As soon as gays and lesbians can have children without scientific intervention, they can get married, until then, they can be lovers/friends/partners, but not married - that is reserved by definition for couples that can, under normal circumstances, conceive children for the survival of the human race.
So if a woman had a hysterectomy, or if she was sterile because of treatment for childhood cancer, she can't get married, according to you.
I read 4 medical journals a week. I read all the food studies. I just read the walnuts study in New England Journal of Medicine. I remember when they were going back and forth on tofu. There's very little solid evidence that eating one type of food over another will make you healthy. Most of it is inferences based on weak studies. And when they try to repeat the studies, they get different results. Not because the doctors are stupid, but because it's very difficult to figure out what's going on. Even the low-fat diet may have been a mistake. Once you have lower overall weight, the specific components of diet don't make much difference. They make a small difference, but not that much.
There are some very good K-12 public schools in the US.
Maybe half the (unionized) public schools in New York City are up to international standards. Parents fight to get their kids in. You'd be crazy to throw those schools out the window.
The other half are in low-income neighborhoods, where the kids have real problems. The good parents are the ones who work two jobs and aren't home to help their kids with their homework.
Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of education for the GWH Bush administration and the Clinton administration. She believed all that stuff -- until she looked at the data.
Ravitch said that the one factor that affected standardized test scores more than anything else was family income.
When you fire teachers because their students did badly on high-stakes testing, you're punishing teachers for teaching low-income students. And that's what Obama's Race to the Top, which Gates supported, is doing.
The only way to bring those low-income kids up is to make them middle-income. You can't solve problems by throwing money at them, but you can cause a lot of problems by reducing people to poverty. (And destroying unions is one of the best ways of reducing people to poverty.)
The NAEP, which runs the best-designed standardized tests, compared charter schools with public schools. They found that charter schools overall did worse than public schools. Yet Obama and Gates want to throw public schools out the window and replace them with non-union charter schools.
Read that article by Ravitch that I linked to. She explains it all -- supported by solid evidence, unlike Obama and Gates.
If you believe in testing, and you want to change the schools, look around the world for the students that test best -- usually Finland. They have a public school system with unionized teachers.
Finland is also the country with the greatest economic equality and mobility in the world. They've eliminated poverty, with government handouts when necessary.
Joel Fuhrman has published popular books himself, but he hasn't published much in the scientific literature, and he makes outlandish claims which show that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
He claimed in 2002 that he could cure autoimmune disease on a water-only fast. Since he hasn't won the Nobel prize yet, it doesn't look like anything came of it.
Association isn't causation. People have been comparing Chinese diets to Western diets and other factors for 30 years trying to figure out what's responsible for the differences in disease. They haven't found much. If Fuhrman had found something, he'd be publishing it in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, which publish stuff like that all the time.
I don't think you're as smart as you think you are. And I don't think you understand the U.S.
It's a lot easier to get an undergraduate degree in most of Europe.
In the U.S., paying for a degree costs as much as the mortgage on a house. There are a lot of smart kids working at McDonald's, and it's pretty hard to earn college tuition at McDonald's.
I usually hear that "toughen up and get better" line from rich conservative hypocrites whose parents handed it all to them.
Maybe you should make it easy for the "guy who does phone tech support" to go to college for an undergraduate and even a STEM Ph.D or M.D. degree, rather than having to pay $20,000 a year for 4 years.
He might turn out to be smarter than you think.
Many of the European countries where these geniuses are coming from have free university education (with expenses).
And before you tell me that the guy who does phone tech support could go to a community college part time, name a couple of Ph.Ds or M.D.s who graduated a community college.
The stupidest fucking public service ad I ever saw was the Hour of Code video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw on YouTube that Google linked to today on its home page.
It's full of women, minorities, older people, and every affirmative action group that has a lobby or a voting block behind it (with a few prominent product placements).
But it doesn't tell you anything about what code is. (Nor does http://csedweek.org/)
There's nothing in here that would actually appeal to some kid who would be interested in code.
It's like the Richard Feynman critique of physics textbooks. You could replace "Hour of Code" with "Hip-Hop Dance" or "Basketball" or "Porn" and you wouldn't have to change the video.
Actually up until the point of the gates foundation, Bill Gates was the ultimate Scrooge. He gae away not one penny, it wasn't until he was called out on that very fact that the Gates foudration was formed.
Even much of the supposedly altruistic efforts also seem to have an angle
That's right. Gates was hated, and he wanted to do something about it before Congress held any more hearings and found something (like antitrust) to prosecute him for.
The philanthropy thing was created by his PR agency, and they did a good job. At their advice, he did fund some important projects, like international disease programs that were exactly what all the public health people knew would give tremendous returns for only a relatively few (billion) dollars.
He was like John D. Rockefeller, the other billionaire (after inflation) who was also hated, and hired a PR firm to improve his image. They had him give away shiny dimes to little children. He also did some good things, like his medical research. Fortunately cancer is a favorite rich folks' cause (along with opera).
The problem is that he also followed the advice of the corporate right wing. He was part of what Diane Ravitch called the "billionaire boy's club" of school "reformers" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/school-reform-failing-grade/ who wanted to privatize public schools, humiliate the teachers, destroy their union, rate them with high-stakes testing, and turn education into an assembly line of short-answer questions.
We've turned this country over to the billionaires. It shows you the benefits and problems of letting dictators run things. Gates did some good things (world epidemics) and some bad things (charter schools).
When he gets involved in (tax-deductible) charities that bring his own interests into conflict with the interests of others, like immigration "reform", you know whose side he's going to be on.
I personally don't think this would be a very good country if we turned it into a billionaire's playground rather than the imperfect democracy it used to be.
I follow the medical literature, and there's not much hard evidence that eating certain foods is healthier than other foods, as opposed to losing weight generally. If you know of any evidence, I'd like to see it.
100 million North Americans are trying to change their diet and it doesn't work. Most weight loss is undone after 3 years. The solution of telling people to "eat healthy" doesn't work. There really isn't much good evidence of what "eat healthy" even means. Think about it. How do you prove scientifically that "eating vegetables" is healthy? Most of the studies are associational. Greeks who eat a "traditional" Greek diet -- and who also climb up and down mountains all day -- have less heart disease. Eskimos who eat a traditional Eskimo diet -- whale blubber -- also have less heart disease.
Your diet is a perpetual thing, not something you do for a little while to lose weight. Eat healthy, be healthy. Drugs and short term adjustments in what you eat aren't going to do shit.
Well, 100 million people tried that and it didn't work. What do you propose to do with them -- write them off?
UnitedHealthcare has been dropping doctors and providers all over the country, even in its Medicare Advantage plans, which are unaffected by Obamacare. This is a story from the Kaiser foundation, whose board of directors is filled with pro-business and right-wing free market types, unfortunately.
Dorathy Senay’s doctor had some bad news after her last checkup, but it wasn't about her serious blood disorder called amyloidosis. Her Medicare Advantage managed care plan from UnitedHealthcare/AARP is terminating the doctor's contract Feb. 1.
She is also losing her oncologist at the prestigious Yale Medical Group -- the entire 1,200 physician practice was axed.
Senay, 71, of Canterbury, Conn., is among thousands of UnitedHealthcare Medicare members in 10 states whose doctors will be cut from their plan network.
Good example. That's what I meant when I said every time you check their facts, they turn out to be wrong. In this case, it turned out that UnitedHealthcare had decided to drop Sundby's policy even before Obamacare.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/11/04/2881581/wall-street-journal-horror-story-cancer-patient-losing-doctors-wrong/ The Real Reason That The Cancer Patient Writing In Today’s Wall Street Journal Lost Her Insurance By Igor Volsky on November 4, 2013 But Sundby shouldn’t blame reform — United Healthcare dropped her coverage because they’ve struggled to compete in California’s individual health care market for years and didn’t want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby. The company, which only had 8,000 individual policy holders in California out of the two million who participate in the market, announced (along with a second insurer, Aetna) that it would be pulling out of the individual market in May. The company could not compete with Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, who control more than 80 percent of the individual market.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-horror-story-20131105,0,6361694.story A closer look at the WSJ's newest Obamacare horror story By Michael Hiltzik November 6, 2013, 6:05 a.m. As for Sundby, the idea that in the pre-Obamacare era, once UnitedHealth bailed out on her—as it surely intended to do eventually—she’d be able to find any insurer willing to cover her cancer treatment without restrictions, allow her to choose her own doctors and therapies without limit, and cap her personal financial exposure at any but a stratospheric level is, to put it bluntly, ludicrous. She may or may not know that, but the editors of the Wall Street Journal certainly do, and for them to put her story out as if her insurance problems would disappear if only the Affordable Care Act ceased to exist is nothing short of malpractice.
I've been reading the Wall Street Journal for 40 years. I used to read the editorial page every day, because years ago, you could trust them to get their facts right (or more impressively, to apologize when they got it wrong). They used to be the best news source in the world. Now they've turned into a Pravda for the right wing of the Republican Party.
I think Obamacare was a disaster. It's a conservative plan, based on a Heritage Foundation model, run through the private insurance companies, which are the most inefficient part of the system. We should have had single payer, which would have solved all those problems Sundby was complaining about, at half the cost. But Obamacare is better than what we had before.
really?? what about the flaming liberals over at MSNBC who straight up lie and mislead? I mean no one watches the station so I guess you could be forgiven for not knowing about them
This is a good example of conservative logic. "flaming liberals over at MSNBC who straight up lie and mislead". No example given. No evidence given. They assume that since (they think) MSNBC is liberal, it must lie and mislead as well. No need to look for facts. We know the truth.
The reason I read the WSJ editorial page for many years is that they could at least present a (usually) consistent, conservative view based on facts and logic. When they made mistakes, they actually admitted it (sometimes). Unfortunately, with time, they became the Republican Pravda.
Medical bills are not the primary reason for bankruptcies, While you can rack up bills that will take more then your life time to pay off, the biggest problem is the lack of income that comes with those large medical bills. You simply do not often get large medical bills without missing work and often, you are permanently off work or off work for a substantial period of time. I don't care how well you planned or if you have insurance, the lack of income usually is devastating to most all working families. Health insurance does nothing to fix that, obamacare of the ACA does nothing to fix that.
That's what Elizabeth Warren published her research on. That's why the voters sent her to Congress. Warren found that large medical bills were a major factor in bankruptcy. There were other factors, but medical factors were a big one. When some of the cancer drugs cost $100,000, and a CAT scan costs $5,000, what do you expect? People complain about taxes, but medical expenses were a bigger expense than even the highest taxes.
If you have disability insurance, which most people had in the days of benevolent corporations like Eastman Kodak or IBM, then the disability insurance would cover your expenses. If you had a good job and planned well, financial advisers used to recommend keeping enough in savings to get through a 6-month emergency. That was the free-market solution to disability. If you didn't have disability insurance, you could fall back on the government safety net.
But corporations don't routinely give disability insurance any more, and most people aren't making enough to pay for disability insurance and accumulate a 6-month cushion. This is a problem of the increasing inequality, which means that people in the middle and bottom are earning less.
And the federal government and states have cut the safety net back dramatically, starting with Ronald Reagan, and followed up by Bill Clinton.
We used to have a pragmatic mix of private and government services, which worked reasonably well. But the conservatives (Republican and Democratic) have destroyed the government safety net.
This is also not getting into the problems with the ACA's cheap plans that do nothing to fix it either. We are seeing family plans with $10k a year out of pocket deductibles before the insurance even kicks in.
Obamacare was based on Romneycare and the Heritage Foundation proposals, with the "moderate" Democrats' foolishly believing that if they gave the Republicans everything they demanded, in a spirit of "post-partisanship," the Republicans would cooperate.
Liberals, like Robert Kuttner, opposed the Romneycare model, for the very reason this Bloomberg article describes. It's a basic principle of health insurance, well-known to anybody who understands insurance, that private insurance offers you a tradeoff between lower premiums and higher copays, or vice versa. These bronze plans are terrible policies, and the platinum plans are still pretty bad.
Progressives supported a Canadian-style single-payer system. Canadians pay their premiums through taxes, and they pay less than the bronze plans, for better coverage than the platinum plans. Here, the cost of running health care through the private insurance system eats up about half of your health care dollar.
But even the liberals agree that Obamacare is better than what we had before. I went to a talk by an insurance expert who worked for a union, and he told us that (though single payer would have been better), under Obamacare the maximum payout in premiums plus copayments will be $8,500 a year for an individual, bronze or platinum. And for low-income people, with the vouchers, their maximum payment will be something like 15% of their income.
Well, we know there are people who were receiving coverage for cancer and heart conditions who had their policies yanked from them because the government said they were junk.
We do? Name one.
Fox News can't find one. Every time they give an example like that, and somebody checks their facts, it turns out Fox was wrong.
This is an interesting example of conservative thinking. Conservatives like Hannity decide that Obamacare must be forcing people to get bad policies, because conservatives believe that the government (and especially the Democrats) can't do anything right. Therefore, they don't have to bother checking their facts. If somebody claims they're worse off undere Obamacare, it must be true. That's why Hannity gets it wrong all the time.
This is in contrast to the scientific method, where we come up with a theory and look at the facts in the real world to see whether the theory is true.
Oh stop it. You can go off into the wilds and stay away from the IRS, UPS, AT&T and likely the NSA. Very, very few people stay completely off the grid. If you want to have the benefits of civilization, then you have to pay for it.
Or as Adam Smith said, those who benefit from society have an obligation to pay for the costs of running society.
Tell that to the 1%. All they're interested in is buying politicians to make sure they keep getting federally mandated profits.
There's more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is vote for politicians who will follow the interests of the citizens who elected them.
Although we seem to have difficulty doing that. There appears to be something wrong with democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a very old, small tribe in Iran that follows Satan. They were like the original pagans before Mohammad.
The Satanists and the Christians might hit it off well together.
You might even have Christian girls going out with Satanist guys and vice versa.
It could be the beginning of something good.
They sound like the ultra-orthodox Jews.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ultra-orthodox Jews and the Muslims got together and traded tips.
Of course. Who wrote the Bible? God. Do you expect Satan to get a fair shake in the Bible?
Maybe in Milton's Paradise Lost.
Satanism directly and proudly promotes evil, damage, and chaos; Satanism conflicts with the constitutions
A lot you know about Satanism. You're confusing them with anarchists, which you don't know anything about either.
When a reporter asked George W. Bush who his favorite philosopher was, he said "Jesus Christ."
Is that the idiotic moron you were referring to?
As soon as gays and lesbians can have children without scientific intervention, they can get married, until then, they can be lovers/friends/partners, but not married - that is reserved by definition for couples that can, under normal circumstances, conceive children for the survival of the human race.
So if a woman had a hysterectomy, or if she was sterile because of treatment for childhood cancer, she can't get married, according to you.
And a 55-year-old couple can't get married.
I read 4 medical journals a week. I read all the food studies. I just read the walnuts study in New England Journal of Medicine. I remember when they were going back and forth on tofu. There's very little solid evidence that eating one type of food over another will make you healthy. Most of it is inferences based on weak studies. And when they try to repeat the studies, they get different results. Not because the doctors are stupid, but because it's very difficult to figure out what's going on. Even the low-fat diet may have been a mistake. Once you have lower overall weight, the specific components of diet don't make much difference. They make a small difference, but not that much.
There are some very good K-12 public schools in the US.
Maybe half the (unionized) public schools in New York City are up to international standards. Parents fight to get their kids in. You'd be crazy to throw those schools out the window.
The other half are in low-income neighborhoods, where the kids have real problems. The good parents are the ones who work two jobs and aren't home to help their kids with their homework.
Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of education for the GWH Bush administration and the Clinton administration. She believed all that stuff -- until she looked at the data.
Ravitch said that the one factor that affected standardized test scores more than anything else was family income.
When you fire teachers because their students did badly on high-stakes testing, you're punishing teachers for teaching low-income students. And that's what Obama's Race to the Top, which Gates supported, is doing.
The only way to bring those low-income kids up is to make them middle-income. You can't solve problems by throwing money at them, but you can cause a lot of problems by reducing people to poverty. (And destroying unions is one of the best ways of reducing people to poverty.)
The NAEP, which runs the best-designed standardized tests, compared charter schools with public schools. They found that charter schools overall did worse than public schools. Yet Obama and Gates want to throw public schools out the window and replace them with non-union charter schools.
Read that article by Ravitch that I linked to. She explains it all -- supported by solid evidence, unlike Obama and Gates.
If you believe in testing, and you want to change the schools, look around the world for the students that test best -- usually Finland. They have a public school system with unionized teachers.
Finland is also the country with the greatest economic equality and mobility in the world. They've eliminated poverty, with government handouts when necessary.
Joel Fuhrman has published popular books himself, but he hasn't published much in the scientific literature, and he makes outlandish claims which show that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/your-disease-your-fault/
He claimed in 2002 that he could cure autoimmune disease on a water-only fast. Since he hasn't won the Nobel prize yet, it doesn't look like anything came of it.
Association isn't causation. People have been comparing Chinese diets to Western diets and other factors for 30 years trying to figure out what's responsible for the differences in disease. They haven't found much. If Fuhrman had found something, he'd be publishing it in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, which publish stuff like that all the time.
I don't think you're as smart as you think you are. And I don't think you understand the U.S.
It's a lot easier to get an undergraduate degree in most of Europe.
In the U.S., paying for a degree costs as much as the mortgage on a house. There are a lot of smart kids working at McDonald's, and it's pretty hard to earn college tuition at McDonald's.
I usually hear that "toughen up and get better" line from rich conservative hypocrites whose parents handed it all to them.
Maybe you should make it easy for the "guy who does phone tech support" to go to college for an undergraduate and even a STEM Ph.D or M.D. degree, rather than having to pay $20,000 a year for 4 years.
He might turn out to be smarter than you think.
Many of the European countries where these geniuses are coming from have free university education (with expenses).
And before you tell me that the guy who does phone tech support could go to a community college part time, name a couple of Ph.Ds or M.D.s who graduated a community college.
The stupidest fucking public service ad I ever saw was the Hour of Code video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw on YouTube that Google linked to today on its home page.
It's full of women, minorities, older people, and every affirmative action group that has a lobby or a voting block behind it (with a few prominent product placements).
But it doesn't tell you anything about what code is. (Nor does http://csedweek.org/)
There's nothing in here that would actually appeal to some kid who would be interested in code.
It's like the Richard Feynman critique of physics textbooks. You could replace "Hour of Code" with "Hip-Hop Dance" or "Basketball" or "Porn" and you wouldn't have to change the video.
They're just repeating a slogan.
Actually up until the point of the gates foundation, Bill Gates was the ultimate Scrooge. He gae away not one penny, it wasn't until he was called out on that very fact that the Gates foudration was formed.
Even much of the supposedly altruistic efforts also seem to have an angle
That's right. Gates was hated, and he wanted to do something about it before Congress held any more hearings and found something (like antitrust) to prosecute him for.
The philanthropy thing was created by his PR agency, and they did a good job. At their advice, he did fund some important projects, like international disease programs that were exactly what all the public health people knew would give tremendous returns for only a relatively few (billion) dollars.
He was like John D. Rockefeller, the other billionaire (after inflation) who was also hated, and hired a PR firm to improve his image. They had him give away shiny dimes to little children. He also did some good things, like his medical research. Fortunately cancer is a favorite rich folks' cause (along with opera).
The problem is that he also followed the advice of the corporate right wing. He was part of what Diane Ravitch called the "billionaire boy's club" of school "reformers" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/school-reform-failing-grade/ who wanted to privatize public schools, humiliate the teachers, destroy their union, rate them with high-stakes testing, and turn education into an assembly line of short-answer questions.
We've turned this country over to the billionaires. It shows you the benefits and problems of letting dictators run things. Gates did some good things (world epidemics) and some bad things (charter schools).
When he gets involved in (tax-deductible) charities that bring his own interests into conflict with the interests of others, like immigration "reform", you know whose side he's going to be on.
I personally don't think this would be a very good country if we turned it into a billionaire's playground rather than the imperfect democracy it used to be.
The high pixel density on the latest displays is wasted on someone with declining eyesight and presbyopia
The original poster didn't say anything about declining eyesight and presbyopia.
I'm 70 years old and I can tell the difference between 2048x1536 and 1280x1024. Especially when I'm reading.
I follow the medical literature, and there's not much hard evidence that eating certain foods is healthier than other foods, as opposed to losing weight generally. If you know of any evidence, I'd like to see it.
100 million North Americans are trying to change their diet and it doesn't work. Most weight loss is undone after 3 years. The solution of telling people to "eat healthy" doesn't work. There really isn't much good evidence of what "eat healthy" even means. Think about it. How do you prove scientifically that "eating vegetables" is healthy? Most of the studies are associational. Greeks who eat a "traditional" Greek diet -- and who also climb up and down mountains all day -- have less heart disease. Eskimos who eat a traditional Eskimo diet -- whale blubber -- also have less heart disease.
Your diet is a perpetual thing, not something you do for a little while to lose weight. Eat healthy, be healthy. Drugs and short term adjustments in what you eat aren't going to do shit.
Well, 100 million people tried that and it didn't work. What do you propose to do with them -- write them off?
The initial stages begin with sketches on paper before moving to 3D design software. He writes, "A whole bunch of sketches were done
Now hold it right there.
Kids these days don't know how to draw with pencil and paper.
UnitedHealthcare has been dropping doctors and providers all over the country, even in its Medicare Advantage plans, which are unaffected by Obamacare. This is a story from the Kaiser foundation, whose board of directors is filled with pro-business and right-wing free market types, unfortunately.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/December/01/Medicare-Advantage-UnitedHealthcare-narrow-networks-doctors.aspx
Dorathy Senay’s doctor had some bad news after her last checkup, but it wasn't about her serious blood disorder called amyloidosis. Her Medicare Advantage managed care plan from UnitedHealthcare/AARP is terminating the doctor's contract Feb. 1.
She is also losing her oncologist at the prestigious Yale Medical Group -- the entire 1,200 physician practice was axed.
Senay, 71, of Canterbury, Conn., is among thousands of UnitedHealthcare Medicare members in 10 states whose doctors will be cut from their plan network.
We do? Name one.
Fox News can't find one. Every time they give an example like that, and somebody checks their facts, it turns out Fox was wrong.
href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579171710423780446">http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579171710423780446
There is one.
Good example. That's what I meant when I said every time you check their facts, they turn out to be wrong. In this case, it turned out that UnitedHealthcare had decided to drop Sundby's policy even before Obamacare.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/11/04/2881581/wall-street-journal-horror-story-cancer-patient-losing-doctors-wrong/
The Real Reason That The Cancer Patient Writing In Today’s Wall Street Journal Lost Her Insurance
By Igor Volsky on November 4, 2013
But Sundby shouldn’t blame reform — United Healthcare dropped her coverage because they’ve struggled to compete in California’s individual health care market for years and didn’t want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby.
The company, which only had 8,000 individual policy holders in California out of the two million who participate in the market, announced (along with a second insurer, Aetna) that it would be pulling out of the individual market in May. The company could not compete with Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, who control more than 80 percent of the individual market.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-horror-story-20131105,0,6361694.story
A closer look at the WSJ's newest Obamacare horror story
By Michael Hiltzik
November 6, 2013, 6:05 a.m.
As for Sundby, the idea that in the pre-Obamacare era, once UnitedHealth bailed out on her—as it surely intended to do eventually—she’d be able to find any insurer willing to cover her cancer treatment without restrictions, allow her to choose her own doctors and therapies without limit, and cap her personal financial exposure at any but a stratospheric level is, to put it bluntly, ludicrous. She may or may not know that, but the editors of the Wall Street Journal certainly do, and for them to put her story out as if her insurance problems would disappear if only the Affordable Care Act ceased to exist is nothing short of malpractice.
I've been reading the Wall Street Journal for 40 years. I used to read the editorial page every day, because years ago, you could trust them to get their facts right (or more impressively, to apologize when they got it wrong). They used to be the best news source in the world. Now they've turned into a Pravda for the right wing of the Republican Party.
I think Obamacare was a disaster. It's a conservative plan, based on a Heritage Foundation model, run through the private insurance companies, which are the most inefficient part of the system. We should have had single payer, which would have solved all those problems Sundby was complaining about, at half the cost. But Obamacare is better than what we had before.
really?? what about the flaming liberals over at MSNBC who straight up lie and mislead? I mean no one watches the station so I guess you could be forgiven for not knowing about them
This is a good example of conservative logic. "flaming liberals over at MSNBC who straight up lie and mislead". No example given. No evidence given. They assume that since (they think) MSNBC is liberal, it must lie and mislead as well. No need to look for facts. We know the truth.
The reason I read the WSJ editorial page for many years is that they could at least present a (usually) consistent, conservative view based on facts and logic. When they made mistakes, they actually admitted it (sometimes). Unfortunately, with time, they became the Republican Pravda.
Medical bills are not the primary reason for bankruptcies, While you can rack up bills that will take more then your life time to pay off, the biggest problem is the lack of income that comes with those large medical bills. You simply do not often get large medical bills without missing work and often, you are permanently off work or off work for a substantial period of time. I don't care how well you planned or if you have insurance, the lack of income usually is devastating to most all working families. Health insurance does nothing to fix that, obamacare of the ACA does nothing to fix that.
That's what Elizabeth Warren published her research on. That's why the voters sent her to Congress. Warren found that large medical bills were a major factor in bankruptcy. There were other factors, but medical factors were a big one. When some of the cancer drugs cost $100,000, and a CAT scan costs $5,000, what do you expect? People complain about taxes, but medical expenses were a bigger expense than even the highest taxes.
If you have disability insurance, which most people had in the days of benevolent corporations like Eastman Kodak or IBM, then the disability insurance would cover your expenses. If you had a good job and planned well, financial advisers used to recommend keeping enough in savings to get through a 6-month emergency. That was the free-market solution to disability. If you didn't have disability insurance, you could fall back on the government safety net.
But corporations don't routinely give disability insurance any more, and most people aren't making enough to pay for disability insurance and accumulate a 6-month cushion. This is a problem of the increasing inequality, which means that people in the middle and bottom are earning less.
And the federal government and states have cut the safety net back dramatically, starting with Ronald Reagan, and followed up by Bill Clinton.
We used to have a pragmatic mix of private and government services, which worked reasonably well. But the conservatives (Republican and Democratic) have destroyed the government safety net.
This is also not getting into the problems with the ACA's cheap plans that do nothing to fix it either. We are seeing family plans with $10k a year out of pocket deductibles before the insurance even kicks in.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/obamacare-deductibles-26-higher-make-cheap-rates-a-risk.html
Obamacare was based on Romneycare and the Heritage Foundation proposals, with the "moderate" Democrats' foolishly believing that if they gave the Republicans everything they demanded, in a spirit of "post-partisanship," the Republicans would cooperate.
Liberals, like Robert Kuttner, opposed the Romneycare model, for the very reason this Bloomberg article describes. It's a basic principle of health insurance, well-known to anybody who understands insurance, that private insurance offers you a tradeoff between lower premiums and higher copays, or vice versa. These bronze plans are terrible policies, and the platinum plans are still pretty bad.
Progressives supported a Canadian-style single-payer system. Canadians pay their premiums through taxes, and they pay less than the bronze plans, for better coverage than the platinum plans. Here, the cost of running health care through the private insurance system eats up about half of your health care dollar.
But even the liberals agree that Obamacare is better than what we had before. I went to a talk by an insurance expert who worked for a union, and he told us that (though single payer would have been better), under Obamacare the maximum payout in premiums plus copayments will be $8,500 a year for an individual, bronze or platinum. And for low-income people, with the vouchers, their maximum payment will be something like 15% of their income.
Well, we know there are people who were receiving coverage for cancer and heart conditions who had their policies yanked from them because the government said they were junk.
We do? Name one.
Fox News can't find one. Every time they give an example like that, and somebody checks their facts, it turns out Fox was wrong.
This is an interesting example of conservative thinking. Conservatives like Hannity decide that Obamacare must be forcing people to get bad policies, because conservatives believe that the government (and especially the Democrats) can't do anything right. Therefore, they don't have to bother checking their facts. If somebody claims they're worse off undere Obamacare, it must be true. That's why Hannity gets it wrong all the time.
This is in contrast to the scientific method, where we come up with a theory and look at the facts in the real world to see whether the theory is true.
Oh stop it. You can go off into the wilds and stay away from the IRS, UPS, AT&T and likely the NSA. Very, very few people stay completely off the grid. If you want to have the benefits of civilization, then you have to pay for it.
Or as Adam Smith said, those who benefit from society have an obligation to pay for the costs of running society.
Tell that to the 1%. All they're interested in is buying politicians to make sure they keep getting federally mandated profits.
There's more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is vote for politicians who will follow the interests of the citizens who elected them.
Although we seem to have difficulty doing that. There appears to be something wrong with democracy.