because huge aircraft such as the Airbus 380 require lots of flights to make back their money. Without flights to and from America, and ugly Americans running around the world, no one would develop them. Without the Americans spending all their money on medical treatments, no one would bother to create many innovative procedures and devices because there wouldn't be enough demand.
My country is in trouble, sure. But we will persevere. We have done it many times before.
The technology needed for a moon mission and a Mars mission may be very different, and in fact, so different that returning to the moon is a diversion. Aldrin's big thing is the Aldrin Cycler, a space vehicle that will constantly travel between Mars and Earth using gravitational pull and minimal fuel. If we decided to embark on that mission, then the vehicles and designs necessary may not transfer very well from a moon mission. We may decide to go straight to Mars to save the time and money necessary to return to the moon. Of course, I don't know what Aldrin thinks about it, but I can understand the desire to avoid the moon mission and go for the glory first time around.
Buzz Aldrin had the best take on the goal to return to the moon. He said it was "more like reaching for past glory than striving for new triumphs." It's hard to ignore him. Aldrin was universally acknowledged by the Apollo astronauts as being the smartest. He was known as Dr. Rendezvous because all he focused on was orbital mechanics of spacecraft and getting them to line up. He graduated from West Point and then MIT. As he's a tough SOB. Some moon hoaxer who called Aldrin a liar and a thief got socked in the face.
Anyway, Aldrin is a Republican who took Communion on the moon. It's not as if he's a Democrat trying to get behind his President.
We've become a bunch of scaredy cats. The Shuttle can still work if you accept the risk that we will lose astronauts during space travel. That's the price of space travel. It's not political like Obama or Bush. It has to do with our country being perfectly content sending thousands of young Americans to die in the foreign sands of war-zones, but terrified that seven grown men and women might die while exploring space. We're just being fucking stupid about this, and I say this with much love for the United States.
Contrary to what you might believe, New York State is a pretty conservative place. Sure, New York CITY is a liberal place, but the state overall is not. Oddly enough, the conservative areas depend on a handout from the liberal City to pay its bills. It's all pretty funny.
He doesn't even make sense in his own fantasy land. I think he means statutory sexual assault--if kids are having sex with kids, then they're being victimized if they're underaged. However, statutory rape doesn't apply when both parties have consented, but are both underaged. It's called the Romeo and Juliet rule. Methinks this prosecutor should read the laws again before making grandiose pronouncements; after all, it's his FUCKING JOB to do so.
I was going to moderate this thread, but I had to point out that the law is not mandatory at either the school or student level. Schools can choose not to teach sexual education. Parents can opt their children out of it as well. That's why this prosecutor is being so fricking ridiculous. If the legislature, school, and parents decide that this education will help their children, who is this prosecutor to say otherwise? I hope someone sues.
The Nuclear Posture Review makes more sense when considered in its entirety. It's not a secret that the US nuclear stockpile has reliability issues. The long-standing US moratorium on nuclear testing has caused the stockpile to have the "Grandfather's Axe" problem: each piece of a nuclear device has been replaced to ensure reliability, but the entire system has not been tested to make sure it works. The NPR suggests that we lower our stockpile but reinvest in making sure that the fewer number of warheads are reliable with more non-detonation testing. It will abandon the development of new warheads to favor of making sure that our current warheads actually work.
Biological and chemical weapons are not considered true weapons of mass destruction by many weapons analysts. They are inherently tactical in nature even though they are scary weapons. Spreading VX or anthrax requires a lot of skill and will not lead to true mass casualties unless performed by a military power such as Russia. Spraying sarin in the Japan subway didn't kill tons of people. The anthrax mailings in the US didn't really kill many. Notably, in both cases, these attacks were the work of domestic groups that would not leave an avenue for nuclear retaliation. That's probably because these weapons require a lot of warheads to be effective due to the concentrations necessary to contaminate a large area, so it's harder to mount a truly devastating attack. And let's be honest. If a foreign nation created a superbug that kills 100,000 Americans, we'd nuke the fuck out of them, NPR or no NPR.
Look at the video; you are wrong. The camera man and his driver were carrying cameras and camera equipment. Two other men 3:46 into the long movie were carrying weapons, to wit, an AK and an RPG. That's why WikiLeaks did not say the crowd was unarmed.
You are wrong in many ways. The Geneva Conventions do not ban the use of heavy weapons against humans. There is a Declaration of St. Petersburg of 1868 that banned the use of exploding projectiles UNDER 400 grams. A 30 mm cannon round is heavier than 400 grams. In fact, using exploding projectiles under 20 mm is militarily useless. The use of 30 mm cannon fire on human targets is perfectly legal.
The children are clearly seen in the video after it had been cleaned up, zoomed up, and slowed down after the fact. The children were not visible or recognizable as children in the raw tape, which is what the pilots saw. I agree that shooting at the van was retarded, but the pilots did not recognize that these were children before they fired. After they were apprised of this, they said "don't bring children into a war zone." That's some rationalization that I would assume is part of the coping mechanism.
You sound like a guy who's never been in a war. The pilot wants to shoot because he thinks his guys on the ground were in mortal danger. First off, members of the group were armed with RPGs and AKs. Look at 3:46 in the long clip. But the photographer aimed his camera from a crouching position behind a corner, just like insurgents do when firing an RPG. At that moment, the pilot became very nervous, agitated, and couldn't wait to circle his chopper around to get the shot. He reasonably believed that the photographers were carrying RPGs. You do not expect journalists with cameras to be walking around. (It's not unforeseeable if you sit and think, but during combat, it would never occur to anyone that these were really large cameras.) I assume that bad guys want to kill the enemy. If you can somehow argue that the chopper pilots knew they were shooting at civilians or photographers, then you'd have a better argument. However, the pilots believed they were engaging hostiles.
Did you even watch the video yourself before spouting off? There were men in that group with AK and RPGs. You can see them at 3:46 into the long movie. No one is saying that the group was unarmed. The argument that these men were just civilians walking down the street is asinine if you consider that they were carrying RPGs. (Let's assume civilians walk around with AKs in Iraq.) Since the insurgents don't wear uniforms, it's a safe assumption that groups of guys with AKs and RPGs are not civilians. You obviously have a political agenda to advance, as you think the US Army is scum. But if you want make up facts and propagate falsehoods, at least make them believable ones.
The background to the story was that US ground forces that had taken fire from that position called in the Apaches, which found the group of armed men. At least two members of the group had weapons. Look at 3:46 in the extended video. One man is carrying an AK and the other is carrying a long, thin heavy weapon that looks like an RPG. The journalists were carrying large cameras that were mistaken for weapons, especially when one of the journalists knelt at a corner to take a photo in a posture that looks just like a person setting up to fire an RPG. At that point, the chopper pilots were freaking out over the possibility of an attack on friendly forces.
The attack on the minivan seemed like a mistake. There were no weapons in or around the van. Firing on a medical transport seemed immoral. (I'm not sure if it's illegal but no one likes guys who shoot at medics.)
Attacking lawyers completely misses the point. You should be attacking the greedy medical researchers and doctors who decided to patent a gene. Lawyers are just middlemen. If the doctor-inventors weren't greedy SOBSs, they wouldn't have patented the genes to they could extort a higher amount from women trying to not die of breast cancer.
"I know, it's easy to vilify doctors because they earn more money than you do, but it's ridiculous all the bogus lawsuits they let through in our "justice" system."
You are completely wrong on every one of your factual assertions. People are not allowed to sue regardless of wrongdoing and typically win. In fact, lawyers will not handle many cases of clear malpractice because the monetary damages are not sufficient to warrant their intervention. If a doctor causes less than $50,000 in injury by malpractice, they will not get sued because the contingency doesn't justify a lawyer taking the case. You want to make it even harder for wronged victims to bring lawsuits by knocking out the "frivolous" lawsuits. Oopsies. You have no fucking clue how to do that.
You assert that malpractice insurance rates are higher than they should be. I assume you are unaware of multiple studies by doctors that have concluded that malpractice payouts are insufficient to cover the harm caused by malpractice. Otherwise, you wouldn't say something so blatantly wrong. Furthermore, as I pointed out, medical malpractice payouts constitute less than 0.5% of health care expenditures. Even if all the payouts were completely undeserved, and doctors literally never committed malpractice, it's inconceivable to assume that this 0.5% payout are so burdensome to doctors. Oh. I guess you were unaware of that 0.5% number.
Why don't you scurry along? Facts don't seem to be your thing.
You have not cited any evidence that lawsuits improve patient care. I will assume that is because it doesn't exist. I can understand that you are biased because you are married to a doctor. You want doctors to keep all their money, which is understandable. However, don't make stuff up, especially stuff that you literally cannot support. After all, nearly 100,000 people in the United States die from medical mistakes. That's from a report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science. Imagine all the crippled, infertile, or severely injured patients negligent doctors leave behind if medical mistakes kill 100,000 a year.
You admit that doctors are so dishonest that they will perform surgeries based on compensation and not patient needs. Hello. This proves my point that medical malpractice payouts are not the cause of our exploding health care costs. Doctors are just like normal people, and like normal people, they need to be held responsible for their actions. A drunk driver has to pay the family of the people they killed. The same is true of doctors.
The fact is that malpractice payouts are lower than the actual harm caused by medical malpractice. Studies conducted by doctors in California and Florida have shown this. There is a lot of malpractice that is being borne by the patient. This belies your blind, naive, and cavalier assertions that doctors do know best, and they shouldn't be accountable for their actions; they are, in fact, very much not accountable, and they're already complaining about medical malpractice payouts. If there is a need for medical malpractice reform, we should be increasing the payouts. Only 30% of patients who were the victims of a medical mistake are informed of this by their doctors. Doctors say they can't disclose that because then patients will sue. So again, doctors don't want to be responsible for their mistakes, while they pad their pockets with unnecessary procedures. And you want them to have less accountability.
Trial lawyers are not getting payouts because people are getting sick. That's a scare tactic. It's called malpractice because doctors did not do their jobs properly. Doctors have amputated the wrong limb. Doctors have left gauze in patients, then defended the malpractice lawsuit by saying that it wasn't necessarily malpractice for an 18" X 18" gauze to be left in a patient's abdomen after surgery. (Doctors I speak to have defended this by saying it's hard to see gauze when it's wet. Well, that's why you count them--you see, doctors do that nowadays because of malpractice lawsuits.) Doctors have killed patients by transplanting organs with the wrong blood type into them. We have a trial by jury to make sure that doctors who make these mistakes pay the appropriate price so that they don't do it again.
You are the one who is detached from reality, inasmuch as you are completely unable to process facts in a coherent manner. It is not surprising that you are unable to find facts. I bet that you avoid them as much as possible. Let me say this again. Follow the bouncing ball this time. Malpractice payouts are only 0.5% of expenditures. Currently, 30% of expenditures are wasted or dangerous. You admit these expenditures are caused by doctors gaming the system. Therefore, medical tort reform is not central to any system meant to lower costs or expand coverage. That's why it's not in the bill.
You can't sue Kaiser in court for malpractice, but you can seek binding arbitration against them for malpractice. If you cannot seek compensation for malpractice, there is no incentive to better themselves.
You have to link to studies that show that leaving patients at the mercy of their doctors makes a health care system more efficient and effective. It sounds absurd to me that allowing doctors to do whatever they want without recourse to the shoddiest level of care will better our medical system. Malpractice lawsuits are a signal from patients to health care providers that they should improve their quality of care to local standards. Crippling that signal will cause a sub-optimal allocation of resources.
So your theory is that doctors don't care about compensation. Malpractice payouts constitute less than 0.5% of health care expenditures in the United States. More than 30% of health care expenditures are wasteful or dangerous. Doctors are probably driven by compensation in spending money rather than fear of malpractice--it's just a good excuse.
Think about it this way. Your contention is that if we eliminate malpractice completely, that 30% of expenditures will disappear. Of course, that 30% drop in health care expenditures will mean that less money received by health care providers. That means doctors and hospitals will make 30% less money if malpractice is eliminated. Do you really expect that to happen?
This bill is a first step to saving our children's lives. Literally. Our nation spends twice as much per capita on health care than most civilized nations, but our infant mortality rates are about the highest in civilized world. Republicans bleat that this is because our system saves a lot of premature babies who then later die. But the fact is that we have a higher rate of premature babies than most other civilized nations in the world. Why is this? Unhealthy mothers have unhealthy kids. This makes sense, doesn't it? Studies have shown that sick mothers have a higher rate of complications, pre-term births, and sick babies. Our health care system fails young women of childbearing age, and they have sick babies. This bill will provide access to care to more women, and they'll tend to have healthier babies.
Furthermore, the consequences of sickness are severe. One of the most significant factors in determining a child's performance in school is whether they eat enough food or whether they are sick. Sick or starving kids do not do well in school. Again, commonsense. If we have a healthier population, we can have a better economic edge. Our kids will do better in school if they're not sick all the time. They'll take less sick days if they're properly vaccinated or see the doctor early before they're crippled by treatable illnesses like diabetes or hypertension.
This is a first step that can save our nation. We need to be healthy to compete. This bill literally will save lives.
(1) The bill requires health insurance companies to pay out at least 85% of their premiums in health care expenditures. Some insurance companies already average 90% but most average about 70%. This should drive health insurance premiums down.
(2) Insurance companies already create rules that limit their payouts through annual and lifetime limits, and preexisting condition exclusions. These are all eliminated under the bill. State run exchanges will allow each state to create a basic package of health insurance benefits that insurance companies can bid to provide. The states are allowed to make the packages as sparse or as luxurious as they choose. These will assure basic packages at competitive prices.
(3) The poor will never have the same access to care as the wealthy so long as there is a private market for health care goods. You shouldn't look to equal access as much as you should look to breadth of access (everyone has health care) and basic level of health care (you can get something on the low end of coverage).
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Ares was not going to create new technology. It would use rehashed technologies from Saturn and the Space Shuttle. This was expected to create a better program because the technology would be flight-tested and well-known. However, it would also obviously stop innovation into new motors and technologies. Ares fell behind schedule and went over-budget almost immediately. The escape mechanism was shown not to be effective. Ares I-X severely damaged the launch pad, didn't separate cleanly, and had a problem with the parachutes. You can argue that these problems would get fixed in due time, but if you weren't getting the benefit of a faster program, then there is less reason to abandon the development of new technologies.
Furthermore, the problems associated with the use of solid fuel propellants with manned flights has been pretty clear. They do not give as much performance as liquid-fueled rockets. This has lead to ARES V being so big that the launch infrastructure would have to be upgraded to deal with its girth. Solid fuels cannot be shut off in case of emergency. And when they explode, they explode. Liquid-fueled rockets may come apart, but cryogenic fuels such as LOx and LH2 do not explode when combined; it needs to be heated or otherwise ignited. For proof, look at the Challenger disaster. When the SRBs ran away and the fuel tank came apart, there was no explosion; the huge cloud was cryogenic fuel being mixed together. In fact, the crew cabin survived the separation even when detached from the rest of the Shuttle; a few astronauts survived until they hit the water.
Also, Ares was going to develop the Ares I for manned vehicles and Ares V heavy lift for cargo. Ares V never really got developed because Ares I fell behind schedule and ate up all the money. A better way would be to develop two medium-lift vehicles to simplify the development. Cargo heavy lift can be provided by industry or by scaling up a medium-lift design with SRBs like other designs.
The new program will focus on the development of lift technologies and boosters without a specific goal. The problem with specific goals and insufficient budgets is that you get rush jobs. If NASA had to put a man on the moon by 2020 but didn't have the money to do it, then we'd have an unwieldy mess that never gets anywhere. Moving the focus to getting the work done would be more productive. Then we can work on getting orbiters and interplanetary spacecraft together once all the heavy-lift has been done.
Is it controversial? Hell yes. Is it a good idea? I dunna; it's risky. But is an end to the US manned space program? No. It's a daring move that throws in all the marbles in the hopes that we trade a bad program to a better future.
Amongst other things, the United States of America makes and maintains the GPS satellites, researches life-saving drugs and antibiotics, awesome medical machinery like artificial hearts, stents, etc., contributes strongly to medical research, airliners such as the 787, microprocessors, operating systems, data services, hedge funds that sponsor cool startups, and really cool fucking missiles and bombs that can fly 1,000 miles by themselves to hit a camel. No one else can replace America in the near future. Just imagine the world without Apple, Pfizer, Boeing, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, and GE. Sound like fun?
Also, the American consumer actually contributes a lot to world consumption. Without the Americans, there may not be air travel as we know it because huge aircraft such as the Airbus 380 require lots of flights to make back their money. Without flights to and from America, and ugly Americans running around the world, no one would develop them. Without the Americans spending all their money on medical treatments, no one would bother to create many innovative procedures and devices because there wouldn't be enough demand.
My country is in trouble, sure. But we will persevere. We have done it many times before.
Can someone mod parent down because he started it off with "my opinion will probably get modded down..."? I hate it when people do that.
The technology needed for a moon mission and a Mars mission may be very different, and in fact, so different that returning to the moon is a diversion. Aldrin's big thing is the Aldrin Cycler, a space vehicle that will constantly travel between Mars and Earth using gravitational pull and minimal fuel. If we decided to embark on that mission, then the vehicles and designs necessary may not transfer very well from a moon mission. We may decide to go straight to Mars to save the time and money necessary to return to the moon. Of course, I don't know what Aldrin thinks about it, but I can understand the desire to avoid the moon mission and go for the glory first time around.
Buzz Aldrin had the best take on the goal to return to the moon. He said it was "more like reaching for past glory than striving for new triumphs." It's hard to ignore him. Aldrin was universally acknowledged by the Apollo astronauts as being the smartest. He was known as Dr. Rendezvous because all he focused on was orbital mechanics of spacecraft and getting them to line up. He graduated from West Point and then MIT. As he's a tough SOB. Some moon hoaxer who called Aldrin a liar and a thief got socked in the face.
Anyway, Aldrin is a Republican who took Communion on the moon. It's not as if he's a Democrat trying to get behind his President.
We've become a bunch of scaredy cats. The Shuttle can still work if you accept the risk that we will lose astronauts during space travel. That's the price of space travel. It's not political like Obama or Bush. It has to do with our country being perfectly content sending thousands of young Americans to die in the foreign sands of war-zones, but terrified that seven grown men and women might die while exploring space. We're just being fucking stupid about this, and I say this with much love for the United States.
Contrary to what you might believe, New York State is a pretty conservative place. Sure, New York CITY is a liberal place, but the state overall is not. Oddly enough, the conservative areas depend on a handout from the liberal City to pay its bills. It's all pretty funny.
He doesn't even make sense in his own fantasy land. I think he means statutory sexual assault--if kids are having sex with kids, then they're being victimized if they're underaged. However, statutory rape doesn't apply when both parties have consented, but are both underaged. It's called the Romeo and Juliet rule. Methinks this prosecutor should read the laws again before making grandiose pronouncements; after all, it's his FUCKING JOB to do so.
I was going to moderate this thread, but I had to point out that the law is not mandatory at either the school or student level. Schools can choose not to teach sexual education. Parents can opt their children out of it as well. That's why this prosecutor is being so fricking ridiculous. If the legislature, school, and parents decide that this education will help their children, who is this prosecutor to say otherwise? I hope someone sues.
The Nuclear Posture Review makes more sense when considered in its entirety. It's not a secret that the US nuclear stockpile has reliability issues. The long-standing US moratorium on nuclear testing has caused the stockpile to have the "Grandfather's Axe" problem: each piece of a nuclear device has been replaced to ensure reliability, but the entire system has not been tested to make sure it works. The NPR suggests that we lower our stockpile but reinvest in making sure that the fewer number of warheads are reliable with more non-detonation testing. It will abandon the development of new warheads to favor of making sure that our current warheads actually work.
Biological and chemical weapons are not considered true weapons of mass destruction by many weapons analysts. They are inherently tactical in nature even though they are scary weapons. Spreading VX or anthrax requires a lot of skill and will not lead to true mass casualties unless performed by a military power such as Russia. Spraying sarin in the Japan subway didn't kill tons of people. The anthrax mailings in the US didn't really kill many. Notably, in both cases, these attacks were the work of domestic groups that would not leave an avenue for nuclear retaliation. That's probably because these weapons require a lot of warheads to be effective due to the concentrations necessary to contaminate a large area, so it's harder to mount a truly devastating attack. And let's be honest. If a foreign nation created a superbug that kills 100,000 Americans, we'd nuke the fuck out of them, NPR or no NPR.
Look at the video; you are wrong. The camera man and his driver were carrying cameras and camera equipment. Two other men 3:46 into the long movie were carrying weapons, to wit, an AK and an RPG. That's why WikiLeaks did not say the crowd was unarmed.
You are wrong in many ways. The Geneva Conventions do not ban the use of heavy weapons against humans. There is a Declaration of St. Petersburg of 1868 that banned the use of exploding projectiles UNDER 400 grams. A 30 mm cannon round is heavier than 400 grams. In fact, using exploding projectiles under 20 mm is militarily useless. The use of 30 mm cannon fire on human targets is perfectly legal.
The children are clearly seen in the video after it had been cleaned up, zoomed up, and slowed down after the fact. The children were not visible or recognizable as children in the raw tape, which is what the pilots saw. I agree that shooting at the van was retarded, but the pilots did not recognize that these were children before they fired. After they were apprised of this, they said "don't bring children into a war zone." That's some rationalization that I would assume is part of the coping mechanism.
You sound like a guy who's never been in a war. The pilot wants to shoot because he thinks his guys on the ground were in mortal danger. First off, members of the group were armed with RPGs and AKs. Look at 3:46 in the long clip. But the photographer aimed his camera from a crouching position behind a corner, just like insurgents do when firing an RPG. At that moment, the pilot became very nervous, agitated, and couldn't wait to circle his chopper around to get the shot. He reasonably believed that the photographers were carrying RPGs. You do not expect journalists with cameras to be walking around. (It's not unforeseeable if you sit and think, but during combat, it would never occur to anyone that these were really large cameras.) I assume that bad guys want to kill the enemy. If you can somehow argue that the chopper pilots knew they were shooting at civilians or photographers, then you'd have a better argument. However, the pilots believed they were engaging hostiles.
Did you even watch the video yourself before spouting off? There were men in that group with AK and RPGs. You can see them at 3:46 into the long movie. No one is saying that the group was unarmed. The argument that these men were just civilians walking down the street is asinine if you consider that they were carrying RPGs. (Let's assume civilians walk around with AKs in Iraq.) Since the insurgents don't wear uniforms, it's a safe assumption that groups of guys with AKs and RPGs are not civilians. You obviously have a political agenda to advance, as you think the US Army is scum. But if you want make up facts and propagate falsehoods, at least make them believable ones.
The background to the story was that US ground forces that had taken fire from that position called in the Apaches, which found the group of armed men. At least two members of the group had weapons. Look at 3:46 in the extended video. One man is carrying an AK and the other is carrying a long, thin heavy weapon that looks like an RPG. The journalists were carrying large cameras that were mistaken for weapons, especially when one of the journalists knelt at a corner to take a photo in a posture that looks just like a person setting up to fire an RPG. At that point, the chopper pilots were freaking out over the possibility of an attack on friendly forces.
The attack on the minivan seemed like a mistake. There were no weapons in or around the van. Firing on a medical transport seemed immoral. (I'm not sure if it's illegal but no one likes guys who shoot at medics.)
Attacking lawyers completely misses the point. You should be attacking the greedy medical researchers and doctors who decided to patent a gene. Lawyers are just middlemen. If the doctor-inventors weren't greedy SOBSs, they wouldn't have patented the genes to they could extort a higher amount from women trying to not die of breast cancer.
I know you were being sarcastic, but to illustrate, the latest estimates think that 5-10% of cerebral palsy cases are caused by oxygen deprivation.
"I know, it's easy to vilify doctors because they earn more money than you do, but it's ridiculous all the bogus lawsuits they let through in our "justice" system."
I think this speaks for itself.
You are completely wrong on every one of your factual assertions. People are not allowed to sue regardless of wrongdoing and typically win. In fact, lawyers will not handle many cases of clear malpractice because the monetary damages are not sufficient to warrant their intervention. If a doctor causes less than $50,000 in injury by malpractice, they will not get sued because the contingency doesn't justify a lawyer taking the case. You want to make it even harder for wronged victims to bring lawsuits by knocking out the "frivolous" lawsuits. Oopsies. You have no fucking clue how to do that.
You assert that malpractice insurance rates are higher than they should be. I assume you are unaware of multiple studies by doctors that have concluded that malpractice payouts are insufficient to cover the harm caused by malpractice. Otherwise, you wouldn't say something so blatantly wrong. Furthermore, as I pointed out, medical malpractice payouts constitute less than 0.5% of health care expenditures. Even if all the payouts were completely undeserved, and doctors literally never committed malpractice, it's inconceivable to assume that this 0.5% payout are so burdensome to doctors. Oh. I guess you were unaware of that 0.5% number.
Why don't you scurry along? Facts don't seem to be your thing.
You have not cited any evidence that lawsuits improve patient care. I will assume that is because it doesn't exist. I can understand that you are biased because you are married to a doctor. You want doctors to keep all their money, which is understandable. However, don't make stuff up, especially stuff that you literally cannot support. After all, nearly 100,000 people in the United States die from medical mistakes. That's from a report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science. Imagine all the crippled, infertile, or severely injured patients negligent doctors leave behind if medical mistakes kill 100,000 a year.
You admit that doctors are so dishonest that they will perform surgeries based on compensation and not patient needs. Hello. This proves my point that medical malpractice payouts are not the cause of our exploding health care costs. Doctors are just like normal people, and like normal people, they need to be held responsible for their actions. A drunk driver has to pay the family of the people they killed. The same is true of doctors.
The fact is that malpractice payouts are lower than the actual harm caused by medical malpractice. Studies conducted by doctors in California and Florida have shown this. There is a lot of malpractice that is being borne by the patient. This belies your blind, naive, and cavalier assertions that doctors do know best, and they shouldn't be accountable for their actions; they are, in fact, very much not accountable, and they're already complaining about medical malpractice payouts. If there is a need for medical malpractice reform, we should be increasing the payouts. Only 30% of patients who were the victims of a medical mistake are informed of this by their doctors. Doctors say they can't disclose that because then patients will sue. So again, doctors don't want to be responsible for their mistakes, while they pad their pockets with unnecessary procedures. And you want them to have less accountability.
Trial lawyers are not getting payouts because people are getting sick. That's a scare tactic. It's called malpractice because doctors did not do their jobs properly. Doctors have amputated the wrong limb. Doctors have left gauze in patients, then defended the malpractice lawsuit by saying that it wasn't necessarily malpractice for an 18" X 18" gauze to be left in a patient's abdomen after surgery. (Doctors I speak to have defended this by saying it's hard to see gauze when it's wet. Well, that's why you count them--you see, doctors do that nowadays because of malpractice lawsuits.) Doctors have killed patients by transplanting organs with the wrong blood type into them. We have a trial by jury to make sure that doctors who make these mistakes pay the appropriate price so that they don't do it again.
You are the one who is detached from reality, inasmuch as you are completely unable to process facts in a coherent manner. It is not surprising that you are unable to find facts. I bet that you avoid them as much as possible. Let me say this again. Follow the bouncing ball this time. Malpractice payouts are only 0.5% of expenditures. Currently, 30% of expenditures are wasted or dangerous. You admit these expenditures are caused by doctors gaming the system. Therefore, medical tort reform is not central to any system meant to lower costs or expand coverage. That's why it's not in the bill.
You can't sue Kaiser in court for malpractice, but you can seek binding arbitration against them for malpractice. If you cannot seek compensation for malpractice, there is no incentive to better themselves.
You have to link to studies that show that leaving patients at the mercy of their doctors makes a health care system more efficient and effective. It sounds absurd to me that allowing doctors to do whatever they want without recourse to the shoddiest level of care will better our medical system. Malpractice lawsuits are a signal from patients to health care providers that they should improve their quality of care to local standards. Crippling that signal will cause a sub-optimal allocation of resources.
So your theory is that doctors don't care about compensation. Malpractice payouts constitute less than 0.5% of health care expenditures in the United States. More than 30% of health care expenditures are wasteful or dangerous. Doctors are probably driven by compensation in spending money rather than fear of malpractice--it's just a good excuse.
Think about it this way. Your contention is that if we eliminate malpractice completely, that 30% of expenditures will disappear. Of course, that 30% drop in health care expenditures will mean that less money received by health care providers. That means doctors and hospitals will make 30% less money if malpractice is eliminated. Do you really expect that to happen?
This bill is a first step to saving our children's lives. Literally. Our nation spends twice as much per capita on health care than most civilized nations, but our infant mortality rates are about the highest in civilized world. Republicans bleat that this is because our system saves a lot of premature babies who then later die. But the fact is that we have a higher rate of premature babies than most other civilized nations in the world. Why is this? Unhealthy mothers have unhealthy kids. This makes sense, doesn't it? Studies have shown that sick mothers have a higher rate of complications, pre-term births, and sick babies. Our health care system fails young women of childbearing age, and they have sick babies. This bill will provide access to care to more women, and they'll tend to have healthier babies.
Furthermore, the consequences of sickness are severe. One of the most significant factors in determining a child's performance in school is whether they eat enough food or whether they are sick. Sick or starving kids do not do well in school. Again, commonsense. If we have a healthier population, we can have a better economic edge. Our kids will do better in school if they're not sick all the time. They'll take less sick days if they're properly vaccinated or see the doctor early before they're crippled by treatable illnesses like diabetes or hypertension.
This is a first step that can save our nation. We need to be healthy to compete. This bill literally will save lives.
(1) The bill requires health insurance companies to pay out at least 85% of their premiums in health care expenditures. Some insurance companies already average 90% but most average about 70%. This should drive health insurance premiums down.
(2) Insurance companies already create rules that limit their payouts through annual and lifetime limits, and preexisting condition exclusions. These are all eliminated under the bill. State run exchanges will allow each state to create a basic package of health insurance benefits that insurance companies can bid to provide. The states are allowed to make the packages as sparse or as luxurious as they choose. These will assure basic packages at competitive prices.
(3) The poor will never have the same access to care as the wealthy so long as there is a private market for health care goods. You shouldn't look to equal access as much as you should look to breadth of access (everyone has health care) and basic level of health care (you can get something on the low end of coverage).