To be blunt: black people, and to a lesser extent, first generation Hispanics. The difference is that Hispanics tend to approach the mean for their socioeconomic status by the second generation. Blacks have made progress, but just enough to keep the gap from widening even more.
Did you ever meet a black person with a college degree?
I did. When I went to elementary school and high school, lots of my teachers were black. One of my best teachers was the biology teacher who taught me how to grow bacteria and fruit flies. I think of her every day. My work today involves a lot of molecular biology and genetics.
One of my college housemates was a black guy who graduated in chemical engineering. Did you ever study chemical engineering? Could you pass physical chem? (BTW I met a lot of black chemical engineers. It's one of those disciplines where you can get ahead just by being smart and working hard.)
Did you ever meet a black lawyer? I have. Did you ever meet a black doctor? I have. They were at the top of their field. They didn't get there by affirmative action.
The reason black people did so badly in the U.S. is 100 years of slavery followed by 100 years of Jim Crow under which black people couldn't vote or go to school in the former Confederate states. Did you ever meet anybody who later got killed for trying to organize black people to vote in the South? I did. Black people couldn't exercise their right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and even then the racists used all kinds of tricks to stop them from voting. They're still doing it today.
After the Southern schools were required to pay for black education, the math and reading "gap" started to disappear. You can see the data at the NAEP web site.
They try to correct for those factors but they can never be sure.
Maybe the biggest epidemiological study is the Nurses' Health Study, which has several thousand participants and has been going on for more than one generation. They've been recording a huge number of personal activities and medical developments. Then they run it through computers to find associations. Then they try to correct for all the factors. Then they do a randomized controlled study to find out if the association was spurious or if it really was causation. They get it right about half the time, which is worthwhile. But you just can't eliminate every possible confounding factor.
If they really wanted to find out whether sunlight affected weight, they would have done a randomized, controlled trial.
They would have randomly assigned half the people to getting exposed to sunlight early, and the other half to getting exposed to sunlight late.
Instead, they let the subjects go their merry way and simply measured their exposure to sunlight during the day.
These kind of studies give spurious results. For example, suppose the ones who are exposed to sunlight in the morning are getting up early to start their day jogging.
No, I'm not saying that I try to make each side look equally valid.
I'm saying that I try to let each side make their best case, and let my readers decide.
I'm writing for people who are intelligent enough to know how to evaluate both sides of an argument and come to their own conclusions.
Sometimes it's obvious that one side is lying. Sometimes it's too close to call.
For example, when I was writing about needle exchange programs for IV drug users, I had a stack of well-designed studies published in major medical journals saying that needle exchange programs saved lives, and I could call up experts who would make very persuasive arguments for them.
Then I'd call up some right-wing politician's office and say, "What's your evidence? How do you respond to this article in the Journal of the American Public Health Association?" Let them talk. Sometimes they just make fools of themselves. (Governor Pataki said, "We don't have enough evidence yet. We're studying it." Studying it forever.) Sometimes they really did seem to be well-intentioned people who believed things that were wrong. Sometimes they had actually changed their position.
Of course it's always possible that I could find out that I was wrong.
If you want to know more about the process, look up John Stuart Mill's On Liberty on the Internet.
(Oh yeah, the other rule is, "Always ask, 'What's your evidence?'")
I write about medicine. I read the journals and go to the conferences.
I was passing by New York City Hall (during the Giuliani Administration) and I saw a demonstration by AIDS activists, something that I had been covering. I always like to talk to the real people involved, so I tried to get over to the demonstration.
Giuliani put a locked gate around City Hall. I had to stop by a guard post. I told the guard what I was doing, and he told me I needed press identification. I told him that I should be able to go to the demonstration simply as a member of the general public. But he was an asshole on a power trip and insisted that I needed a press ID. Finally I saw somebody else walk through without press ID, so I just walked through myself.
I later called up City Hall to complain about the guard, and went through a long series of written complaints to supervisors who were perpetually on vacation or had been moved to a different job. Finally the City Hall guards let some politician's friend with a gun into City Hall without screening, and he shot and killed a City Council member. It was no longer a good time to press on with a complaint like that.
I also called the City Hall press office and asked them what the requirements were for a press card. They were actually reasonable as written. The original purpose of a press card is to let you cross police lines during a fire or other emergency, or big events or demonstrations, and they gave press cards to reporters who regularly covered them for news media. Counter-cultural publications like the Village Voice and WBAI-FM got press cards. Less formally, they let the cops know when the reporters were watching so they didn't beat up demonstrators with cameras around. With time, press passes turned into a prestige item that publishers and other freeloaders used to try to get out of speeding tickets, get free admission to the circus, cage free meals at restaurants, etc. You had to fill out a form and apply, documenting that you actually do cover events where a press card is useful. I thought that it might actually make a good story, for the National Writers Union newsletter or someplace, "How to get a police press card."
I decided that I don't need your fucking press card. I can find out enough just by exercising the rights I have as an ordinary citizen, and exercising my willingness to go to jail if that's what it takes, to get my readers the information that they want and have a right to know.
One of the things that always amused me was the outrage of the press (like the New York Times) when the cops beat up their reporters during a demonstration (at the Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, for example). Why weren't you doing your job of reporting the truth when we were getting beaten up by the cops, in front of your own eyes?
So blogger, shmogger. You don't need a press pass to write journalism. All you need are your rights under the Constitution and the willingness to get beaten up and go to jail.
As someone who made a modest living for 30 years as a "journalist" (or whatever you want to call me), I can summarize the most important thing I learned in 30 seconds:
Every time you attack someone, always call him to get his side.
(Variation 1: Every time you write something that you strongly believe, always call somebody on the other side to find out why they disagree with you.)
That's it. If you follow that rule, you'll always get a decent story.
(German colleges are now free again, like the Scandinavian countries. Under the German constitution, the 16 state governments control finance and education. A 2005 federal court decision allowed them to charge tuition. 8 states, in former West Germany, did, but it was unpopular and they reversed their policy. Lower Saxony charged €1,000 ($1,300)/year. An economist estimated that tuition caused 20,000 potential students (6.8% of all students) to forgo enrollment in 2007. Denmark, Norway and Sweden have free tuition, although Germany, with 2.5 million students, is the largest. Britain raised its tuition caps to £9,000 ($14,000). In France, most public universities charge a few hundred euros per year, though the grandes écoles are more expensive.)
Also, one can't look at the lifetime earnings of people in their 40s or 50s to do this analysis. the question facing the high school graduate today is a looking forward one, not "what was the effect of choosing college or not in 1970-1980". In 1970 the job market was very different today. Manufacturing and similar jobs which did not require a degree were still a large part of the market.
That's true. I read a classic analysis of inequality in the U.S. (sorry I can't remember the citation), which concluded that for people from the lower classes, a college degree with any major was a guarantee of a professional job. This was based on data of people who were working when the study was done, which was probably in the 1960s. So it was true in the 1950s.
Another problem is that correlation is not causation. The one factor that most strongly correlates with your income is your father's income. In general, rich kids go to college. Rich kids don't become rich because they went to college. They become rich because their fathers were rich.
An Ivy League education's greatest value is partying with well-connected rich people who are obviously going to spend their entire lives well-connected and rich. Earning the friendship of these people makes you well-connected, and eventually rich.
So George W. Bush was right to spend his time at Yale and Harvard partying, getting drunk, and smoking pot, rather than studying business management and boring old wars.
The vast majority of public schools are run by school boards in which parents can have greater or lesser input.
Some districts have smart aggressive school boards that set standards and make sure their kids get a good education; in other school districts it's all about whose brother-in-law gets the lunchroom contract.
It's small-town democracy. If you don't have good schools for your kids, blame your self and your neighbors. It's your responsibility.
I remember one tech college, RCA Institute, that was actually pretty good. I met their graduates doing pretty good work on pretty good jobs everywhere. Bell Labs used to hire techs from RCA Institute. I met an electrical engineer from India who went to RCA Institute for 6 months to finish off his education. Then he went to work designing IC circuits for the blind. He showed me the first 8086 chip I ever saw in my life.
Then they went into decline. They were going to close down, the teachers tried to make a go of continuing on their own, and it just wasn't working out as a viable model. They changed their name several times. Last time I heard it was called TCI, Technical Careers Institute or something. They had rented a space on 8th Ave. off W. 56th St. in Manhattan, next to McDonald's.
Anybody know more about them? Are they still any good?
The Malaysian military radar showed an unidentified plane without a flight plan fly across their country and over the Indian Ocean. The radar operators didn't notice it. So they missed the opportunity to send up fighter jets to find out what the fuck was going on.
Instead they were were searching the wrong sea, on the east of Malaysia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03... Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370 By KEITH BRADSHER and MICHAEL FORSYTHE MARCH 15, 2014
I don't trust you. I trust the doctors who know their patients better than you do. And I trust researchers who have actually talked to poor people in the projects and gone over their budgets, better than I trust you.
I've been to New Orleans. It's one of the least segregated parts of the formerly Confederate south, and it's still pretty segregated. You reduced the black population to slavery and post-slavery servitude, and you complain when they don't show personal initiative.
As George Bernard Shaw said, "The American makes the negro his bootblack, and then demonstrates his inferiority by pointing out that he is a bootblack."
People who are poor don't have the same choices you do.
They're not buying 60" televisions.
I guess you aren't driving by the same projects I am, seeing said 60" TVs through the open doors of the apartments, while they're sitting on the porch.
You don't know that they're poor. There are a lot of middle-class projects, where people have good jobs and pay market-rate rents.
There was a sociologist named Elliott Liebow who answered the question he was always getting, "Why don't these negroes get jobs instead of hanging out on street corners all the time?" His answer was, most of them do have jobs. The negroes you see hanging out of the street corners during the day have jobs in the evening (and weekends). If you go to a restaurant in the evening, you need a cook there in the evening, right?
Where in the US constitution is it mandated that I be my brothers keeper....by force?
We mandate lots of things that aren't in the US constitution.
As Adam Smith said, when you benefit from a society, you have an obligation to pay the costs of running that society.
Adam Smith knew about epidemics. We have to cooperate to build hospitals that care for everyone as a last resort. It would be nice if everybody contributed those costs voluntarily.
But they don't. Some people become freeloaders. They know we're going to have to take care of them whether they pay their share or not, so they don't pay. A few freeloaders can encourage everybody to stop cooperating. Then we won't have hospitals for anybody. So if the freeloaders don't pay, we have to make them pay.
If you had a 4-year-old child who got cancer, whose life could only be saved by a $100,000 drug, you'd be demanding that the government, or somebody, give your child that drug. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
So we have to make you pay your share now of the cost of running society. You don't have any choice.
What happened to people taking responsibility for their lives and answering to the consequences of their actions/inactions?
It failed.
Personal responsibility doesn't work in health care. Rich people get care. Poor people die.
People who are poor don't have the same choices you do.
They're not buying 60" televisions. They're not buying lattes in Starbucks. They don't have relatives to fall back on for money. They can't buy insurance. They can barely afford transportation to work. Sometimes they can't afford transportation at all.
Where in the US constitution is it mandated that I be my brothers keeper....by force?
The biggest problem is that once people have to pay for "routine" visits, they don't go on routine visits. Obviously you are one of those people who can afford to pay for a $200 doctor's visit out of pocket. Maybe half of Americans are in your category. The other half aren't.
Perhaps if they chose a Major Medical plan instead of an ObamaCare plan, they could use the $600 a month savings to put some money aside to go to the doctor once a year.
According to some handouts I got at a panel on Obamacare, the entire Obamacare premium for a family of 3 earning $78,000 would be $600 a month. So if they dropped Obamacare and got Major Medical instead, they wouldn't save $600 a month.
Major Medical is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick. Any insurance is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick.
The problem comes when people get sick. If you develop multiple sclerosis, your medical costs will go up enormously. You could easily spend $100,000 in the first year. You could be spending $500 and $1,000 on specialist visits.You could get a dozen MRI scans at $10,000 apiece. Your medical savings account won't cover it.
And what Dr. should be insisting one way or the other that someone should used contraception? That is a personal choice....things don't get much more personal than that.
Doctors don't insist. Patients ask them which contraceptives are safest and most effective. They give their recommendations.
Two different issues here. No one is, nor should they be...holding a gun to your head to go down either path.
he U.S. has an infant mortality rate that dwarfs comparable nations, as well as the highest teenage-pregnancy rate in the developed world, largely because of the politically-motivated unavailability of contraception in many areas."
Seriously? I don't know of anywhere in the US where contraception is not available. They sell rubbers at all drug stores and most every grocery store I've ever been to. I'm born and raised in the south of the US, and I've never seen anywhere that doesn't have multiple forms of contraception unavailable with or without a prescription. There are no cities I know of that ban them by law.
While condoms have useful purposes, they have a contraceptive failure rate of about 1% a year. A gynecologist at a medical school once told me that for women who absolutely must not get pregnant, she prescribes either the contraceptive loop or the hormone implants, both of which must be inserted by a doctor. Another reliable method is the pill, which must be prescribed by a doctor. The cheapest place to get this is usually a Planned Parenthood clinic. Otherwise it might cost $1-2,000
Throughout the South, politicians have been closing down Planned Parenthood clinics. Romney said that he will do anything he can to shut down Planned Parenthood. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
They've also been trying to exclude contraceptives from health insurance under a religious exemption. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
I've also noticed that when I see a list of states with their incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, Mississippi and Alabama are usually at the top of the list.
The infant mortality and maternal mortality is pretty high in the U.S. in general and throughout the South in particular. Yes, Rolling Stone was correct.
You need to call the GOP... I hear they're having real trouble finding ACA horror stories that don't turn out to be utter bullshit after thirty seconds of digging. Your story isn't utter bullshit like all the others, is it?
This is what you're referring to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02... Health Care Horror Hooey Paul Krugman FEB. 23, 2014 (Right-wingers convinced Americans that farms are being broken up to pay "death tax" estate liabilities, but there is not one single example. Now the Republicans are creating Obamacare horror stories, which don't hold up upon fact checking. In the GOP response to the State of the Union address, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers claimed "Bette in Spokane" had lost her good insurance and was forced to pay $700 a month more. Local reporters found the real Betty, and found out [Bette Grenier had a catastrophic plan, and she refused to look on the ACA web site.] In Michigan, Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, is running an ad about Julie Boonstra, who has leukemia, saying that her new policy will have unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. But Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post found that she will be saving more than she will be paying in out-of-pocket costs. [The Obamacare out-of-pocket maximum is $6,350. Her premiums were cut in half, from $1,100/mo to $571/mo.]) [T]he true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you name some of these subcultures?
To be blunt: black people, and to a lesser extent, first generation Hispanics. The difference is that Hispanics tend to approach the mean for their socioeconomic status by the second generation. Blacks have made progress, but just enough to keep the gap from widening even more.
Did you ever meet a black person with a college degree?
I did. When I went to elementary school and high school, lots of my teachers were black. One of my best teachers was the biology teacher who taught me how to grow bacteria and fruit flies. I think of her every day. My work today involves a lot of molecular biology and genetics.
One of my college housemates was a black guy who graduated in chemical engineering. Did you ever study chemical engineering? Could you pass physical chem? (BTW I met a lot of black chemical engineers. It's one of those disciplines where you can get ahead just by being smart and working hard.)
Did you ever meet a black lawyer? I have. Did you ever meet a black doctor? I have. They were at the top of their field. They didn't get there by affirmative action.
The reason black people did so badly in the U.S. is 100 years of slavery followed by 100 years of Jim Crow under which black people couldn't vote or go to school in the former Confederate states. Did you ever meet anybody who later got killed for trying to organize black people to vote in the South? I did. Black people couldn't exercise their right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and even then the racists used all kinds of tricks to stop them from voting. They're still doing it today.
After the Southern schools were required to pay for black education, the math and reading "gap" started to disappear. You can see the data at the NAEP web site.
They try to correct for those factors but they can never be sure.
Maybe the biggest epidemiological study is the Nurses' Health Study, which has several thousand participants and has been going on for more than one generation. They've been recording a huge number of personal activities and medical developments. Then they run it through computers to find associations. Then they try to correct for all the factors. Then they do a randomized controlled study to find out if the association was spurious or if it really was causation. They get it right about half the time, which is worthwhile. But you just can't eliminate every possible confounding factor.
True, it's appropriate to start with a correlational study before you go on to a randomized, controlled trial.
This would have been a good study -- if they didn't come to an unjustified conclusion.
Exposure to moderate levels of light at biologically appropriate times can influence weight, independent of sleep timing and duration.
We don't know that from this study, because they couldn't control for all the other factors that might have influenced weight.
If they really wanted to find out whether sunlight affected weight, they would have done a randomized, controlled trial.
They would have randomly assigned half the people to getting exposed to sunlight early, and the other half to getting exposed to sunlight late.
Instead, they let the subjects go their merry way and simply measured their exposure to sunlight during the day.
These kind of studies give spurious results. For example, suppose the ones who are exposed to sunlight in the morning are getting up early to start their day jogging.
No, I'm not saying that I try to make each side look equally valid.
I'm saying that I try to let each side make their best case, and let my readers decide.
I'm writing for people who are intelligent enough to know how to evaluate both sides of an argument and come to their own conclusions.
Sometimes it's obvious that one side is lying. Sometimes it's too close to call.
For example, when I was writing about needle exchange programs for IV drug users, I had a stack of well-designed studies published in major medical journals saying that needle exchange programs saved lives, and I could call up experts who would make very persuasive arguments for them.
Then I'd call up some right-wing politician's office and say, "What's your evidence? How do you respond to this article in the Journal of the American Public Health Association?" Let them talk. Sometimes they just make fools of themselves. (Governor Pataki said, "We don't have enough evidence yet. We're studying it." Studying it forever.) Sometimes they really did seem to be well-intentioned people who believed things that were wrong. Sometimes they had actually changed their position.
Of course it's always possible that I could find out that I was wrong.
If you want to know more about the process, look up John Stuart Mill's On Liberty on the Internet.
(Oh yeah, the other rule is, "Always ask, 'What's your evidence?'")
I write about medicine. I read the journals and go to the conferences.
I was passing by New York City Hall (during the Giuliani Administration) and I saw a demonstration by AIDS activists, something that I had been covering. I always like to talk to the real people involved, so I tried to get over to the demonstration.
Giuliani put a locked gate around City Hall. I had to stop by a guard post. I told the guard what I was doing, and he told me I needed press identification. I told him that I should be able to go to the demonstration simply as a member of the general public. But he was an asshole on a power trip and insisted that I needed a press ID. Finally I saw somebody else walk through without press ID, so I just walked through myself.
I later called up City Hall to complain about the guard, and went through a long series of written complaints to supervisors who were perpetually on vacation or had been moved to a different job. Finally the City Hall guards let some politician's friend with a gun into City Hall without screening, and he shot and killed a City Council member. It was no longer a good time to press on with a complaint like that.
I also called the City Hall press office and asked them what the requirements were for a press card. They were actually reasonable as written. The original purpose of a press card is to let you cross police lines during a fire or other emergency, or big events or demonstrations, and they gave press cards to reporters who regularly covered them for news media. Counter-cultural publications like the Village Voice and WBAI-FM got press cards. Less formally, they let the cops know when the reporters were watching so they didn't beat up demonstrators with cameras around. With time, press passes turned into a prestige item that publishers and other freeloaders used to try to get out of speeding tickets, get free admission to the circus, cage free meals at restaurants, etc. You had to fill out a form and apply, documenting that you actually do cover events where a press card is useful. I thought that it might actually make a good story, for the National Writers Union newsletter or someplace, "How to get a police press card."
I decided that I don't need your fucking press card. I can find out enough just by exercising the rights I have as an ordinary citizen, and exercising my willingness to go to jail if that's what it takes, to get my readers the information that they want and have a right to know.
One of the things that always amused me was the outrage of the press (like the New York Times) when the cops beat up their reporters during a demonstration (at the Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, for example). Why weren't you doing your job of reporting the truth when we were getting beaten up by the cops, in front of your own eyes?
So blogger, shmogger. You don't need a press pass to write journalism. All you need are your rights under the Constitution and the willingness to get beaten up and go to jail.
As someone who made a modest living for 30 years as a "journalist" (or whatever you want to call me), I can summarize the most important thing I learned in 30 seconds:
Every time you attack someone, always call him to get his side.
(Variation 1: Every time you write something that you strongly believe, always call somebody on the other side to find out why they disagree with you.)
That's it. If you follow that rule, you'll always get a decent story.
Interestingly I was never taught to do addition/subtraction like that but have always done it that way.
Me too.
I suspect a lot of people will dismiss it entirely because it was done on mice, and humans are not big mice.
And mouse evolution, since this study was done in mice.
When they replicate this study in humans I'll pay attention.
Humans are not big mice.
We don't have a moral obligation to get into a situation that most of us don't understand, and make things worse by escalating the conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...
Germany Backtracks on Tuition
By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE
Published: August 25, 2013
(German colleges are now free again, like the Scandinavian countries. Under the German constitution, the 16 state governments control finance and education. A 2005 federal court decision allowed them to charge tuition. 8 states, in former West Germany, did, but it was unpopular and they reversed their policy. Lower Saxony charged €1,000 ($1,300)/year. An economist estimated that tuition caused 20,000 potential students (6.8% of all students) to forgo enrollment in 2007. Denmark, Norway and Sweden have free tuition, although Germany, with 2.5 million students, is the largest. Britain raised its tuition caps to £9,000 ($14,000). In France, most public universities charge a few hundred euros per year, though the grandes écoles are more expensive.)
Also, one can't look at the lifetime earnings of people in their 40s or 50s to do this analysis. the question facing the high school graduate today is a looking forward one, not "what was the effect of choosing college or not in 1970-1980". In 1970 the job market was very different today. Manufacturing and similar jobs which did not require a degree were still a large part of the market.
That's true. I read a classic analysis of inequality in the U.S. (sorry I can't remember the citation), which concluded that for people from the lower classes, a college degree with any major was a guarantee of a professional job. This was based on data of people who were working when the study was done, which was probably in the 1960s. So it was true in the 1950s.
Another problem is that correlation is not causation. The one factor that most strongly correlates with your income is your father's income. In general, rich kids go to college. Rich kids don't become rich because they went to college. They become rich because their fathers were rich.
An Ivy League education's greatest value is partying with well-connected rich people who are obviously going to spend their entire lives well-connected and rich. Earning the friendship of these people makes you well-connected, and eventually rich.
So George W. Bush was right to spend his time at Yale and Harvard partying, getting drunk, and smoking pot, rather than studying business management and boring old wars.
The vast majority of public schools are run by school boards in which parents can have greater or lesser input.
Some districts have smart aggressive school boards that set standards and make sure their kids get a good education; in other school districts it's all about whose brother-in-law gets the lunchroom contract.
It's small-town democracy. If you don't have good schools for your kids, blame your self and your neighbors. It's your responsibility.
I remember one tech college, RCA Institute, that was actually pretty good. I met their graduates doing pretty good work on pretty good jobs everywhere. Bell Labs used to hire techs from RCA Institute. I met an electrical engineer from India who went to RCA Institute for 6 months to finish off his education. Then he went to work designing IC circuits for the blind. He showed me the first 8086 chip I ever saw in my life.
Then they went into decline. They were going to close down, the teachers tried to make a go of continuing on their own, and it just wasn't working out as a viable model. They changed their name several times. Last time I heard it was called TCI, Technical Careers Institute or something. They had rented a space on 8th Ave. off W. 56th St. in Manhattan, next to McDonald's.
Anybody know more about them? Are they still any good?
The Malaysian military radar showed an unidentified plane without a flight plan fly across their country and over the Indian Ocean. The radar operators didn't notice it. So they missed the opportunity to send up fighter jets to find out what the fuck was going on.
Instead they were were searching the wrong sea, on the east of Malaysia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...
Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370
By KEITH BRADSHER and MICHAEL FORSYTHE
MARCH 15, 2014
I don't trust you. I trust the doctors who know their patients better than you do. And I trust researchers who have actually talked to poor people in the projects and gone over their budgets, better than I trust you.
I've been to New Orleans. It's one of the least segregated parts of the formerly Confederate south, and it's still pretty segregated. You reduced the black population to slavery and post-slavery servitude, and you complain when they don't show personal initiative.
As George Bernard Shaw said, "The American makes the negro his bootblack, and then demonstrates his inferiority by pointing out that he is a bootblack."
(I may be wrong about the "formerly.")
I guess you aren't driving by the same projects I am, seeing said 60" TVs through the open doors of the apartments, while they're sitting on the porch.
You don't know that they're poor. There are a lot of middle-class projects, where people have good jobs and pay market-rate rents.
There was a sociologist named Elliott Liebow who answered the question he was always getting, "Why don't these negroes get jobs instead of hanging out on street corners all the time?" His answer was, most of them do have jobs. The negroes you see hanging out of the street corners during the day have jobs in the evening (and weekends). If you go to a restaurant in the evening, you need a cook there in the evening, right?
Where in the US constitution is it mandated that I be my brothers keeper....by force?
We mandate lots of things that aren't in the US constitution.
As Adam Smith said, when you benefit from a society, you have an obligation to pay the costs of running that society.
Adam Smith knew about epidemics. We have to cooperate to build hospitals that care for everyone as a last resort. It would be nice if everybody contributed those costs voluntarily.
But they don't. Some people become freeloaders. They know we're going to have to take care of them whether they pay their share or not, so they don't pay. A few freeloaders can encourage everybody to stop cooperating. Then we won't have hospitals for anybody. So if the freeloaders don't pay, we have to make them pay.
If you had a 4-year-old child who got cancer, whose life could only be saved by a $100,000 drug, you'd be demanding that the government, or somebody, give your child that drug. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
So we have to make you pay your share now of the cost of running society. You don't have any choice.
What happened to people taking responsibility for their lives and answering to the consequences of their actions/inactions?
It failed.
Personal responsibility doesn't work in health care. Rich people get care. Poor people die.
People who are poor don't have the same choices you do.
They're not buying 60" televisions. They're not buying lattes in Starbucks. They don't have relatives to fall back on for money. They can't buy insurance. They can barely afford transportation to work. Sometimes they can't afford transportation at all.
Where in the US constitution is it mandated that I be my brothers keeper....by force?
The biggest problem is that once people have to pay for "routine" visits, they don't go on routine visits. Obviously you are one of those people who can afford to pay for a $200 doctor's visit out of pocket. Maybe half of Americans are in your category. The other half aren't.
Perhaps if they chose a Major Medical plan instead of an ObamaCare plan, they could use the $600 a month savings to put some money aside to go to the doctor once a year.
According to some handouts I got at a panel on Obamacare, the entire Obamacare premium for a family of 3 earning $78,000 would be $600 a month. So if they dropped Obamacare and got Major Medical instead, they wouldn't save $600 a month.
Major Medical is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick. Any insurance is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick.
The problem comes when people get sick. If you develop multiple sclerosis, your medical costs will go up enormously. You could easily spend $100,000 in the first year. You could be spending $500 and $1,000 on specialist visits.You could get a dozen MRI scans at $10,000 apiece. Your medical savings account won't cover it.
And what Dr. should be insisting one way or the other that someone should used contraception? That is a personal choice....things don't get much more personal than that.
Doctors don't insist. Patients ask them which contraceptives are safest and most effective. They give their recommendations.
Two different issues here. No one is, nor should they be...holding a gun to your head to go down either path.
Except for the guys who shoot abortion doctors.
Seriously? I don't know of anywhere in the US where contraception is not available. They sell rubbers at all drug stores and most every grocery store I've ever been to. I'm born and raised in the south of the US, and I've never seen anywhere that doesn't have multiple forms of contraception unavailable with or without a prescription. There are no cities I know of that ban them by law.
While condoms have useful purposes, they have a contraceptive failure rate of about 1% a year. A gynecologist at a medical school once told me that for women who absolutely must not get pregnant, she prescribes either the contraceptive loop or the hormone implants, both of which must be inserted by a doctor. Another reliable method is the pill, which must be prescribed by a doctor. The cheapest place to get this is usually a Planned Parenthood clinic. Otherwise it might cost $1-2,000
Throughout the South, politicians have been closing down Planned Parenthood clinics. Romney said that he will do anything he can to shut down Planned Parenthood. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
They've also been trying to exclude contraceptives from health insurance under a religious exemption. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
I've also noticed that when I see a list of states with their incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, Mississippi and Alabama are usually at the top of the list.
The infant mortality and maternal mortality is pretty high in the U.S. in general and throughout the South in particular. Yes, Rolling Stone was correct.
You need to call the GOP... I hear they're having real trouble finding ACA horror stories that don't turn out to be utter bullshit after thirty seconds of digging. Your story isn't utter bullshit like all the others, is it?
This is what you're referring to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
Health Care Horror Hooey
Paul Krugman
FEB. 23, 2014
(Right-wingers convinced Americans that farms are being broken up to pay "death tax" estate liabilities, but there is not one single example. Now the Republicans are creating Obamacare horror stories, which don't hold up upon fact checking. In the GOP response to the State of the Union address, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers claimed "Bette in Spokane" had lost her good insurance and was forced to pay $700 a month more. Local reporters found the real Betty, and found out [Bette Grenier had a catastrophic plan, and she refused to look on the ACA web site.] In Michigan, Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, is running an ad about Julie Boonstra, who has leukemia, saying that her new policy will have unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. But Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post found that she will be saving more than she will be paying in out-of-pocket costs. [The Obamacare out-of-pocket maximum is $6,350. Her premiums were cut in half, from $1,100/mo to $571/mo.])
[T]he true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.