No, you won't go to jail. The maximum fine for not getting insurance is $695 if you make $80,000 or more. This is a fine, not a criminal penalty that could carry jail time. If you make less than that, you might be eligible for subsidies to reduce the cost you pay.
You would be able to get some insurance; they could not refuse outright to cover you due to your pre-existing condition as they can now. I have not seen a reliable analysis yet of whether they would be required to offer you competitive rates or whether they could offer a screw-you rate that technically offers insurance and in practice costs far more than the expected benefit. However, with the new high-risk exchanges being created, you would have the option of buying into one of the existing high-risk pools, which might be expensive but would lump you in with other at-risk people, not expose you to having to negotiate rates on your own with a specific known condition.
I believe that Amazon has a conventional physical presence in New York - they have to have offices somewhere, and lucky New York gets to play host (and charge the sales tax).
Amazon could boycott North Carolina themselves. This would have no appreciable benefit for Amazon and would not result in any significant change in the legal situation; other corporations without any pre-existing 'affiliate program' would gain Amazon's market share and, lo and behold, would have exactly the same effect as Amazon's current action is having. Withdrawing entirely from the North Carolina market would be a completely irrational move on their part with no moral benefit. Amazon has not the slightest moral obligation to hang around incurring costs in order to help out its affiliates in making the affiliates' business model work in North Carolina.
That still wouldn't get Amazon to restore its NC affiliates, even if North Carolina made sales tax information perfectly free and instantly accessible at any moment. Amazon would still be forced to collect sales tax in North Carolina, due to having those affiliates constituting a 'physical presence' by the proposed NC law. By remaining an Internet retailer with no physical presence in the state, they do not have to charge the sales tax.
It's not about the technical difficulty. It's about the competitive disadvantage Amazon would accrue due to having an in-state physical presence. Other e-tailers would be able to undercut them simply by not having any physical presence in North Carolina.
Right! Public health inspectors have no place coming into PRIVATE restaurants! Just think of how much money the poor restaurateurs could save if they didn't have to put up with those intrusive inspections, citing them for things like 'chefs not washing hands' or 'seafood kept in unrefrigerated piles on a dirt floor next to the catbox.'
There would be no point to not selling to NC residents. North Carolina is claiming that the independent affiliates count as a 'physical presence' for Amazon, meaning Amazon has to pay sales tax on anything sold in the state. Amazon can eliminate that qualifier by eliminating its contracts with North Carolina businesses, freeing Amazon to continue to do business tax-free in the state. Refusing to do business entirely would only hurt Amazon more without particularly adding much more pressure.
Google is combining forces with Hulu. "An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy!" Google rationalizes their participation on the grounds that there's too much information in the world to efficiently search, so by eliminating one rich source of data (California), they can reduce the amount of information they need to index and thus keep their search results more relevant, which they consider a good thing.
If I request in this comment that people not respond to it, for how many people will the default behavior be responding to it? Please do not respond to this comment.
So that 'one by one' response boils down to repeating several times your opposition to abortion at all. Got it. Fortunately, people are not forced to abide by your opinions. I take the point of view that a functioning human life requires an active human brain; we accept brain death as a distinction of the end of life, so the inauguration of brain activity can be taken as the beginning of a human life. Until there are alpha waves (or some other test for ongoing neural activity), I consider a fetus a potential life, but not an actualized one. This happens to take place around the end of the second trimester. There has to be some point at which there was not an independent life before and now there is one. Some people put this at conception, which means that birth control pills are a form of active murder, since they prevent fertilized embryos from implanting in the lining of the womb. I put it at the start of consistent neural activity.
It doesn't need to have 'nothing ever wrong with it.' What it needs is to have a distinct improvement over the alternative. The argument is that the set of problems inherent in a national health care system is preferable to the set of problems inherent in the current mess. If a public/private mix works best, great, go with that. But rejecting the premise that a national plan could be better due to ideological rejection of government programs is no way to make policy.
I'm not convinced you've drawn the correlation between economic well-being and marriage rates; a lot of heavily white not-too-poor areas still have poor marriage rates, high divorce rates, and high abortion rates. But events IRL have, sadly, distracted me in a negative manner, so I'll just pass on further exploration of that, though I think we could have an interesting back-and-forth on it.
At this point, I think I have a reasonable handle on your position about international trade: the socioeconomic costs of displacement are sufficiently high that they outweigh the economic gains from trade, even if some of those gains are used to create a social safety net against the effects of displacement. Is that a fair summation? If so, then I think we've at least tacked down the bounds of what we're disagreeing on. I do agree that the social safety net was historically insufficient, particularly when coupled with the effects of racism. I don't agree that it cannot be made sufficient and still have a net gain.
My contention would be that the gain in overall standard of living as a result of the free trade was enough to, even with that poor safety net, still result in an improved standard of living over the status that America, including black Americans, would have had with an isolationistic trade policy, as much of that industrial boom came during a period when the US was very much a net exporter; without those exports manufacturing would not have boomed as much and both the black citizenry and the populace as a whole would have been worse off. But that's arguing a what-if situation, which is very hard to prove one way or another.
If schools are so popular, there should be no need to mandate participation, right? People will just opt in because they love it so much.
People will tend to do the default thing. Schools are mandatory so that people will send their kids and not incur the social cost of uneducated, low-value workers later in life. Social Security is mandatory so that people will defer those monies and not incur the social cost of homeless, impoverished elderly. Old poor people were a major social problem in the early 20th century. Social Security dramatically changed the face of old age for millions, and was made mandatory because the costs of those who chose to risk not saving up were higher than the benefits of those for whom the risk paid off.
government should not be intervening in a woman's personal medical decision
How can you say that a medical decision is personal if she cannot pay for it? I would agree, that your body is inviolate so long as you pay for its upkeep, but once you start waving the cup around for someone else's dough to take care of you, the placer of the coin in the cup has more say than you.
You're conflating the thread (public health care) with the specific point there (access to abortion clinics). Abortion clinics exist in the places where they have not been forced out because they meet a demand that exists today and doctors can make a living at them, even under today's health care system. Democrats generally (though not monolithically) assert that a woman who needs an abortion should be able to get one without interference from the government. This principle is able to stand on its own, regardless of payment. A separate common Democratic assertion is that anyone's access to medical services should be a given, not only because of the moral position but also because of the aggregate reduced cost of making preventive care available to people who would otherwise try to wait and hope it goes away on its own and end up with expensive, serious conditions. These are separate principles.
As for free trade, we are again mostly in opposition. Isolationism is, economically speaking, a terrible idea. Environmental, financial and labor issues certainly need to be more prominently considered in trade treaties, but shutting out imports would be devastating to the US economy. We already have a manufacturing base; the largest one in the world by a wide margin, in fact. The US is better able to take advantage of an interconnected world than any other entity on the planet partly because of that manufacturing base, which can import raw materials and export (or produce for domestic consumption) higher-valued goods. Buying American is nice, but we just don't produce everything we consume anymore because it's not economically efficient for many lower-valued goods.
I'd be interested to see your basis for relating marriage and abortion rates to trade; there doesn't appear to be much correlation between rich areas of the country and areas with higher marriage rates, for example.
Right, we have forty-seven million healthy, middle-aged, rich people who are the ones not getting insurance. Working poor who, for example, don't take their kids to see the doctor until they've gotten seriously, seriously ill and in need of expensive publicly-paid treatment when cheap preventative care would have nipped the issue in the bud if they could afford it... why, they just don't want health care!
Let's test the hypothesis that Social Security is popular. You would expect, therefore, that when the President of the United States proposes making adjustments to it, this would be loudly and vigorously denounced. Lo and behold, this is what happened. Yes, Social Security is very popular in the US, and only small minorities (yes, including many Libertarians) want to do away with it.
Oh, I'm sorry. I just had poll results saying Canadians were happy with their care. You have unsupported anecdotes. Clearly I should accept your premise, Anonymous.
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No, you won't go to jail. The maximum fine for not getting insurance is $695 if you make $80,000 or more. This is a fine, not a criminal penalty that could carry jail time. If you make less than that, you might be eligible for subsidies to reduce the cost you pay. You would be able to get some insurance; they could not refuse outright to cover you due to your pre-existing condition as they can now. I have not seen a reliable analysis yet of whether they would be required to offer you competitive rates or whether they could offer a screw-you rate that technically offers insurance and in practice costs far more than the expected benefit. However, with the new high-risk exchanges being created, you would have the option of buying into one of the existing high-risk pools, which might be expensive but would lump you in with other at-risk people, not expose you to having to negotiate rates on your own with a specific known condition.
Yes, clearly PBS has destroyed the free market for television in the US. Woe is us.
Please follow up with every sarcastic expression of sympathy you can muster. To start: "I'm playing the world's smallest violin for him."
Yes, AdBlock Plus reportedly does disable that tab.
Any time someone thinks they've idiot-proofed anything, the universe takes that as a challenge to design a bigger idiot.
I believe that Amazon has a conventional physical presence in New York - they have to have offices somewhere, and lucky New York gets to play host (and charge the sales tax).
They aren't cutting any customers off. What they're cutting off is sellers going through the Amazon Affiliates program. It would be very different.
Amazon could boycott North Carolina themselves. This would have no appreciable benefit for Amazon and would not result in any significant change in the legal situation; other corporations without any pre-existing 'affiliate program' would gain Amazon's market share and, lo and behold, would have exactly the same effect as Amazon's current action is having. Withdrawing entirely from the North Carolina market would be a completely irrational move on their part with no moral benefit. Amazon has not the slightest moral obligation to hang around incurring costs in order to help out its affiliates in making the affiliates' business model work in North Carolina.
That still wouldn't get Amazon to restore its NC affiliates, even if North Carolina made sales tax information perfectly free and instantly accessible at any moment. Amazon would still be forced to collect sales tax in North Carolina, due to having those affiliates constituting a 'physical presence' by the proposed NC law. By remaining an Internet retailer with no physical presence in the state, they do not have to charge the sales tax.
It's not about the technical difficulty. It's about the competitive disadvantage Amazon would accrue due to having an in-state physical presence. Other e-tailers would be able to undercut them simply by not having any physical presence in North Carolina.
Right! Public health inspectors have no place coming into PRIVATE restaurants! Just think of how much money the poor restaurateurs could save if they didn't have to put up with those intrusive inspections, citing them for things like 'chefs not washing hands' or 'seafood kept in unrefrigerated piles on a dirt floor next to the catbox.'
World War Three. After that one, there's not much left to form an economy from anyhow.
There would be no point to not selling to NC residents. North Carolina is claiming that the independent affiliates count as a 'physical presence' for Amazon, meaning Amazon has to pay sales tax on anything sold in the state. Amazon can eliminate that qualifier by eliminating its contracts with North Carolina businesses, freeing Amazon to continue to do business tax-free in the state. Refusing to do business entirely would only hurt Amazon more without particularly adding much more pressure.
Google is combining forces with Hulu. "An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy!" Google rationalizes their participation on the grounds that there's too much information in the world to efficiently search, so by eliminating one rich source of data (California), they can reduce the amount of information they need to index and thus keep their search results more relevant, which they consider a good thing.
If I request in this comment that people not respond to it, for how many people will the default behavior be responding to it? Please do not respond to this comment.
... of de programming language that your code doesn't compile!
So that 'one by one' response boils down to repeating several times your opposition to abortion at all. Got it. Fortunately, people are not forced to abide by your opinions. I take the point of view that a functioning human life requires an active human brain; we accept brain death as a distinction of the end of life, so the inauguration of brain activity can be taken as the beginning of a human life. Until there are alpha waves (or some other test for ongoing neural activity), I consider a fetus a potential life, but not an actualized one. This happens to take place around the end of the second trimester. There has to be some point at which there was not an independent life before and now there is one. Some people put this at conception, which means that birth control pills are a form of active murder, since they prevent fertilized embryos from implanting in the lining of the womb. I put it at the start of consistent neural activity.
What, nobody watches The Meaning of Life anymore?
Exactly.
It doesn't need to have 'nothing ever wrong with it.' What it needs is to have a distinct improvement over the alternative. The argument is that the set of problems inherent in a national health care system is preferable to the set of problems inherent in the current mess. If a public/private mix works best, great, go with that. But rejecting the premise that a national plan could be better due to ideological rejection of government programs is no way to make policy.
I'm not convinced you've drawn the correlation between economic well-being and marriage rates; a lot of heavily white not-too-poor areas still have poor marriage rates, high divorce rates, and high abortion rates. But events IRL have, sadly, distracted me in a negative manner, so I'll just pass on further exploration of that, though I think we could have an interesting back-and-forth on it.
At this point, I think I have a reasonable handle on your position about international trade: the socioeconomic costs of displacement are sufficiently high that they outweigh the economic gains from trade, even if some of those gains are used to create a social safety net against the effects of displacement. Is that a fair summation? If so, then I think we've at least tacked down the bounds of what we're disagreeing on. I do agree that the social safety net was historically insufficient, particularly when coupled with the effects of racism. I don't agree that it cannot be made sufficient and still have a net gain.
My contention would be that the gain in overall standard of living as a result of the free trade was enough to, even with that poor safety net, still result in an improved standard of living over the status that America, including black Americans, would have had with an isolationistic trade policy, as much of that industrial boom came during a period when the US was very much a net exporter; without those exports manufacturing would not have boomed as much and both the black citizenry and the populace as a whole would have been worse off. But that's arguing a what-if situation, which is very hard to prove one way or another.
If schools are so popular, there should be no need to mandate participation, right? People will just opt in because they love it so much.
People will tend to do the default thing. Schools are mandatory so that people will send their kids and not incur the social cost of uneducated, low-value workers later in life. Social Security is mandatory so that people will defer those monies and not incur the social cost of homeless, impoverished elderly. Old poor people were a major social problem in the early 20th century. Social Security dramatically changed the face of old age for millions, and was made mandatory because the costs of those who chose to risk not saving up were higher than the benefits of those for whom the risk paid off.
government should not be intervening in a woman's personal medical decision
How can you say that a medical decision is personal if she cannot pay for it? I would agree, that your body is inviolate so long as you pay for its upkeep, but once you start waving the cup around for someone else's dough to take care of you, the placer of the coin in the cup has more say than you.
You're conflating the thread (public health care) with the specific point there (access to abortion clinics). Abortion clinics exist in the places where they have not been forced out because they meet a demand that exists today and doctors can make a living at them, even under today's health care system. Democrats generally (though not monolithically) assert that a woman who needs an abortion should be able to get one without interference from the government. This principle is able to stand on its own, regardless of payment. A separate common Democratic assertion is that anyone's access to medical services should be a given, not only because of the moral position but also because of the aggregate reduced cost of making preventive care available to people who would otherwise try to wait and hope it goes away on its own and end up with expensive, serious conditions. These are separate principles.
As for free trade, we are again mostly in opposition. Isolationism is, economically speaking, a terrible idea. Environmental, financial and labor issues certainly need to be more prominently considered in trade treaties, but shutting out imports would be devastating to the US economy. We already have a manufacturing base; the largest one in the world by a wide margin, in fact. The US is better able to take advantage of an interconnected world than any other entity on the planet partly because of that manufacturing base, which can import raw materials and export (or produce for domestic consumption) higher-valued goods. Buying American is nice, but we just don't produce everything we consume anymore because it's not economically efficient for many lower-valued goods.
I'd be interested to see your basis for relating marriage and abortion rates to trade; there doesn't appear to be much correlation between rich areas of the country and areas with higher marriage rates, for example.
Right, we have forty-seven million healthy, middle-aged, rich people who are the ones not getting insurance. Working poor who, for example, don't take their kids to see the doctor until they've gotten seriously, seriously ill and in need of expensive publicly-paid treatment when cheap preventative care would have nipped the issue in the bud if they could afford it... why, they just don't want health care!
Let's test the hypothesis that Social Security is popular. You would expect, therefore, that when the President of the United States proposes making adjustments to it, this would be loudly and vigorously denounced. Lo and behold, this is what happened. Yes, Social Security is very popular in the US, and only small minorities (yes, including many Libertarians) want to do away with it.
Oh, I'm sorry. I just had poll results saying Canadians were happy with their care. You have unsupported anecdotes. Clearly I should accept your premise, Anonymous.