if you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money — it would not have passed. OK? Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.
I.e. Democrats lied about the intent and function of the bill in order to get it to pass, because they knew full well that Americans would reject this kind of economic policy.
Actually - have overall costs gone up, or are more people shouldering the true cost of health insurance?
Yes, the costs have gone up. Go look it up.
Now, I carry "good" insurance. The kind that covers you when bad shit happens and doesn't leave you bankrupt and in debt and needing bailing out by the taxpayer like your *cheap* insurance plan
How nice for you. And I now have much worse insurance, as does everybody at the company I work for. So, we got screwed so that you can have better insurance. But in the long run, we're all screwed because the ACA is not sustainable and not fixable.
Since I have to spell it out for you, you have to do more than cherry pick your quotes from someone that was all over the map.
I have provided two quotes, you have provided zero. In addition, these quotes are not in dispute as representing the intent of either Gruber or Obama. Obama, in particular, was warned by his advisers to stop making this statement.
It decreased the number of uninsured greatly.
You said that it achieved its objectives. Clearly, it did not achieve two of its three objectives. I think it also failed at the third objective ("more coverage"), but it's pointless to discuss that in light of the abject failure on the other two objectives.
Based on another site I came across, there's been a large benefit from ACA in the amount of money spent by taxpayers covering those uninsured people - something to the tune of many billions. But, of course, no one wants to talk about that.
Even if that were true, if overall costs have gone up, it's irrelevant to the stated objectives of the ACA.
In the UK, Trump is slang for a noise fart, what yanks call passing gas.
And that perfectly characterizes what has become of that nation of scientists and philosophers: a nation of tabloid-obsessed geezers making fart jokes about foreign leaders.
It's a combination of factors, potentially, not just CO2 concentrations.
As far as the paper is concerned, the causative factor CO2 concentrations, nothing else. If you want arguments in favor of reducing carbon emissions, you should be happy about at least that much, because for this particular impact, it doesn't matter how much warming carbon emissions cause. But...
With regard to supplements, it's trivial if (1) the need is recognised and (2) people can afford them.
I'm glad we agree on that. Which tells you that the actual problem isn't the level of zinc in the crops, but the wealth of the citizens.
Neither are a given, and it could mean that self-sufficiency is no longer possible for some.
Well, "self-sufficiency" (or nutritional sufficiency) certainly won't be possible for a lot of people if we burden global GDP with the several percent reduction that would result from taking the economic steps outlined in the Paris accords, let alone the far more draconian steps necessary to halt carbon emissions altogether.
In such a situation I'm not sure how an expert would help. What the man needs is help to make the decision himself in a way that empowers him - it's not done out of fear or for dogmatic reasons, it's humanism.
In fact, there are actual experts who provide expert help, without dogma or fear: moral philosophers, psychologists, and counselors.
Your point about Sartre illustrates the typical problem with intellectuals: they appear erudite on subjects that they are actually not experts in, and they trick people into confusing them with experts.
Poor populations have many nutritional deficiencies already. The cause of those is poverty, not carbon dioxide or climate change. Our focus should be to lift these people out of poverty as quickly as possible, because then their nutritional deficiencies, as well as many other problems, get addressed.
That is, the paper says something like "carbon emissions cause lower nutritional content in cheap bulk food which causes increased nutritional deficiencies in poor populations", implying that we should "decrease carbon emissions to prevent this". That's not a sensible policy.
The actual situation is that "poverty causes populations to buy food that is already nutritionally marginal" and the solution is to "reduce poverty through rapid economic development".
The only likely cause of ongoing increases is CO2 emissions so it's pointless pedantry to complain about using the term climate change
You're saying it's irrelevant to you what the cause of nutritional deficiencies is? It's irrelevant to you that increased CO2 levels and climate change have very different geographic patterns, different causes, different coping strategies? That's like advocating amputating a leg to cure appendicitis.
Over a billion people are zinc deficient, I don't care what definition of trivial you believe in, but if you really do think solving that would be trivial and you aren't up in arms about the fact it hasn't been done then what's wrong with you.
You need to read more carefully: I said it is "trivial to supplement" not that it is a "trivial problem". Zinc supplementation costs less than a cent per day even in the US and would be even cheaper in development countries. Are you unfamiliar with those facts?
Now what about causes? The reason so many people are zinc deficient is because they live in abject poverty. Their poverty doesn't just cause zinc deficiency, it causes hundreds of other serious diseases. So what we should be focusing on is alleviating their poverty, and their poverty is not going to be alleviated by decreasing carbon emissions, it is going to be alleviated by economic development.
what's wrong with you.
It is, however, crystal clear what's wrong with you: you're a pampered, ignorant Westerner to whom suffering in the third world is a mere abstraction and who doesn't really care about addressing it.
Obviously, it's not "climate change" that lowers nutrients, it's carbon dioxide. And the "nutrients" that are being lost are zinc and iron, trivial to supplement even in the unlikely event that people don't get enough from their diet and the issue can't be addressed by simple breeding.
Astrology is about solving problems in your life, that doesn't mean astrologers are experts on solving problems in your life. Opium is about solving problems in your life, that doesn't mean it's a good solution. A gun to your head is about solving problems in your life, that doesn't mean it's a good solution. (The latter two seem, incidentally, quite compatible with existentialist philosophy.)
So, what expertise does Sartre have in counseling people to improve their lives? Where is the evidence that existentialism is a safe and effective means of solving life problems? Where is the evidence that rejection religion in favor of existentialist philosophy leads to better life outcomes? Even just anecdotally, how did Sartre improve your life?
So the charge then is that "Google employees acted in harmony towards the common end of maligning Donald Trump and altering search results." Seems like a reasonable statement to me, consistent with everything we know about Google.
But you really need to improve your English vocabulary skills. The definition you list is the second definition for the verb "conspire", not the noun "conspiracy", and that definition only applies to impersonal subjects.
Also, if there is no secret, then they are not modifying the search engine
They are modifying the search engine all the time in order to change the results it returns, and they are doing so subject to their (conscious and unconscious) biases.
And what you "think" is that it's OK to lie to American voters in order to get legislation passed that American voters don't want.
You also "think" that it's OK to force young, healthy people to subsidize old, sick people.
In those views, you agree with Democrats; whether you identify as a Democrat, I have no idea.
I already knew you had an idealistic chip on your shoulder,
I'm not arguing from a position of idealism, I simply don't want the US to spiral down the drain, like other countries that have been taken over by progressives and leftists.
Gruber also said political realities forced the approach used.
So you admit that they lied and misrepresented the plan, you simply think it's OK.
It's objectives were to lower the uninsured rate. It succeeded.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has three primary, overarching objectives: increase health insurance coverage, reduce rising healthcare costs, and improve the quality of care provided
It certainly didn't accomplish (2) or (3), and arguably didn't even accomplish (1) (it expanded number of people covered, but decreased coverage for many people).
And I see why you're so misguided. To be perfectly clear, I hold that single payer basic health coverage is the only real answer. I don't support insurance for profit and forcing all into it.... Now I wonder where the rest of that $9k/year/person they are charging today is going
That’s a good thing to wonder. Now, Europeans pay about $3k/person/year (average over the entire population, young and old). Do you think the difference of $6k/person/year is all kept by for-profit insurance companies? Of course not. In fact, the biggest differences are in drug spending, prices of procedures, and utilization of the health care system.
And the reason we are spending those extra $6k/person is not that companies are “for profit”, it is that US laws have effectively eliminated competition in the market place and have a third party payer system where neither the provider nor the consumer have any incentive to contain costs. And the ACA made that problem worse, not better. And the reason it made it worse is because that’s what the Democrats’ corporate cronies like and want.
What, did you sleep through the entire ACA discussion?
Gruber: "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” (admitting misrepresentation retroactively)
Obama: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” (he knew it was false)
There are plenty more.
no law vs a flawed law that actually does some good
The question isn’t whether it “does some good” but whether it “does more good than harm” and whether it achieves its objectives.
And regardless of the statistics on the ACA, it certainly wrecked my insurance coverage. I went from a simple, everything covered plan to a worthless high deductible plan with a lot of paperwork that likely would be useless even if I got seriously sick. So did many other people. So the fact that some poor person can get “free” health insurance was bought by taking my health insurance away, taxing me for it, and to add insult to injury, I’m still nominally counted as insured.
and can be amended
As you are discovering, pass a shitty law now and then amend it later is not a viable strategy because governments change. Its even less viable when politicians try to pass laws that undermine the will of the American people.
Furthermore, it can’t be amended into anything sensible because, despite the lies that Democrats have been telling you, the ACA moved us further away from both a European-style single payer system and a free market system. Moving towards a European-style single payer system would have had to have started with cutting costs, services, salaries, and coverage to European levels, something Democrats don’t have any intention of doing. The ACA moved us squarely in the direction of higher costs and more corporate cronyism, and that’s all it did.
I still blame Republicans
Well, I still blame Democrats, and I and other former Democrats will work hard to remind people what a bunch of authoritarian jerks have taken over the Democratic party, and how dysfunctional their policies are.
There is a growing population who just doesn't trust the experts.
I trust experts. What I don't trust is politicians to select experts for me and then force me to act according to their preferences.
The biggest threat is the anti-intelectualism movement.
You're confusing expertise with intellectualism. An engineer, a doctors, and a plumber all are experts at something that actually matters. Chomsky, Habermas, and Sartre are intellectuals, but they have no expertise on anything that matters, like running the economy, treating cancer, or fixing a leak. Intellectuals make money by spreading ideas, not by actually solving problems.
Because of this, some of the flaws of ACA can be laid at the feet of Republicans.
When you buy a car, the price you pay and the car you get are determined by the contract you sign; how that contract was written is irrelevant. It's the same with a bill: only the people who vote to pass a bill are responsible for it.
What does matter, of course, is lies and misrepresentations, like when Gruber and Obama deliberately lied to the American people about the consequences of the bill.
There's many ways to be obstructionist, and the party of no (ideas) was exceptionally good at this.
Obviously they are not good enough at obstructionism to keep a bad bill from passing.
Pick a side. Either you're saying this is deliberate or unconscious. The line you appear to be walking is: "Google believe in unconscious bias, which proves that they have a deliberate bias!".
No, I'm merely saying that bias of its employees (whether conscious or unconscious) is sufficient to explain the bias in its products; it doesn't take a conspiracy.
You're a glass is quarter full when it's half empty kind of guy, aren't you?
Look, I told you that I voted for Obama and was dissatisifed with all his broken promises. You absurdly somehow tried to prove me "wrong" by pointing at the WaPo.
And that even when those people are from the same party, they may not all agree?
So you're saying that the ACA is the best compromise Democrats could come up with among themselves. I agree. It is factually wrong to say that the ACA is as crappy as it is because of a compromise with Republicans because Republicans rejected it. And they rejected it because it is a disaster.
Don't be obtuse. Insurance rates went up because Trump decided to reduce government subsidies
No, you need to stop being obtuse: if you hand control of healthcare to government, this is the outcome. That is, people become utterly dependent on the good will of government for healthcare. Healthcare become a tool by which politicians can then blackmail the public.
As for insurance rates, they're set within the legal framework set up by congress. You are actually pointing out the major flaw in for-profit insurance, in that it is in the companies best interests to maximize profits within those constructs.
Did Obama get rid of for-profit insurance? Did Obama get rid of for-profit medical providers? Did Obama rein in drug costs? None of that. What he did was give corporations a gigantic handout. That's what the ACA is: cronyism on a massive scale. And you are so "obtuse" that you think that's in your favor.
I completely agree that a single payer system like the UK or France would be better than what we have (though not as good as full privatization). But no Democrat is seriously proposing that or anything like any European single payer system. What they are proposing is the most corrupt scheme of all: taking tax dollars and mandatory contributions and handing them to big corporations. And that's what you support.
Slashdot Mirror
I.e. Democrats lied about the intent and function of the bill in order to get it to pass, because they knew full well that Americans would reject this kind of economic policy.
Yes, the costs have gone up. Go look it up.
How nice for you. And I now have much worse insurance, as does everybody at the company I work for. So, we got screwed so that you can have better insurance. But in the long run, we're all screwed because the ACA is not sustainable and not fixable.
I have provided two quotes, you have provided zero. In addition, these quotes are not in dispute as representing the intent of either Gruber or Obama. Obama, in particular, was warned by his advisers to stop making this statement.
You said that it achieved its objectives. Clearly, it did not achieve two of its three objectives. I think it also failed at the third objective ("more coverage"), but it's pointless to discuss that in light of the abject failure on the other two objectives.
Even if that were true, if overall costs have gone up, it's irrelevant to the stated objectives of the ACA.
And that perfectly characterizes what has become of that nation of scientists and philosophers: a nation of tabloid-obsessed geezers making fart jokes about foreign leaders.
As far as the paper is concerned, the causative factor CO2 concentrations, nothing else. If you want arguments in favor of reducing carbon emissions, you should be happy about at least that much, because for this particular impact, it doesn't matter how much warming carbon emissions cause. But...
I'm glad we agree on that. Which tells you that the actual problem isn't the level of zinc in the crops, but the wealth of the citizens.
Well, "self-sufficiency" (or nutritional sufficiency) certainly won't be possible for a lot of people if we burden global GDP with the several percent reduction that would result from taking the economic steps outlined in the Paris accords, let alone the far more draconian steps necessary to halt carbon emissions altogether.
Finally! A leftist regime with a tight monetary policy!
In fact, there are actual experts who provide expert help, without dogma or fear: moral philosophers, psychologists, and counselors.
Your point about Sartre illustrates the typical problem with intellectuals: they appear erudite on subjects that they are actually not experts in, and they trick people into confusing them with experts.
Nevertheless, the cause of lower nutritional content is carbon dioxide increase, not climate change.
And the cause of malnutrition and nutrient deficiency in third world population is poverty, not carbon dioxide or climate change.
Poor populations have many nutritional deficiencies already. The cause of those is poverty, not carbon dioxide or climate change. Our focus should be to lift these people out of poverty as quickly as possible, because then their nutritional deficiencies, as well as many other problems, get addressed.
That is, the paper says something like "carbon emissions cause lower nutritional content in cheap bulk food which causes increased nutritional deficiencies in poor populations", implying that we should "decrease carbon emissions to prevent this". That's not a sensible policy.
The actual situation is that "poverty causes populations to buy food that is already nutritionally marginal" and the solution is to "reduce poverty through rapid economic development".
You're saying it's irrelevant to you what the cause of nutritional deficiencies is? It's irrelevant to you that increased CO2 levels and climate change have very different geographic patterns, different causes, different coping strategies? That's like advocating amputating a leg to cure appendicitis.
You need to read more carefully: I said it is "trivial to supplement" not that it is a "trivial problem". Zinc supplementation costs less than a cent per day even in the US and would be even cheaper in development countries. Are you unfamiliar with those facts?
Now what about causes? The reason so many people are zinc deficient is because they live in abject poverty. Their poverty doesn't just cause zinc deficiency, it causes hundreds of other serious diseases. So what we should be focusing on is alleviating their poverty, and their poverty is not going to be alleviated by decreasing carbon emissions, it is going to be alleviated by economic development.
It is, however, crystal clear what's wrong with you: you're a pampered, ignorant Westerner to whom suffering in the third world is a mere abstraction and who doesn't really care about addressing it.
Obviously, it's not "climate change" that lowers nutrients, it's carbon dioxide. And the "nutrients" that are being lost are zinc and iron, trivial to supplement even in the unlikely event that people don't get enough from their diet and the issue can't be addressed by simple breeding.
Astrology is about solving problems in your life, that doesn't mean astrologers are experts on solving problems in your life. Opium is about solving problems in your life, that doesn't mean it's a good solution. A gun to your head is about solving problems in your life, that doesn't mean it's a good solution. (The latter two seem, incidentally, quite compatible with existentialist philosophy.)
So, what expertise does Sartre have in counseling people to improve their lives? Where is the evidence that existentialism is a safe and effective means of solving life problems? Where is the evidence that rejection religion in favor of existentialist philosophy leads to better life outcomes? Even just anecdotally, how did Sartre improve your life?
So the charge then is that "Google employees acted in harmony towards the common end of maligning Donald Trump and altering search results." Seems like a reasonable statement to me, consistent with everything we know about Google.
But you really need to improve your English vocabulary skills. The definition you list is the second definition for the verb "conspire", not the noun "conspiracy", and that definition only applies to impersonal subjects.
They are modifying the search engine all the time in order to change the results it returns, and they are doing so subject to their (conscious and unconscious) biases.
And what you "think" is that it's OK to lie to American voters in order to get legislation passed that American voters don't want.
You also "think" that it's OK to force young, healthy people to subsidize old, sick people.
In those views, you agree with Democrats; whether you identify as a Democrat, I have no idea.
I'm not arguing from a position of idealism, I simply don't want the US to spiral down the drain, like other countries that have been taken over by progressives and leftists.
Google's anti-Trump and anti-conservative biases are neither secret nor unlawful, hence no conspiracy.
So you admit that they lied and misrepresented the plan, you simply think it's OK.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has three primary, overarching objectives: increase health insurance coverage, reduce rising healthcare costs, and improve the quality of care provided
It certainly didn't accomplish (2) or (3), and arguably didn't even accomplish (1) (it expanded number of people covered, but decreased coverage for many people).
Perhaps one should not read too much into poll results. Every time a pollster calls me, I’m having fun with them.
You need to look up “conspiracy”. Conscious bias is not a “conspiracy”.
That’s a good thing to wonder. Now, Europeans pay about $3k/person/year (average over the entire population, young and old). Do you think the difference of $6k/person/year is all kept by for-profit insurance companies? Of course not. In fact, the biggest differences are in drug spending, prices of procedures, and utilization of the health care system.
And the reason we are spending those extra $6k/person is not that companies are “for profit”, it is that US laws have effectively eliminated competition in the market place and have a third party payer system where neither the provider nor the consumer have any incentive to contain costs. And the ACA made that problem worse, not better. And the reason it made it worse is because that’s what the Democrats’ corporate cronies like and want.
What, did you sleep through the entire ACA discussion?
Gruber: "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” (admitting misrepresentation retroactively)
Obama: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” (he knew it was false)
There are plenty more.
The question isn’t whether it “does some good” but whether it “does more good than harm” and whether it achieves its objectives.
And regardless of the statistics on the ACA, it certainly wrecked my insurance coverage. I went from a simple, everything covered plan to a worthless high deductible plan with a lot of paperwork that likely would be useless even if I got seriously sick. So did many other people. So the fact that some poor person can get “free” health insurance was bought by taking my health insurance away, taxing me for it, and to add insult to injury, I’m still nominally counted as insured.
As you are discovering, pass a shitty law now and then amend it later is not a viable strategy because governments change. Its even less viable when politicians try to pass laws that undermine the will of the American people.
Furthermore, it can’t be amended into anything sensible because, despite the lies that Democrats have been telling you, the ACA moved us further away from both a European-style single payer system and a free market system. Moving towards a European-style single payer system would have had to have started with cutting costs, services, salaries, and coverage to European levels, something Democrats don’t have any intention of doing. The ACA moved us squarely in the direction of higher costs and more corporate cronyism, and that’s all it did.
Well, I still blame Democrats, and I and other former Democrats will work hard to remind people what a bunch of authoritarian jerks have taken over the Democratic party, and how dysfunctional their policies are.
I trust experts. What I don't trust is politicians to select experts for me and then force me to act according to their preferences.
You're confusing expertise with intellectualism. An engineer, a doctors, and a plumber all are experts at something that actually matters. Chomsky, Habermas, and Sartre are intellectuals, but they have no expertise on anything that matters, like running the economy, treating cancer, or fixing a leak. Intellectuals make money by spreading ideas, not by actually solving problems.
Wow, that was a great satire of the ridiculous views of modern progressives!
Well, you are hallucinating.
House vote: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/201... (note that 34 Democrats voted against it)
Senate vote: https://www.senate.gov/legisla...
When you buy a car, the price you pay and the car you get are determined by the contract you sign; how that contract was written is irrelevant. It's the same with a bill: only the people who vote to pass a bill are responsible for it.
What does matter, of course, is lies and misrepresentations, like when Gruber and Obama deliberately lied to the American people about the consequences of the bill.
Obviously they are not good enough at obstructionism to keep a bad bill from passing.
No, I'm merely saying that bias of its employees (whether conscious or unconscious) is sufficient to explain the bias in its products; it doesn't take a conspiracy.
Look, I told you that I voted for Obama and was dissatisifed with all his broken promises. You absurdly somehow tried to prove me "wrong" by pointing at the WaPo.
So you're saying that the ACA is the best compromise Democrats could come up with among themselves. I agree. It is factually wrong to say that the ACA is as crappy as it is because of a compromise with Republicans because Republicans rejected it. And they rejected it because it is a disaster.
No, you need to stop being obtuse: if you hand control of healthcare to government, this is the outcome. That is, people become utterly dependent on the good will of government for healthcare. Healthcare become a tool by which politicians can then blackmail the public.
Did Obama get rid of for-profit insurance? Did Obama get rid of for-profit medical providers? Did Obama rein in drug costs? None of that. What he did was give corporations a gigantic handout. That's what the ACA is: cronyism on a massive scale. And you are so "obtuse" that you think that's in your favor.
I completely agree that a single payer system like the UK or France would be better than what we have (though not as good as full privatization). But no Democrat is seriously proposing that or anything like any European single payer system. What they are proposing is the most corrupt scheme of all: taking tax dollars and mandatory contributions and handing them to big corporations. And that's what you support.