This is why I don't get folks that want to hoard gold as a hedge against economic fallout.
I don't get this claim. Civilization has collapsed before. Gold remained shiny and valued. But as another replier noted, gold isn't worth much to the person who doesn't have the power to keep it.
Of course, that's rather a large change in our social contract and I expect one that would not be palatable to the vast majority of people.
We can't do something because of "our" imaginary "social contract" which isn't a contract? Do you have a real, serious reason why we can't?
Barring that, there are still some options to reduce costs. Carefully evaluate the cost / benefit ratios of expensive therapies (bye bye dialysis). Basically freeze drug research (it's not like they have come up with any great new therapies) and essentially force generics. Get rid of Big Pharma's advertising budget (bigger than their research budget). Get rid of insurance companies and simplify the byzantine American medical system (one time savings, but a big one, basically kicks the can down the road). Limit reimbursement. Shoot the lawyers. Ration. Ration. Ration.
I guess that talk of "social contract" is only for convenience since you're proposing to tear it up here. The health care system is so byzantine and messed up because of the social contract people. They rationalized a bunch of terrible ideas on the basis of how much they were going to help other people. Instead, those ideas happened to benefit special interest groups like doctors, insurance companies, or malpractice lawyers. Who knew?
Now, it's gotten to the point where the law, here, Obamacare violates the closest real world thing to a "social contract", the US Constitution, and it's still not going to fix the worst problems such as excessive health care costs.
Just exactly what do you want society and government to do? (And don't give me any free market drivel, even the highly modified 'free market' in the US hasn't worked out so well in terms of patient safety.
Get out of the way. A mostly free market would indeed do the job despite your claims to the contrary.
Speaking of lying, I'm more concerned about how radically the Obama administration changed its stories after Snowden's revelations. Basically, a bunch of officials were caught lying and only changed their story due to Snowden. It sure looks to me also like there is far more going on than most people want to believe.
The Obama administration and the NSA chief have already radically changed the stories they were telling because of Snowden.
Snowden will and does lie & bend his tale to justify his acts
That's why we look at evidence and not just make up shit. The Obama administration has vast resources at its disposal with which to disprove Snowden assertions. It hasn't chosen to do so for some reason. I wager it is because Snowden's assertions and accompanying evidence are close enough to truth.
Preventive health care is like finding mistakes in the requirements before delivery of the product.
Except that the product was delivered when the person was born.
The earlier you get it, the less expensive it is to fix the problem.
With two caveats, you will find expensive "problems", if you go looking for them. And second, the person dies in the end anyway so there is a point of negative returns to preventative care.
Meteor populations are based on a Poisson distribution. Here, that the log of the population of meteors vary inversely with the cross-sectional area of the meteors. It's a decent fit at the end we can observe.
Their interest is in maximizing profit, not maximizing health or minimizing costs to the insured.
Exactly. Original poster was claiming that these policies would make profit for insurance companies. Sorry, they disagree.
Birth control costs very little to society, and unwanted kids are generally a drain on society's resources.
It costs even less to simply not pay for this at all. And if kids even after considering their adulthood contribution are a net drain on society, then that society has deep problems that aren't going to be solved by birth control or health care reform.
Incidentally, consider why insurance companies are involved in this gimmick at all. There are plenty of better ways of distributing birth control than via an insurance policy.
For example, the person who is going to use the birth control can pay for it themselves. That has the advantage of being more convenient since one doesn't have to provide health insurance information to the cashier.
Or the government could just give out free birth control on the appropriate level. That catches the people for whom it is too difficult to actually go to a store and buy birth control (whether with their own money or an insurer's).
So why not those two approaches? The first is ruled out on liberal-religious grounds. Certain portions of society aren't supposed to buy their own birth control. The second is ruled out because it costs the government a lot of money.
Money is why this is getting tossed on the insurance companies and the people who pay for health insurance. And I'm sure it'll be an outrageous boon to any expensive birth control systems out there which happen to qualify.
If the American position is truly "let them die and get it over with", then America as a society is pretty much fucked and deserves what they get.
Originally, you were implying it "costs money" to deny people exorbitant health care. When confronted, you backpeddled on that and now claim bogus moral grounds. What's next? Because... unicorns?
The problem with "getting health care" is twofold. It gets very expensive and the end result is always failure, death, no matter how much health care you provide. Since there is no limit morally to how much health care a person should have, we're stuck going back to economic constraints. You have to be able to afford the morality.
I think most of the increase in US health care costs comes from a chasm between the people consuming health care and the people paying for that consumption. The rest comes from policies that restrict health care/insurance supply and competition.
Iceland didn't have the problems these other countries had to start with. And their debt started to decline this year with respect to GDP, which is one of the goals of austerity, despite weak economic growth.
Stolen from Social Security? For the past 80 years. It's not going to be paid back anywhere near in full so it's a fait accompli. My take is that the US federal government will game the consumer price index (CPI) so that cost of living adjustments (COLAs) don't keep track with inflation (something that they've been doing for a while) and reduce the Social Security and federal debt (some bonds track CPI) liabilities that way.
The government is just another case of "middlemen parasitic scum". You're trading one for another.
Even in the US, most people can pay for most of their health care. So it's reasonable to have them do so. And insurance is a great way to cover costly, low probability health issues. The US system worked great in the 50s and 60s before everyone started gaming the system and making it what it is today.
Free birth control is an incredibly cheap "luxury" that insurance companies are only too happy to provide because it offsets the higher cost to the them for paying for more pregnancies
They also get higher insurance payments for the resulting kids. I don't see the net gain for insurers here. Also, the kind of people who would have problems obtaining cheap birth control are going to have similar troubles obtaining and properly applying free birth control.
The number-crunching analysis shows it helps lower the costs of covering more expensive services in the long run when they are caught early with cheap intervention.
The insurance industry did the same number crunching and they as a whole decided to forgo preventative care. I'll side with the people who actually have an interest in getting this calculation right.
The government isn't like a family. It's more like a bank.
There's three big problems with that model. Banks don't have taxes or a captive revenue stream. Second, banks have to have positive net assets. Third, banks have to follow rigorous accounting laws.
Governments can run some degree of negative liabilities due to the captive revenue stream and lack of accountability.
Conservatives, for some reason, have come to the conclusion that health care is a luxury. It is not, it is a necessity, that's why it is illegal for emergency rooms to turn people away.
Some health care is a necessity and some a luxury. Free birth control, for example, is a luxury.
Under the ACA, people are for the first time required to take personal responsibility to plan for their own (inevitable) health care costs, rather than foisting them on to the rest of us, and somehow conservatives think that is a bad thing.
That hasn't happened. There's no such requirement. For example, I can pay the mandate tax until such time as I get an expensive medical condition, then get the insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I don't get folks that want to hoard gold as a hedge against economic fallout.
I don't get this claim. Civilization has collapsed before. Gold remained shiny and valued. But as another replier noted, gold isn't worth much to the person who doesn't have the power to keep it.
Of course, that's rather a large change in our social contract and I expect one that would not be palatable to the vast majority of people.
We can't do something because of "our" imaginary "social contract" which isn't a contract? Do you have a real, serious reason why we can't?
Barring that, there are still some options to reduce costs. Carefully evaluate the cost / benefit ratios of expensive therapies (bye bye dialysis). Basically freeze drug research (it's not like they have come up with any great new therapies) and essentially force generics. Get rid of Big Pharma's advertising budget (bigger than their research budget). Get rid of insurance companies and simplify the byzantine American medical system (one time savings, but a big one, basically kicks the can down the road). Limit reimbursement. Shoot the lawyers. Ration. Ration. Ration.
I guess that talk of "social contract" is only for convenience since you're proposing to tear it up here. The health care system is so byzantine and messed up because of the social contract people. They rationalized a bunch of terrible ideas on the basis of how much they were going to help other people. Instead, those ideas happened to benefit special interest groups like doctors, insurance companies, or malpractice lawyers. Who knew?
Now, it's gotten to the point where the law, here, Obamacare violates the closest real world thing to a "social contract", the US Constitution, and it's still not going to fix the worst problems such as excessive health care costs.
Just exactly what do you want society and government to do? (And don't give me any free market drivel, even the highly modified 'free market' in the US hasn't worked out so well in terms of patient safety.
Get out of the way. A mostly free market would indeed do the job despite your claims to the contrary.
Speaking of lying, I'm more concerned about how radically the Obama administration changed its stories after Snowden's revelations. Basically, a bunch of officials were caught lying and only changed their story due to Snowden. It sure looks to me also like there is far more going on than most people want to believe.
He's blown a whole lot of trust as it is, by stabbing his country in the back so spectacularly.
Trust that we see was poorly placed in the federal government.
Snowden will and does lie & bend his tale to justify his acts
That's why we look at evidence and not just make up shit. The Obama administration has vast resources at its disposal with which to disprove Snowden assertions. It hasn't chosen to do so for some reason. I wager it is because Snowden's assertions and accompanying evidence are close enough to truth.
Which parts of the US constitution has the NSA broken?
Fourth, Tenth, Fourteenth Amendments.
My point is, if these illegal acts are so manifestly illegal... why is no-one prosecuting?
"Treason doth never prosper: whatâ(TM)s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
Where's the evidence? I just hear complaining from lazy people who can't be bothered to provide evidence for their dogmatic assertions.
Preventive health care is like finding mistakes in the requirements before delivery of the product.
Except that the product was delivered when the person was born.
The earlier you get it, the less expensive it is to fix the problem.
With two caveats, you will find expensive "problems", if you go looking for them. And second, the person dies in the end anyway so there is a point of negative returns to preventative care.
If you need a cancer drug, you don't have much choice.
You can always go without, if it really costs that much or go with a cheaper and slightly less effective route. Your life isn't infinite in value.
Meteor populations are based on a Poisson distribution. Here, that the log of the population of meteors vary inversely with the cross-sectional area of the meteors. It's a decent fit at the end we can observe.
It does have a cost on your economy to decide that healthcare is only for the wealthy.
Which isn't a decision made by any developed world society today. Definitely, we're to the "because unicorns" stage of your argument.
And it's the epitome of douchebag to say "let the poor die".
Well, don't say that then. But I'll note here that the poor and the rich will continue to die whether you allow it or not.
Their interest is in maximizing profit, not maximizing health or minimizing costs to the insured.
Exactly. Original poster was claiming that these policies would make profit for insurance companies. Sorry, they disagree.
Birth control costs very little to society, and unwanted kids are generally a drain on society's resources.
It costs even less to simply not pay for this at all. And if kids even after considering their adulthood contribution are a net drain on society, then that society has deep problems that aren't going to be solved by birth control or health care reform.
Incidentally, consider why insurance companies are involved in this gimmick at all. There are plenty of better ways of distributing birth control than via an insurance policy.
For example, the person who is going to use the birth control can pay for it themselves. That has the advantage of being more convenient since one doesn't have to provide health insurance information to the cashier.
Or the government could just give out free birth control on the appropriate level. That catches the people for whom it is too difficult to actually go to a store and buy birth control (whether with their own money or an insurer's).
So why not those two approaches? The first is ruled out on liberal-religious grounds. Certain portions of society aren't supposed to buy their own birth control. The second is ruled out because it costs the government a lot of money.
Money is why this is getting tossed on the insurance companies and the people who pay for health insurance. And I'm sure it'll be an outrageous boon to any expensive birth control systems out there which happen to qualify.
If those people can get healthcare before it gets so bad for expensive ER visits it saves EVERYONE money.
Unless it doesn't. This health care costs money as well. Consume more as a result, then there won't be savings.
Free market works when people want stuff, not when they NEED it
Like those damn food monopolies?
Free market works whether you want it or NEED it.
If the American position is truly "let them die and get it over with", then America as a society is pretty much fucked and deserves what they get.
Originally, you were implying it "costs money" to deny people exorbitant health care. When confronted, you backpeddled on that and now claim bogus moral grounds. What's next? Because ... unicorns?
The problem with "getting health care" is twofold. It gets very expensive and the end result is always failure, death, no matter how much health care you provide. Since there is no limit morally to how much health care a person should have, we're stuck going back to economic constraints. You have to be able to afford the morality.
I think most of the increase in US health care costs comes from a chasm between the people consuming health care and the people paying for that consumption. The rest comes from policies that restrict health care/insurance supply and competition.
That "if" is a particularly large obstacle.
Well, then that could be implemented separately.
The best time to fix debt is during the good times, not the bad times.
Some entities just don't fix debt during the good times. Then it becomes a matter of fixing them when they have no choice.
Iceland didn't have the problems these other countries had to start with. And their debt started to decline this year with respect to GDP, which is one of the goals of austerity, despite weak economic growth.
Stolen from Social Security? For the past 80 years. It's not going to be paid back anywhere near in full so it's a fait accompli. My take is that the US federal government will game the consumer price index (CPI) so that cost of living adjustments (COLAs) don't keep track with inflation (something that they've been doing for a while) and reduce the Social Security and federal debt (some bonds track CPI) liabilities that way.
The government is just another case of "middlemen parasitic scum". You're trading one for another.
Even in the US, most people can pay for most of their health care. So it's reasonable to have them do so. And insurance is a great way to cover costly, low probability health issues. The US system worked great in the 50s and 60s before everyone started gaming the system and making it what it is today.
Free birth control is an incredibly cheap "luxury" that insurance companies are only too happy to provide because it offsets the higher cost to the them for paying for more pregnancies
They also get higher insurance payments for the resulting kids. I don't see the net gain for insurers here. Also, the kind of people who would have problems obtaining cheap birth control are going to have similar troubles obtaining and properly applying free birth control.
The number-crunching analysis shows it helps lower the costs of covering more expensive services in the long run when they are caught early with cheap intervention.
The insurance industry did the same number crunching and they as a whole decided to forgo preventative care. I'll side with the people who actually have an interest in getting this calculation right.
you raise taxes on property and wealth by 1%
As an aside, you would need to pass a constitutional amendment to make this work. Capital gains and income taxes are a work around for this.
The government isn't like a family. It's more like a bank.
There's three big problems with that model. Banks don't have taxes or a captive revenue stream. Second, banks have to have positive net assets. Third, banks have to follow rigorous accounting laws.
Governments can run some degree of negative liabilities due to the captive revenue stream and lack of accountability.
Conservatives, for some reason, have come to the conclusion that health care is a luxury. It is not, it is a necessity, that's why it is illegal for emergency rooms to turn people away.
Some health care is a necessity and some a luxury. Free birth control, for example, is a luxury.
Under the ACA, people are for the first time required to take personal responsibility to plan for their own (inevitable) health care costs, rather than foisting them on to the rest of us, and somehow conservatives think that is a bad thing.
That hasn't happened. There's no such requirement. For example, I can pay the mandate tax until such time as I get an expensive medical condition, then get the insurance.