No. Every penny gov't employees make comes out of "your pockets". The same gov't employees that, on average, make more than private employees. The same gov't employees agitating for tax increases so they can get pay raises.
Don't pretend its just the rich getting taxed either. That's not only silly classism, but inherently wrong. The first tax implemented by the Obama administration was a regressive sin tax. The Obamacare system contains seven seperate taxes that directly tax people making under $200k/yr, including increases to income tax.
The market, on the other hand, actually creates wealth.
Palin only said that you could see Russia from Alaska
"They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." The actual quote, and an actual fact.
she was trying to claim that as a reason for why she has experience in international politics
In context, that is not her claim. However, it should be noted that Palin engaged in international treaty negotiations, as a representative of the United States as well as Alaska, with Canada. The topic was a natural gas pipeline. In the 2008 Presidential elections, she was the only one of the four Presidential or Vice Presidential candidates with international negotiation experience.
Self defense is not "trouble". In fact, suggesting that self defense should be removed as a viable legal option should make you a target for elimination. In self defense.
No, it has to do with the fact that we don't have as much free-market as anti-free-market whiners like to tell us we do. You can't strongly regulate an industry and then claim that free market failed.
e.g. cable television, insurance, pharmacuticals, power production, power distribution, etc, etc, etc.
I don't think society has any legitimate interest at stake here that is not covered by allowing the free market to set prices for human kidneys. It should be interesting to see what kidney buyers will place real $ value on.
Colourblindness is not a loss of something. I can still see colour just like you do but if someone writes on an orange piece of paper with a green pen, I cannot read it.
So in other words, you lied. It is a loss of something.
In fact, color blindness can be dangerous, common signals used in all transport agencies; air, marine, train, all use signals that are hard or impossible to distinguish for the colorblind. Not only are you unable to take any number of jobs, but even recreational activities would be potentially dangerous.
No, what they're saying is that it's expensive and people shouldn't be required to pay for other peoples health care anyways. Especially when the people in question are busy not buying health care on their own (as most uninsured young adults choose not to buy it).
Also of course, anybody against health care is racist and want to step over (and on!) the dead bodies of the poor! Or so the conversation goes...
Both the blogs are biased, uninformative, and basically uninteresting.
Furthermore, the source chosen for the slashdot posting seems to have been searched for and specifically chosen so as to be the least informative and lacking in interest. A better one is at Toronto Star
Among the information in that paper is a statement by Watts that the trial was fair, and a direct contradiction to "Making Light's" timeline of events.
And here you said that insurance companies would leave the business before doing such a thing, and yet, every job provided health insurance plan I ever had came with a set price.
Every job provided health insurance plan covers healthy individuals, which are the bulk of workers. The larger the company, the larger the pool, and thus the smaller effect an ill hire would have on the plan costs. Some states allow employers to pool together.
At the end of the year, every pool - every single pool! - has its premiums adjusted so that that pool is profitable to the insurance company. If your company consisted of 10 people all with MS and nobody else, then your insurance costs would be astronomical.
When somebody enters the pool with a pre-existing condition, they are effectively punishing every other member of the pool with higher rates without having paid premiums while not needing care.
Oh. I get it. So the insurance companies are not allowed to deny coverage based on existing conditions, but there is nothing wrong with them charging premiums, of say, one hundred billion dollars a month ($100,000,000,000/mo).
That depends on what you're talking about, you keep changing context.
If your context is your proposal: Clearly not, because being forced to cover all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions or coverage at flat rates while not requiring the cheap-to-cover healthy individuals to pay for coverage would cause rational individuals to delay coverage until needed, requiring insurance companies to charge astronomical rates people like you wouldn't "allow", thus ending the potential for profit and the insurance companies would leave the market. If your context is the "Obamacare" reconciliation bill: High cost individuals will be placed into high risk pools that is subsidized by the gov't. The insurance company recoups the value spent by the high risk pool on medical costs, the gov't subsidizes to the level it is willing to, and the balance is billed to individual policy holders.
Existing state policies for high risk, such as California's Major Risk Pool pools the high risk patients with Cobra and other state sponsored medical coverage, and then subsidizes coverage on top of that. This is the only reason a group of guaranteed cost individuals can be covered without massive premium costs.
Once again, insurance is a profit making enterprise. If you are intent on eliminating the possibility for profit by requiring low cost coverage to high cost individuals, thus allowing low cost individuals to escape the market due to lack of need, then the insurance providers will be vacated by profit seeking companies.
See, that way the insurance company, say Humana, can claim that they offered coverage, but the customer refused to pay, which is required by law. They were so kind as to give the number to Cigna. Their rates are half of what Humana's are for preexisting condition customers.
$50,000,000,000/month is still a profitable enterprise, even for a pre-existing condition. Of course, yearly caps exist - until "Obamacare" is passed, so the actual price point would be much lower.
See, an understanding of how insurance works is necessary to design reasonable proposals for reform.
No, the industry that would be vacated would be the insurance industry. Not the medical provider one.
I would hate the be under a gov't control health system like the VA system is. I have VA coverage and never, ever, use it. Neither does my grand-father.
For a health company insurance company insuring someone with MS, for example, they are on the hook for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to cover that single person. And you are saying that they should not be allowed to deny a MS patient coverage (I agree), but can base rates on preexisting conditions or risks(I disagree).
Wow. Your reading comprehension is seriously lacking. At no point have I suggested an insurance company should not be allowed to deny new coverage of a person found to be a victim of MS, or any serious disease. At the point they are diagnosed it is a pre-existing condition and should not be covered by anything new. The suggestion that insurance companies should be on he hook for every old disease they have the day they sign up for coverage (which you suggest the insurance company cannot deny) is entirely yours.
It's simple really: You do not have a right to force a company to pay for your medical coverage, even if that company bills itself as a medical insurance company. If you want that sort of guarantee, do not look to insurance for it. Look to your gov't, because only the gov't has the ability to engage in the kind of force required to demand medical providers (of which insurance companies are -not-) provide such services.
How much would an insurance company have to charge to break even? What's to stop them from charging that amount or more to either cover the cost of this patient, or force this money loser to move to their competition?
Actuary tables are very good. When you sign up and are not ill your payments will be based on not being ill. If you sign up and are already ill, your costs will go up because it is a known fact that it will cost much more to cover you. That's assuming you can find somebody willing to assume the absolute certainty that you will require medical services. If you sign up and lie, claiming to not be ill when you are, then when the insurance company finds out they will rightfully discontinue your coverage ab initio, from the outset.
Well, Gee. I don't work for an insurance company, and I don't have an MBA, and I certainly don't have a law degree or have any experience writing contracts, but since you insist, let me take a whack at it.
Nor, clearly, are you very logical or understand the problem.
Under your proposal, the problem is simple: It is not necessary to purchase insurance when one is not ill, because one one gets ill one may purchase insurance and not be denied. Get diagnosed with cancer? NO problem! Sign up with SoonToBeBankruptHealthInsurance. Pay one month of the flat-fee that doesn't vary! They can't deny you!
Your above proposal with loans and whatnot is nearly nonsensical and does nothing for the problem. It appears you were trying to solve some other problem, such as canceling insurance shortly after beginning.
I'm healthy and I have coverage. My whole family is healthy and I have the all covered.
That's because, right now, if you become ill without coverage you cannot get coverage. Once again, refer to your two line proposal.
Again, the healthy have coverage today. Over 90% of the population is covered. Are over 90% of the population not healthy?
Seriously, do you disassociate yourself so much from the topic at hand that you started that you are so unable to continue with subject context? You created a proposal that changes the system such that people cannot be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions. Thus, why would people without immediate need bother with insurance? If they get ill, -then- they can get insurance. Until then, they won't need it.
People don't pay for insurance because they are not healthy. That's not the point of insurance, by definition.
The point of insurance, be it health, automotive, or real estate, is to pay somebody else to assume the risk that bad things will happen to the insured item. When you force, through regulatory laws, the insurance company to pay for events that occurred prior to the start of insurance then there is no reason for the insured to bother getting insurance until they need it. It thus ceases to be insurance, and any attempt at insurance will financially fail.
This is like telling home insurance carriers that they cannot refuse to cover termite damage for a house that had termites at the time of initial coverage.
Adding the "everyone must get coverage" clause without flat rate pricing will cause insurance companies to gouge those in high risk categories, much like auto insurance companies do today.
Such pricing makes sense. Once again, insurance is paying somebody to assume the risk that bad things will happen. When bad things are more likely to happen, you cost more to insure.
It's become obvious why you chose the buffet restaurant comparison. Such a comparison is still not appropriate, as its not how insurance works.
Strange. My cell phone provider has found a way to keep me from getting a cell phone only when I need to make a call. It's a shame that the massive legal teams at these insurance companies can't find a way to do the same.
They have such a way. It's by refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
Oh, and buffet restaurants are not legally allowed to discriminate.
They most certainly can discriminate. They will kick out heavy eaters. They will kick out people who spend too much time at the location. Furthermore the restaurant itself sets the menu. Nobody can purchase a buffet entrance fee and then kobe beef.
But even if you drop the restaurant analogy, you can't touch "I guess you are wrong when you assumed that the board members of insurance companies would rather loose millions in investments and make thousands of their employees unemployed than simplify their books by charging a flat rate."
Being unable to "deny coverage or treatment based on a preexisting condition" is the way to lose millions in investments. Such a legal requirement without requiring the healthy to be insured - which your short two line proposal does not include - will bankrupt the insurance companies very very fast. Except that the companies would leave the market even quicker.
You would have been better off showing that those that have cheaper rates, like the young and healthy, would probably get higher rates because they would need to be charged the same as the 64-yr-old smoking diabetic who has to wheel around an O2 tank behind their Hoverounds.
That doesn't matter, as the healthy will not get coverage.
Your comparison is poor. Insurance is not a buffet market restaurant. It is a third party, charging its customers a flat rate for all their eating needs. Then you're requiring it, by law, to not refuse heavy eaters, binge eaters, and people who only decide to get coverage when they are hungry and forego coverage when they are not.
Private insurers have much better resumes than the gov't, federal or otherwise.
The problem is that people don't want health insurance, they're demanding infinite health procedures at zero cost. Insurance is not the correct provider for infinite health procedures at zero cost. For that goal, the gov't is the only possible provider. However, that runs into the second issue that there is no such thing as "zero cost", and the people eventually forced to pay will not pay for nationwide infinite health procedures at zero cost.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Every penny gov't employees make comes out of "your pockets". The same gov't employees that, on average, make more than private employees. The same gov't employees agitating for tax increases so they can get pay raises.
Don't pretend its just the rich getting taxed either. That's not only silly classism, but inherently wrong. The first tax implemented by the Obama administration was a regressive sin tax. The Obamacare system contains seven seperate taxes that directly tax people making under $200k/yr, including increases to income tax.
The market, on the other hand, actually creates wealth.
Palin only said that you could see Russia from Alaska
"They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." The actual quote, and an actual fact.
she was trying to claim that as a reason for why she has experience in international politics
In context, that is not her claim. However, it should be noted that Palin engaged in international treaty negotiations, as a representative of the United States as well as Alaska, with Canada. The topic was a natural gas pipeline. In the 2008 Presidential elections, she was the only one of the four Presidential or Vice Presidential candidates with international negotiation experience.
Self defense is not "trouble". In fact, suggesting that self defense should be removed as a viable legal option should make you a target for elimination. In self defense.
You're dying. Six weeks to live.
What do you care of side effects?
This is the major problem with FDA interference with medicines that can control or cure life-ending diseases.
Fix -what- locally? Demand smaller gov't, and less taxes? Done!
No, it has to do with the fact that we don't have as much free-market as anti-free-market whiners like to tell us we do. You can't strongly regulate an industry and then claim that free market failed.
e.g. cable television, insurance, pharmacuticals, power production, power distribution, etc, etc, etc.
The American Revolutionary War
The American Civil War
Mexican American War
I don't think society has any legitimate interest at stake here that is not covered by allowing the free market to set prices for human kidneys. It should be interesting to see what kidney buyers will place real $ value on.
Colourblindness is not a loss of something. I can still see colour just like you do but if someone writes on an orange piece of paper with a green pen, I cannot read it.
So in other words, you lied. It is a loss of something.
In fact, color blindness can be dangerous, common signals used in all transport agencies; air, marine, train, all use signals that are hard or impossible to distinguish for the colorblind. Not only are you unable to take any number of jobs, but even recreational activities would be potentially dangerous.
Me tending to my ill, those related and associated with me, is not the same as tending your ill.
Hunter gatherers felt the same way. Even the ones that won the evolutionary war.
I do nothing "per se", because I don't value the "service" wikileaks "offers".
Neanderthals also lost the war of evolution. Coincidence?
No, what they're saying is that it's expensive and people shouldn't be required to pay for other peoples health care anyways. Especially when the people in question are busy not buying health care on their own (as most uninsured young adults choose not to buy it).
Also of course, anybody against health care is racist and want to step over (and on!) the dead bodies of the poor! Or so the conversation goes...
Seriously. Saying "we have something" is boring. Post it, or shut up.
He was told to get back into his car after the officer had just punched him in the face.
I can't even imagine where this timeline of events was created. Probably in your head. It doesn't appear in any credible news source.
Both the blogs are biased, uninformative, and basically uninteresting.
Furthermore, the source chosen for the slashdot posting seems to have been searched for and specifically chosen so as to be the least informative and lacking in interest. A better one is at Toronto Star
Among the information in that paper is a statement by Watts that the trial was fair, and a direct contradiction to "Making Light's" timeline of events.
Oddly, a grand jury found reason enough to charge, and a second criminal jury found reason enough to convict.
And here you said that insurance companies would leave the business before doing such a thing, and yet, every job provided health insurance plan I ever had came with a set price.
Every job provided health insurance plan covers healthy individuals, which are the bulk of workers. The larger the company, the larger the pool, and thus the smaller effect an ill hire would have on the plan costs. Some states allow employers to pool together.
At the end of the year, every pool - every single pool! - has its premiums adjusted so that that pool is profitable to the insurance company. If your company consisted of 10 people all with MS and nobody else, then your insurance costs would be astronomical.
When somebody enters the pool with a pre-existing condition, they are effectively punishing every other member of the pool with higher rates without having paid premiums while not needing care.
Oh. I get it. So the insurance companies are not allowed to deny coverage based on existing conditions, but there is nothing wrong with them charging premiums, of say, one hundred billion dollars a month ($100,000,000,000/mo).
That depends on what you're talking about, you keep changing context.
If your context is your proposal: Clearly not, because being forced to cover all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions or coverage at flat rates while not requiring the cheap-to-cover healthy individuals to pay for coverage would cause rational individuals to delay coverage until needed, requiring insurance companies to charge astronomical rates people like you wouldn't "allow", thus ending the potential for profit and the insurance companies would leave the market.
If your context is the "Obamacare" reconciliation bill: High cost individuals will be placed into high risk pools that is subsidized by the gov't. The insurance company recoups the value spent by the high risk pool on medical costs, the gov't subsidizes to the level it is willing to, and the balance is billed to individual policy holders.
Existing state policies for high risk, such as California's Major Risk Pool pools the high risk patients with Cobra and other state sponsored medical coverage, and then subsidizes coverage on top of that. This is the only reason a group of guaranteed cost individuals can be covered without massive premium costs.
Once again, insurance is a profit making enterprise. If you are intent on eliminating the possibility for profit by requiring low cost coverage to high cost individuals, thus allowing low cost individuals to escape the market due to lack of need, then the insurance providers will be vacated by profit seeking companies.
See, that way the insurance company, say Humana, can claim that they offered coverage, but the customer refused to pay, which is required by law. They were so kind as to give the number to Cigna. Their rates are half of what Humana's are for preexisting condition customers.
$50,000,000,000/month is still a profitable enterprise, even for a pre-existing condition. Of course, yearly caps exist - until "Obamacare" is passed, so the actual price point would be much lower.
See, an understanding of how insurance works is necessary to design reasonable proposals for reform.
No, the industry that would be vacated would be the insurance industry. Not the medical provider one.
I would hate the be under a gov't control health system like the VA system is. I have VA coverage and never, ever, use it. Neither does my grand-father.
For a health company insurance company insuring someone with MS, for example, they are on the hook for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to cover that single person. And you are saying that they should not be allowed to deny a MS patient coverage (I agree), but can base rates on preexisting conditions or risks(I disagree).
Wow. Your reading comprehension is seriously lacking. At no point have I suggested an insurance company should not be allowed to deny new coverage of a person found to be a victim of MS, or any serious disease. At the point they are diagnosed it is a pre-existing condition and should not be covered by anything new. The suggestion that insurance companies should be on he hook for every old disease they have the day they sign up for coverage (which you suggest the insurance company cannot deny) is entirely yours.
It's simple really: You do not have a right to force a company to pay for your medical coverage, even if that company bills itself as a medical insurance company. If you want that sort of guarantee, do not look to insurance for it. Look to your gov't, because only the gov't has the ability to engage in the kind of force required to demand medical providers (of which insurance companies are -not-) provide such services.
How much would an insurance company have to charge to break even? What's to stop them from charging that amount or more to either cover the cost of this patient, or force this money loser to move to their competition?
Actuary tables are very good. When you sign up and are not ill your payments will be based on not being ill. If you sign up and are already ill, your costs will go up because it is a known fact that it will cost much more to cover you. That's assuming you can find somebody willing to assume the absolute certainty that you will require medical services. If you sign up and lie, claiming to not be ill when you are, then when the insurance company finds out they will rightfully discontinue your coverage ab initio, from the outset.
Well, Gee. I don't work for an insurance company, and I don't have an MBA, and I certainly don't have a law degree or have any experience writing contracts, but since you insist, let me take a whack at it.
Nor, clearly, are you very logical or understand the problem.
Under your proposal, the problem is simple: It is not necessary to purchase insurance when one is not ill, because one one gets ill one may purchase insurance and not be denied. Get diagnosed with cancer? NO problem! Sign up with SoonToBeBankruptHealthInsurance. Pay one month of the flat-fee that doesn't vary! They can't deny you!
Your above proposal with loans and whatnot is nearly nonsensical and does nothing for the problem. It appears you were trying to solve some other problem, such as canceling insurance shortly after beginning.
I'm healthy and I have coverage. My whole family is healthy and I have the all covered.
That's because, right now, if you become ill without coverage you cannot get coverage. Once again, refer to your two line proposal.
Again, the healthy have coverage today. Over 90% of the population is covered. Are over 90% of the population not healthy?
Seriously, do you disassociate yourself so much from the topic at hand that you started that you are so unable to continue with subject context? You created a proposal that changes the system such that people cannot be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions. Thus, why would people without immediate need bother with insurance? If they get ill, -then- they can get insurance. Until then, they won't need it.
People don't pay for insurance because they are not healthy. That's not the point of insurance, by definition.
The point of insurance, be it health, automotive, or real estate, is to pay somebody else to assume the risk that bad things will happen to the insured item. When you force, through regulatory laws, the insurance company to pay for events that occurred prior to the start of insurance then there is no reason for the insured to bother getting insurance until they need it. It thus ceases to be insurance, and any attempt at insurance will financially fail.
This is like telling home insurance carriers that they cannot refuse to cover termite damage for a house that had termites at the time of initial coverage.
Adding the "everyone must get coverage" clause without flat rate pricing will cause insurance companies to gouge those in high risk categories, much like auto insurance companies do today.
Such pricing makes sense. Once again, insurance is paying somebody to assume the risk that bad things will happen. When bad things are more likely to happen, you cost more to insure.
It's become obvious why you chose the buffet restaurant comparison. Such a comparison is still not appropriate, as its not how insurance works.
Strange. My cell phone provider has found a way to keep me from getting a cell phone only when I need to make a call. It's a shame that the massive legal teams at these insurance companies can't find a way to do the same.
They have such a way. It's by refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
Oh, and buffet restaurants are not legally allowed to discriminate.
They most certainly can discriminate. They will kick out heavy eaters. They will kick out people who spend too much time at the location. Furthermore the restaurant itself sets the menu. Nobody can purchase a buffet entrance fee and then kobe beef.
But even if you drop the restaurant analogy, you can't touch "I guess you are wrong when you assumed that the board members of insurance companies would rather loose millions in investments and make thousands of their employees unemployed than simplify their books by charging a flat rate."
Being unable to "deny coverage or treatment based on a preexisting condition" is the way to lose millions in investments. Such a legal requirement without requiring the healthy to be insured - which your short two line proposal does not include - will bankrupt the insurance companies very very fast. Except that the companies would leave the market even quicker.
You would have been better off showing that those that have cheaper rates, like the young and healthy, would probably get higher rates because they would need to be charged the same as the 64-yr-old smoking diabetic who has to wheel around an O2 tank behind their Hoverounds.
That doesn't matter, as the healthy will not get coverage.
Your comparison is poor. Insurance is not a buffet market restaurant. It is a third party, charging its customers a flat rate for all their eating needs. Then you're requiring it, by law, to not refuse heavy eaters, binge eaters, and people who only decide to get coverage when they are hungry and forego coverage when they are not.
do private insurers have better resume???
Private insurers have much better resumes than the gov't, federal or otherwise.
The problem is that people don't want health insurance, they're demanding infinite health procedures at zero cost. Insurance is not the correct provider for infinite health procedures at zero cost. For that goal, the gov't is the only possible provider. However, that runs into the second issue that there is no such thing as "zero cost", and the people eventually forced to pay will not pay for nationwide infinite health procedures at zero cost.