isn't the way insurance works by spreading cost?
What you describe sounds like a good first step (pull people at lower risk into the insurance pool).
We're talking about healthcare, not insurance. The two are not the same, however much this country likes to conflate the two. If I treat my car like shit (never change the oil, wreck the clutch, redline the engine, etc), and the thing becomes a maintenance nightmare down the road in auto repair, neither society nor insurance owes me a dime -- I eat those costs as a consequence of my poor decisions. On the flipside, if some drunk driver runs into me, insurance has my back. Why is it that only in healthcare are these concepts combined? Why can a person lead an unhealthy, sedentary, smoking-drinking-drugging, irresponsible life of their choosing, and society is simply expected to float their risk and their costs (emergency or not, whether they be truly life threatening or simply unpleasant). I'll gladly fork in to pay for the unfortunate victims of true misfortune, but I shouldn't be required to subsidize the bad decisions of an entire nation of fools. You smoked all your life? Sorry buddy, that lung cancer drug is on your dime. Lived on a diet of Big Macs and Super Sized colas for 50 years? Triple bypass is on YOUR wallet. Seriously, I have _no_ empathy for someone who drove themselves willingly to an early grave.
So....reinvent the wheel to keep pleasing the Free Market Fairy, and go on ignoring the fact that socialized medicine produces better outcomes for a third the cost?
Non sequitur. Different cultures, needs, diseases, exercise, diets, yadda, yadda, yadda...get back to me when you don't have a straw man to burn.
you'll realize that the world is a lot more complicated than you think it is from your mommies basement.
As it is also more complicated that you "money grows on trees" advocates. Why don't you go look up what percentage of healthcare expenses are indeed "emergency"/"urgent"/rushed care and then get back to me. When you learn such expenses are a very small amount of our total healthcare expenditures and that you have your head up your ass, we can get back to discussing this on an educated level.
You misunderstand...this is not a crony choice being made to benefit business. This is an ochestrated political decision made by the White House to improve their party's election chances in 2014. Believe it or not, crippling economic fallouts are not opportune in an election year. If the timeline were different, or if the effect on business had been more subdued, Obama wouldn't have done jack to delay this.
And how much did it go up in the years before obamacare was passed?
How is that relevant? Healthcare costs are (and have always been) the pressing issue in this country. If the bill failed to address said escalating costs in any positive way, I'd still call it a failure (i.e. lack of change is equivalent to failure).
Seems like the rate of inflation in health care insurance is slowing to a historically low level of 4.5%:.......YMMV, but nationwide the trend is getting better not worse.
Slowing or relocating? These costs aren't mysteriously disappearing, they're shifting (to the government, and to employers, and to youthful taxpayers that previously had no insurance). You can't just look at the cost of insurance in a vacuum. "Total system cost" is what I care about. As far as I can see, at best all we did was move around the deck chairs on the Titanic, remaining fully ignorant of cost controls. At worst, we spent a ton of money doing nothing or making it even worse.
And handing it over to private insurance companies has produced a better result?
You don't understand...routing all our healthcare costs through an opaque middleman (insurance companies) drove up costs by removing transparency, consumer choice, and competition. The solution to this is not to add an additional level of opaque middlemen (government). The solution is to expose the costs to the consumer. Do that, and these bullshit "Chargemasters" would go away from simple market mechanics. All Obamacare does is cement our existing shitty system by forcing us all to pay the artificial inflated costs that a bunch of assholes who aren't me negotiated behind my back.
Great, but where's the equally idiotic comparisons to marrying your toaster, your dog, or a 10 year kid?
What's idiotic about those comparisons? They all involve redefining marriage to include the unnatural, some more extreme than others. Hyperbole may not be the best way to prove a point, but I wouldn't call it idiotic -- the argument has merit. Or are you trying to claim permanent homosexual coupling is not unnatural? Nature certainly disagrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
"According to geneticist Simon Levay in 1996, "Although homosexual behavior is very common in the animal world, it seems to be very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such behavior to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Thus, a homosexual orientation, if one can speak of such thing in animals, seems to be a rarity."
The court's judgment was that, in almost all cases, definitions of marriage fall to the states, not to the federal government. The only time the federal government can step into marriage is to invalidate a state law that denies equal rights, as in Loving v. Virginia. DOMA Section 3 did the opposite: the federal government was invalidating a state law that granted equal rights. Without getting into legalese details about levels of scrutiny, the court said that DOMA Section 3 overstepped the federal government's bounds for no good reason by getting into state business.
If marriage is "state's business", by the same definition, ANY federal subsidy or tax that is tied to marriage should be overruled on the same grounds. Otherwise, you have the federal government determining tax law based on a classification they can't even define themselves.
specifically the DOMA decision revolves around States Rights, not around gay marriage itself, and is actually a big win for States Rights supporters. people are saying it legalizes gay marriage, but it does nothing of the sort. it simply says that the federal government cant appropriate for itself the power to define marriage as it has always been something held at the state level, and the fed did not show any proper reasoning for why it should be taken away and decided at hte fed level.
All reports I've seen of the DOMA decision attribute it to the "equal protection" clause, not anything to do with the Tenth Amendment. Do you have a cite for that? Hell, I think they have a far better case under the Tenth, but that's not the case that was made.
can't think of the last time I've heard of a Justice saying that he personally detests the ruling but 'this is what the law says'. They all seem to join or dissent with the ruling that they prefer and back themselves into an argument to support it, which is antithetical to the job description. Somebody please prove me wrong on that.
"Roberts stressed that the decision does not speak to the merits of the law. "We do not consider whether the act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the nation's elected leaders," he said. "
I disagree with DOMA, and support same sex marriage, but this Supreme Court decision boggles me. "Marriage" from a civil standpoint carries various civil benefits (taxes, etc). The federal government is well within their rights to define it. It has nothing to do with "equal protection". Unless a white male can use "equal protection" to strike down affirmative action laws. Or allow felons to demand voting rights. Or declaring income taxes unconstitutional because everyone doesn't pay the same amount. "Equal protection" is being seriously misconstrued in this case. DOMA may have been shitty legislation, but it was constitutional.
Not quite. Estimates put parity around 2015-2016 (http://bnef.com/PressReleases/view/172). And wind comes with its own set of gotchas (need ideal locations, damage to bird ecosystem, etc)
Solar will probably be at price parity in less than 5 years.
Solar is already at price parity in a few locations (such as Hawaii). I'd argue it'd be hard to make it feasible for the entire country without subsidies, but I could see a few states hitting parity in the next 5 years.
Dirty coal doesn't stand a chance based on price alone.
I wouldn't say that. We have a metric shit ton of coal in the US. It will always be competitive as at least PART of the energy mix. Keep in mind that as demand for coal drops as we shift to other energy sources, so too does the cost of coal, thus making it competitive again. This is why natural gas hasn't put the nail in the coffin of coal yet. They've hit a new equilibrium based on their new balance and will generally maintain that balance going forward until the market changes again. Though this is the first time renewables can say they're getting competitive (without subsidies).
Clean coal really doesn't exist.
There's alot that can be done to improve the industry without 100% emissions elimination.
Or put up solar panels. Maybe some of them will even build solar panels! That's good for the economy.
And ban any car older than 3 years -- that would build a thriving auto market. And mandatory houses for everyone, because that would cause a thriving housing market. And run a company that smashes windows on odds days and repairs them on even days -- tons of work to go around! Man, the economy is a simple thing to streamline.
Actually, the price of energy has always been artificially low. Internalizing an external cost fixes a market failure, and making the market more efficient is good for the economy.
An external cost I'm sure you're basically speculating at, as you've enumerated nothing. Where's your figures showing costs of "fossil fuels + external costs" vs "ditching fossil fuels entirely"?. I don't see any "artificially low" prices -- they are what they are. That's precisely why the shift to natural gas occurred. Because the market dictated it.
The country doesn't have a two party system. It has individuals that choose to associated into groups (parties) to maximize their chance of getting things done in elections and legislative efforts.
Hrm, I wonder how many of these "parties" in our "system" are electable.
When a single person can put hundreds or thousands (or more) of others out of jobs and homes to serve their own selfish interests, we have a problem.
I don't see that as a problem. It's an unfortunate necessity of business. And it can't be changed without introducing a world of other problems (such as companies going bankrupt because they aren't able to effectively cost-manage their company). Also, you make it seems like these evil business owners are scheming to ruin as many people's lives as possible if it saves them a buck. And it's typically not that black and white. I know many business owners and they aren't the horrible people they are made out to be. They often seek any and all possible alternates before cutting employees. And, if forced to downsize, they do it with a great deal of regret. Now I'm sure there's a few instances where the separation between employee and CEO is so great that it becomes "numbers on paper" moreso than "people's livelihoods", but once again I feel this is the exception, not the norm.
. When a single person (or a couple Koch Brothers) can sway national politics by far more than a handful of votes, we have a problem.
Not a problem if our government was small, rather than the bloated corporatist state it is. If the federal government was properly limited in power the way it was intended, all the money in the world wouldn't help a company generate favorable legislation since it would be unconstitutional and illegal for the government to do in the first place.
But the closer you get to the top, the more likely you're deriving the majority of your wealth from parasitically interposing yourself to control the labor of others.
I'll agree with you on this much, but that segment of our populace is so damn small that it simply doesn't concern me that much, particularly when the parasites at the bottom are far _far_ greater in number. Moreover, typically the people at the top at least did _something_ to earn their parasite status (with the exception of handed down familial wealth, which is why I support a 100% death tax).
The key differentiation, however, is that I'm calling the wealthy capitalist class --- who accumulate their wealth by taking a cut of the labor of others, rather than through their own work --- the parasites.
Except that that is a straw man. Because you're either bitching about the.01% (in which case, I'd say the # of "parasites" in the system is quite low...) -or- you're attempting to call the upper 10-20% "high on the hog parasites that don't work", which is simply wrong. And, consequently, left-wing politics are fantastic for punishing the upper 20% for the crimes of the.01%
Or how about the push for more male nurses? Or equal maternity leave for both sexes? Or "Guy's Nights" at the club where drinks are free for men? Yadda Yadda Yadda...feminism is about keeping all the unequal freebies and bitching about the rest.
Bully for you. But the rest of society has decided they aren't going to work their asses off in miserable jobs so you can collect all the fruits of their labor and live high on the hog off their work. So, sorry, you don't get a private island. And, if you're such a self-entitled lazy parasite that you refuse to work on the same terms as everyone else (including a little toilet cleaning), I hope being homeless and starving is your second choice preference after that private island.
lol, congrats, you are now a capitalist/Republican.
What "reduced spending" and "smaller government" actually seem to result in is decreased social services (education, health care, etc) while leaving military and intelligence budgets intact (often beyond what the military is actually requesting, as we've seen often enough in recent years in the US, e.g. the F35 controversy).
Surely, you don't mean Republicans, do you? Because they remember about the noble goal of smaller budget/smaller government only while Democrats are in power. And who's idea was it to keep wars in Afganistan and Iraq off the budget (as "emergency supplemental appropriations bills")? Brilliant strategy to keep a low "budget"
You may mock the Republicans, but the government expanded very little under Bush. Very few programs passed under the Bush Administration still exist today. The wars are over (and thus were temporary expansions). His tax cuts are expired. The Patriot act sunsetted as well. DHS I think is the last remnant of Bush's "government growth", and it came about as a response to an immediate terrorist act on US soil.
Now look at the Obama administration. Obamacare is _permanent_ and a massive government expansion. Obama's tax cuts have been made permanent. The Patriot act has been extended.
Legislation under a Repbulican administration tends to go away over time. Legislation under a Democratic administration expands to government and sticks with us forever (see FDR).
No, Occupy was protesting on Wall Street, pissed at the banks for getting bailed out by the government. The Tea Party was protesting the government for bailing out the banks. It's too bad they couldn't combine their efforts, but Fox News says OWS is all dirty hippie rapists, and CNN says the Tea Party is ignorant racists.
Whereas I agree with your sentiment, I think the Tea Party people might have joined them if Occupy didn't rapidly turn into a generic Democratic platform with no centralized goal or agenda. What started out as a sensible movement eventually morphed into "we want gay marriage, environmental regulation, free healthcare, etc, etc, etc... oh, and we don't want the banks bailed out either". And that's not really a surprise -- the same thing happened to the Tea Party, which started grassroots and then eventually just became a mouthpiece for the "generic Republican platform". At any rate, that's why I, as a major opponent to the bailout, did not support Occupy (and also why I don't support the current incarnation of the "Tea Party" either)
Why? Other than Norway with its massive oil reserves (the proceeds from which it invests incidentally, rather than pumping them back into the local economy), what's so special about these countries?
Most European societies are small, homogeneous, relatively dense, and culturally similar. Sprawl mixed w/ population growth creates more problems than you're willing to acknowledge. On "village/town"-size populations, even _Communism_ works, but we've seen it fail time and time again on grander "large scales". Problems are far easier to solve when everyone is generally "on the same page". Look at the success story that is Germany. They have but 25% of the people the US has, and less than 4% of the land mass. Someone in Hamburg might give a shit about what's going on in Munich. But do you think a Californian gives a flying fuck what happens to a Virginian? Do you think they can even _relate_? I'm heard West Coast inhabitants refer to East Coast inhabitants as if they're from a different _planet_ (and vice versa). This is one of the many reasons we state's rights advocates rail against excessive federal legislation. The US is far too big and diverse for "One Way" to solve everyone's needs.
But they're far too late to the game to be a major player. Natural gas has the same infrastructure obstruction they've been slowly overcoming, a far more cost competitive product, and a solid established user base in industry and public transportation. NG is the immediate future. Solar might follow it.
Slashdot Mirror
We're talking about healthcare, not insurance. The two are not the same, however much this country likes to conflate the two. If I treat my car like shit (never change the oil, wreck the clutch, redline the engine, etc), and the thing becomes a maintenance nightmare down the road in auto repair, neither society nor insurance owes me a dime -- I eat those costs as a consequence of my poor decisions. On the flipside, if some drunk driver runs into me, insurance has my back. Why is it that only in healthcare are these concepts combined? Why can a person lead an unhealthy, sedentary, smoking-drinking-drugging, irresponsible life of their choosing, and society is simply expected to float their risk and their costs (emergency or not, whether they be truly life threatening or simply unpleasant). I'll gladly fork in to pay for the unfortunate victims of true misfortune, but I shouldn't be required to subsidize the bad decisions of an entire nation of fools. You smoked all your life? Sorry buddy, that lung cancer drug is on your dime. Lived on a diet of Big Macs and Super Sized colas for 50 years? Triple bypass is on YOUR wallet. Seriously, I have _no_ empathy for someone who drove themselves willingly to an early grave.
Non sequitur. Different cultures, needs, diseases, exercise, diets, yadda, yadda, yadda...get back to me when you don't have a straw man to burn.
As it is also more complicated that you "money grows on trees" advocates. Why don't you go look up what percentage of healthcare expenses are indeed "emergency"/"urgent"/rushed care and then get back to me. When you learn such expenses are a very small amount of our total healthcare expenditures and that you have your head up your ass, we can get back to discussing this on an educated level.
You misunderstand...this is not a crony choice being made to benefit business. This is an ochestrated political decision made by the White House to improve their party's election chances in 2014. Believe it or not, crippling economic fallouts are not opportune in an election year. If the timeline were different, or if the effect on business had been more subdued, Obama wouldn't have done jack to delay this.
How is that relevant? Healthcare costs are (and have always been) the pressing issue in this country. If the bill failed to address said escalating costs in any positive way, I'd still call it a failure (i.e. lack of change is equivalent to failure).
Slowing or relocating? These costs aren't mysteriously disappearing, they're shifting (to the government, and to employers, and to youthful taxpayers that previously had no insurance). You can't just look at the cost of insurance in a vacuum. "Total system cost" is what I care about. As far as I can see, at best all we did was move around the deck chairs on the Titanic, remaining fully ignorant of cost controls. At worst, we spent a ton of money doing nothing or making it even worse.
You don't understand...routing all our healthcare costs through an opaque middleman (insurance companies) drove up costs by removing transparency, consumer choice, and competition. The solution to this is not to add an additional level of opaque middlemen (government). The solution is to expose the costs to the consumer. Do that, and these bullshit "Chargemasters" would go away from simple market mechanics. All Obamacare does is cement our existing shitty system by forcing us all to pay the artificial inflated costs that a bunch of assholes who aren't me negotiated behind my back.
What's idiotic about those comparisons? They all involve redefining marriage to include the unnatural, some more extreme than others. Hyperbole may not be the best way to prove a point, but I wouldn't call it idiotic -- the argument has merit. Or are you trying to claim permanent homosexual coupling is not unnatural? Nature certainly disagrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
"According to geneticist Simon Levay in 1996, "Although homosexual behavior is very common in the animal world, it seems to be very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such behavior to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Thus, a homosexual orientation, if one can speak of such thing in animals, seems to be a rarity."
If marriage is "state's business", by the same definition, ANY federal subsidy or tax that is tied to marriage should be overruled on the same grounds. Otherwise, you have the federal government determining tax law based on a classification they can't even define themselves.
All reports I've seen of the DOMA decision attribute it to the "equal protection" clause, not anything to do with the Tenth Amendment. Do you have a cite for that? Hell, I think they have a far better case under the Tenth, but that's not the case that was made.
How about the most recent pisspoor decision? http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/28/supreme-court-upholds-individual-mandate-obamacare-survives/
"Roberts stressed that the decision does not speak to the merits of the law. "We do not consider whether the act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the nation's elected leaders," he said. "
Not true. They both come with tax breaks. Otherwise they wouldn't have a "married, filing jointly" tax bracket that differs from the rest.
I disagree with DOMA, and support same sex marriage, but this Supreme Court decision boggles me. "Marriage" from a civil standpoint carries various civil benefits (taxes, etc). The federal government is well within their rights to define it. It has nothing to do with "equal protection". Unless a white male can use "equal protection" to strike down affirmative action laws. Or allow felons to demand voting rights. Or declaring income taxes unconstitutional because everyone doesn't pay the same amount. "Equal protection" is being seriously misconstrued in this case. DOMA may have been shitty legislation, but it was constitutional.
Not quite. Estimates put parity around 2015-2016 (http://bnef.com/PressReleases/view/172). And wind comes with its own set of gotchas (need ideal locations, damage to bird ecosystem, etc)
Solar is already at price parity in a few locations (such as Hawaii). I'd argue it'd be hard to make it feasible for the entire country without subsidies, but I could see a few states hitting parity in the next 5 years.
I wouldn't say that. We have a metric shit ton of coal in the US. It will always be competitive as at least PART of the energy mix. Keep in mind that as demand for coal drops as we shift to other energy sources, so too does the cost of coal, thus making it competitive again. This is why natural gas hasn't put the nail in the coffin of coal yet. They've hit a new equilibrium based on their new balance and will generally maintain that balance going forward until the market changes again. Though this is the first time renewables can say they're getting competitive (without subsidies).
There's alot that can be done to improve the industry without 100% emissions elimination.
Which costs nothing apparently...?
And ban any car older than 3 years -- that would build a thriving auto market. And mandatory houses for everyone, because that would cause a thriving housing market. And run a company that smashes windows on odds days and repairs them on even days -- tons of work to go around! Man, the economy is a simple thing to streamline.
An external cost I'm sure you're basically speculating at, as you've enumerated nothing. Where's your figures showing costs of "fossil fuels + external costs" vs "ditching fossil fuels entirely"?. I don't see any "artificially low" prices -- they are what they are. That's precisely why the shift to natural gas occurred. Because the market dictated it.
Hrm, I wonder how many of these "parties" in our "system" are electable.
I don't see that as a problem. It's an unfortunate necessity of business. And it can't be changed without introducing a world of other problems (such as companies going bankrupt because they aren't able to effectively cost-manage their company). Also, you make it seems like these evil business owners are scheming to ruin as many people's lives as possible if it saves them a buck. And it's typically not that black and white. I know many business owners and they aren't the horrible people they are made out to be. They often seek any and all possible alternates before cutting employees. And, if forced to downsize, they do it with a great deal of regret. Now I'm sure there's a few instances where the separation between employee and CEO is so great that it becomes "numbers on paper" moreso than "people's livelihoods", but once again I feel this is the exception, not the norm.
Not a problem if our government was small, rather than the bloated corporatist state it is. If the federal government was properly limited in power the way it was intended, all the money in the world wouldn't help a company generate favorable legislation since it would be unconstitutional and illegal for the government to do in the first place.
I'll agree with you on this much, but that segment of our populace is so damn small that it simply doesn't concern me that much, particularly when the parasites at the bottom are far _far_ greater in number. Moreover, typically the people at the top at least did _something_ to earn their parasite status (with the exception of handed down familial wealth, which is why I support a 100% death tax).
Except that that is a straw man. Because you're either bitching about the .01% (in which case, I'd say the # of "parasites" in the system is quite low...) -or- you're attempting to call the upper 10-20% "high on the hog parasites that don't work", which is simply wrong. And, consequently, left-wing politics are fantastic for punishing the upper 20% for the crimes of the .01%
Maybe you should look up how Senator Obama voted on the Patriot Act -- they don't look all that different to me.
Or how about the push for more male nurses? Or equal maternity leave for both sexes? Or "Guy's Nights" at the club where drinks are free for men? Yadda Yadda Yadda...feminism is about keeping all the unequal freebies and bitching about the rest.
lol, congrats, you are now a capitalist/Republican.
Except that reality says the opposite, since defense spending is a smaller portion of the budget than it has ever been, whereas social spending is at all time highs: http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2012/10/federal-spending-by-the-numbers-2012/62-percent-of-the-federal-budget-goes-to-entitlements
You may mock the Republicans, but the government expanded very little under Bush. Very few programs passed under the Bush Administration still exist today. The wars are over (and thus were temporary expansions). His tax cuts are expired. The Patriot act sunsetted as well. DHS I think is the last remnant of Bush's "government growth", and it came about as a response to an immediate terrorist act on US soil.
Now look at the Obama administration. Obamacare is _permanent_ and a massive government expansion. Obama's tax cuts have been made permanent. The Patriot act has been extended.
Legislation under a Repbulican administration tends to go away over time. Legislation under a Democratic administration expands to government and sticks with us forever (see FDR).
Whereas I agree with your sentiment, I think the Tea Party people might have joined them if Occupy didn't rapidly turn into a generic Democratic platform with no centralized goal or agenda. What started out as a sensible movement eventually morphed into "we want gay marriage, environmental regulation, free healthcare, etc, etc, etc ... oh, and we don't want the banks bailed out either". And that's not really a surprise -- the same thing happened to the Tea Party, which started grassroots and then eventually just became a mouthpiece for the "generic Republican platform". At any rate, that's why I, as a major opponent to the bailout, did not support Occupy (and also why I don't support the current incarnation of the "Tea Party" either)
Most European societies are small, homogeneous, relatively dense, and culturally similar. Sprawl mixed w/ population growth creates more problems than you're willing to acknowledge. On "village/town"-size populations, even _Communism_ works, but we've seen it fail time and time again on grander "large scales". Problems are far easier to solve when everyone is generally "on the same page". Look at the success story that is Germany. They have but 25% of the people the US has, and less than 4% of the land mass. Someone in Hamburg might give a shit about what's going on in Munich. But do you think a Californian gives a flying fuck what happens to a Virginian? Do you think they can even _relate_? I'm heard West Coast inhabitants refer to East Coast inhabitants as if they're from a different _planet_ (and vice versa). This is one of the many reasons we state's rights advocates rail against excessive federal legislation. The US is far too big and diverse for "One Way" to solve everyone's needs.
But they're far too late to the game to be a major player. Natural gas has the same infrastructure obstruction they've been slowly overcoming, a far more cost competitive product, and a solid established user base in industry and public transportation. NG is the immediate future. Solar might follow it.