The problem for Republicans was that they instead of using Clinton's "It's the economy stupid!" to get the election in the bag they conceded all the racial minorities votes to the Democrats, they created a handicap for themselves of 20-30% of the electorate. On top of that, they alienated women, that are the majority of population, regardless of race, they alienated religious moderates that are a majority of Americans and with their hate against gays they alienated not only the LGBT community, but also the young population that have friends in that community. The Republicans played this election to lose.
Wow, they alienated all those groups and still only lost by 2%. I guess they must really be the better choice ad would have won if they just would have played nice with even one of those other groups.
I figure the republicans lost because Romney tried to campaign as being the right choice for America, when he should have just taken the low road and tried to campaign as the right choice for the 10 states that have any bearing in an election.
Bad form to reply to my own post. But I guess to put it more bluntly, I pay about $3000 a year for my INSURANCE, but I paid only about $500 last year for my HEALTHCARE. My insurance company did not pay dime one, so the entire burden of my healthcare was on me. I would say the average yearly cost of what me or my insurance company paid out over my entire adult life has been probably about $1,000 a year, and given deductibles, copay, and coinsurance, what the insurance companies paid out on average has probably been only about half of that. Now what I have paid INTO insurance over the course of my life has probably been about $7,200 a year, and as I mentioned I switched to a high deductible recently which has saved me a lot of money recently and would STILL save me money even if I had to pay my maximum out-of-pocket expense. Over my lifetime, the insurance company has been making about 90% profit on me and my family. With the high deductible plan, I am basically paying them $225 a month just to be on their pricing program, but it is definitely worth it. And if things really go to hell, they cover anything over $7,500 or $10k or whatever my limit is. And that is still cheaper than being on a full medical plan. Too bad Obama wants to do away with insurance, which is what this is, and try to convince us that medical plans are insurance and everybody needs to be on one.
But $6,000 is not what is spent on healthcare. That is what is spent on insurance. What is spent on healthcare is significantly less. Unfortunately, Obama has REQUIRED that we go through an insurance company and thus lose 1/2 of our buying power to the Insurance Company. Now, I will admit that that is still cheaper than paying cash at the doctor. If you go to the doctor, it may cost $1,000. If you went through an insurance company, they would probably pay the doctor $200, but charge you $500 (on average, over time in payments. Made up numbers, but you get the idea). The problem with out healthcare system is not that people don't have insurance, the problem is that people don't have access to affordable healthcare. By requiring insurance, all we do is make the insurance companies richer. We need to make healthcare more affordable to the masses. This means getting rid of the lawyers, not allowing people to sue when they were aware of the risks and signed on the dotted line and despite the doctor doing things right, something didn't go right. I mean gross negligence is one thing, but our society has become one of "that was an unfortunate and unlucky series of events, and now somebody's got to pay!".
nearly $9000 in the USA (probably higher in 2012).
Well, it is only $9,000 because people are paying for overpriced insurance. I used to pay $800 a month for insurance, and my employer paid another $150 or so. So that is almost $12,000 a year. However, this was ludicrous. I dropped my employer's plan completely and went with a high deductible plan where I pay about $225 a month and pay ALL out of pocket costs myself, but at the insurance company's discounted rate. Even if I hit my deductible, I will STILL pay less than I was paying under my employer's plan. Unfortunately, I hear Obama is trying to get rid of these policies, which actually meet the technical definition of "insurance" in favor of the higher cost options which benefit the insurance companies and take more money needlessly out of the hands of the citizens and transfer them to the insurance company.
You should move out of the IT side and learn as much as you can about billing.
I don't actually WORK for a hospital, but I have interviewed for jobs with hospitals, back when I was a Unix admin. At one "state of the art" facility, the IT department was in a trailer out in the back parking lot. They offered me $40k for an experienced administrator at a time when engineers fresh out of college were making about $50k.
I HAVE worked for the insurance industry, for several different companies, including Zurich and CNA. The insurance companies have money almost literally falling out of the ceiling tiles. They had a team of about 20 of us there from Sybase professional Services essentially doing daily administrative tasks at a cost of probably $40,000 a day, and this went on for years. There were whole buildings full of people doing nothing but jacking their jaws and collecting a paycheck. The insurance industry in the U.S. has more money than any other industry I can think of, and yet Obama still felt the need to "Bail them out" with the Obamacare plan, which guarantees that everyone will be forced to buy the industry's overpriced product.
Well, if she had just said "I don't have insurance", that would have gotten the bureaucracy out of the way and they could have got the boy back there, then, once he was being taken care of she could start working on the insurance.
if any medical documents are important to you, keep records of them.
If you can manage to get the provider to allow you to have them, then that is great. A lot of times they don't want to give up that information. You may take it to a competing doctor. Also, if you go to a competing doctor, he is not going to believe your records. He is going to want them from an officially licensed Doctor. It's more expensive that way.
Why should I have to pay 10x as much to get my transmission repaired just because I chose the wrong car manufacturer!
That's not even the worst of it. You usually end up having to pay more depending on how incompetent your car repairperson is. If they are incompetent and can only guess at what is wrong based on error codes, then they may replace a dozen things before finding the thing that was actually bad, or they may never find what was bad, but they still charge you parts AND labor for all the time they spent monkeying around with something they had no clue about. Air Conditioning repair people are the same way.
The USA spends about $6000 per capita *more* than the UK (and despite this the USA does not even manage to cover everyone).
So, in my family of 6, I pay $36,000 more for healthcare than a family in the U.K. Well, let's see, I paid about $4,500 last year, so in the U.K., the healthcare system pays the average family more than $31,500 a year?
I am interested to know how they figure the per capita costs. Do they actually break down your taxes in the UK and say X amount was for healthcare, or do they hide the expenses like Obama did for us by using proceeds from selling houses to pad the healthcare budget.
Are you suggesting that in a system like what we have today, someone would actually spend the $3000+ they're asking to retrieve the records?
I sure wouldn't. I have transferred my records a number of times and have never been charged and would not expect to be charged. That is part of the providers cost of doing business which they generously pad into their care of me.
They're also arrogant enough to try and pass the costs on to the customer.
What other industry could ever have the balls to charge a customer more based on a bad decision that the company made? Well, other than the Cell Phone industry, and ISPs, and Banks, and Insurance Companies.
Healthcare is always strapped for cash
Maybe in the U.K., but here in the sates, the healthcare industry is extremely wealthy. They also are extremely cheap. They pay crap wages for IT and will not invest in IT unless absolutely forced to (maybe this is the same in UK). But meanwhile, they are constantly expanding their billion dollar hospitals which all have much nicer furniture, flooring and trim then my house, and of course, they all have to have the absolute latest fad equipment to use on the patients for top dollar. But yeah, their backend software and behind the scenes hardware is usually ten year old equipment living on life support.
I'd take Britain's system over here in the US where paramedics check to see if you have a valid insurance card before they check your pulse
Saying a thing doesn't make it true.
Of course you have to weigh the whole platform. I don't think anybody is arguing that one plank was enough to get their support. Why do you think the race was so close? Obama had some things people were in favor of and some that they weren't. Same with Romney. There is not one candidate for me that meets all of my criteria, and I would have thrown both of them out and asked for new candidates if it was in my power to do so. In fact, 94 million people voted for neither candidate, whereas only about 60 million voted for the winning candidate, so it is clear that the country wants neither of them.
My perfect candidate would support small business, would endorse a fair tax system that doesn't kill the middle class, would slash the military budget, would completely nix the TSA, would slash the entitlement programs, would in fact slash government down to a shoestring budget, would properly fund education, would properly fund infrastructure, would enforce the notion that government cannot establish a state religion, and would enforce the constitutional rights that have already been outlined in the constitution and the bill of rights, and not allow the SCOTUS to simply put the word "not" in front of sentences in the constitution that they don't like.
He might even have won if he wasn't a mormon, there are just too many christian conservatives who consider Romney a heretic.
On the other hand, most of the Christian conservatives I know voted for Romney because although he claims to be a Mormon, he supports Christian platforms, whereas Obama, although he claims to be a Christian, does not support Christian platforms.
the republicans are butt-hurt about a black guy winning.
Right, because there weren't any black folks that voted Obama simply because he was black. Yeah, some white folks are pretty intolerant, but you want to find a REAL racist? Find yourself a minority.
In other news retires Skype, Replacing it with GoogleTalk.
I fought like the devil not to get on Skype, but it was company policy that I had to have it, so now I have it, and now they have decided it is TEH SUCK and are replacing it with Google Talk.
Trillian still works for me and that is what all my outside contacts use.
I voted in Oklahoma, too. It was a 30 minute wait for me. I noticed that there were campaign posters on the grounds of the facility where I voted, a public school. I guess I don't know all the rules, maybe they just can't post within X many feet of the polling place, but I thought it was no posting on the grounds period.
Not sure if the long line was due to more voter turnout or just fewer precincts. I voted in a different place than last election, so they may have consolidated some precincts to save money.
Happened to some people from work to. He and his wife moved here several years ago. They registered to vote but never received the cards. They went to vote and were turned away.
Scale brings efficiency;
If that were true (and economics says it is, and I believe it), then when big companies merged, they would be able to offer their product for cheaper. However, what we are seeing is that companies use the increase in subscriber base as justification to charge MORE per customer for their product.
Ahh, but does Amazon remit all of the tax it collected?
They only have to do that in states where they have a physical presence. In states where they have no physical presence, they could still collect sales tax and then just not remit it because the stat ha no authority to demand that they pay it or that they stop collecting it.
Taking a hint from the last election, if the news outlets all say that Obama will win, then everybody will vote for Obama because everybody loves to vote for the winner. They got him in last time and they are doing their best to get him in this time. Not that I think Romney is great either, but Obama has just been awful for our country, for international relations, and for me personally.
I visited Florida once and purchased a lottery ticket. The drawing was after I got home and it turned out I won $14. I read the directions on how to claim which said to send the ticket in. So I did. After about 10 weeks I got a response saying that they had determined my ticket was not a winning ticket. So I contributed $1 to Florida's education system, and some flunky at the Lottery headquarters got $14.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem for Republicans was that they instead of using Clinton's "It's the economy stupid!" to get the election in the bag they conceded all the racial minorities votes to the Democrats, they created a handicap for themselves of 20-30% of the electorate. On top of that, they alienated women, that are the majority of population, regardless of race, they alienated religious moderates that are a majority of Americans and with their hate against gays they alienated not only the LGBT community, but also the young population that have friends in that community. The Republicans played this election to lose.
Wow, they alienated all those groups and still only lost by 2%. I guess they must really be the better choice ad would have won if they just would have played nice with even one of those other groups.
I figure the republicans lost because Romney tried to campaign as being the right choice for America, when he should have just taken the low road and tried to campaign as the right choice for the 10 states that have any bearing in an election.
Bad form to reply to my own post. But I guess to put it more bluntly, I pay about $3000 a year for my INSURANCE, but I paid only about $500 last year for my HEALTHCARE. My insurance company did not pay dime one, so the entire burden of my healthcare was on me. I would say the average yearly cost of what me or my insurance company paid out over my entire adult life has been probably about $1,000 a year, and given deductibles, copay, and coinsurance, what the insurance companies paid out on average has probably been only about half of that. Now what I have paid INTO insurance over the course of my life has probably been about $7,200 a year, and as I mentioned I switched to a high deductible recently which has saved me a lot of money recently and would STILL save me money even if I had to pay my maximum out-of-pocket expense. Over my lifetime, the insurance company has been making about 90% profit on me and my family. With the high deductible plan, I am basically paying them $225 a month just to be on their pricing program, but it is definitely worth it. And if things really go to hell, they cover anything over $7,500 or $10k or whatever my limit is. And that is still cheaper than being on a full medical plan. Too bad Obama wants to do away with insurance, which is what this is, and try to convince us that medical plans are insurance and everybody needs to be on one.
But $6,000 is not what is spent on healthcare. That is what is spent on insurance. What is spent on healthcare is significantly less. Unfortunately, Obama has REQUIRED that we go through an insurance company and thus lose 1/2 of our buying power to the Insurance Company. Now, I will admit that that is still cheaper than paying cash at the doctor. If you go to the doctor, it may cost $1,000. If you went through an insurance company, they would probably pay the doctor $200, but charge you $500 (on average, over time in payments. Made up numbers, but you get the idea). The problem with out healthcare system is not that people don't have insurance, the problem is that people don't have access to affordable healthcare. By requiring insurance, all we do is make the insurance companies richer. We need to make healthcare more affordable to the masses. This means getting rid of the lawyers, not allowing people to sue when they were aware of the risks and signed on the dotted line and despite the doctor doing things right, something didn't go right. I mean gross negligence is one thing, but our society has become one of "that was an unfortunate and unlucky series of events, and now somebody's got to pay!".
nearly $9000 in the USA (probably higher in 2012).
Well, it is only $9,000 because people are paying for overpriced insurance. I used to pay $800 a month for insurance, and my employer paid another $150 or so. So that is almost $12,000 a year. However, this was ludicrous. I dropped my employer's plan completely and went with a high deductible plan where I pay about $225 a month and pay ALL out of pocket costs myself, but at the insurance company's discounted rate. Even if I hit my deductible, I will STILL pay less than I was paying under my employer's plan. Unfortunately, I hear Obama is trying to get rid of these policies, which actually meet the technical definition of "insurance" in favor of the higher cost options which benefit the insurance companies and take more money needlessly out of the hands of the citizens and transfer them to the insurance company.
You should move out of the IT side and learn as much as you can about billing.
I don't actually WORK for a hospital, but I have interviewed for jobs with hospitals, back when I was a Unix admin. At one "state of the art" facility, the IT department was in a trailer out in the back parking lot. They offered me $40k for an experienced administrator at a time when engineers fresh out of college were making about $50k.
I HAVE worked for the insurance industry, for several different companies, including Zurich and CNA. The insurance companies have money almost literally falling out of the ceiling tiles. They had a team of about 20 of us there from Sybase professional Services essentially doing daily administrative tasks at a cost of probably $40,000 a day, and this went on for years. There were whole buildings full of people doing nothing but jacking their jaws and collecting a paycheck. The insurance industry in the U.S. has more money than any other industry I can think of, and yet Obama still felt the need to "Bail them out" with the Obamacare plan, which guarantees that everyone will be forced to buy the industry's overpriced product.
Well, if she had just said "I don't have insurance", that would have gotten the bureaucracy out of the way and they could have got the boy back there, then, once he was being taken care of she could start working on the insurance.
if he moved to the USA he would pay an average of $6000 extra per year for his health care.
If you post it twice, does that make it true?
if any medical documents are important to you, keep records of them.
If you can manage to get the provider to allow you to have them, then that is great. A lot of times they don't want to give up that information. You may take it to a competing doctor. Also, if you go to a competing doctor, he is not going to believe your records. He is going to want them from an officially licensed Doctor. It's more expensive that way.
Why should I have to pay 10x as much to get my transmission repaired just because I chose the wrong car manufacturer!
That's not even the worst of it. You usually end up having to pay more depending on how incompetent your car repairperson is. If they are incompetent and can only guess at what is wrong based on error codes, then they may replace a dozen things before finding the thing that was actually bad, or they may never find what was bad, but they still charge you parts AND labor for all the time they spent monkeying around with something they had no clue about. Air Conditioning repair people are the same way.
The USA spends about $6000 per capita *more* than the UK (and despite this the USA does not even manage to cover everyone).
So, in my family of 6, I pay $36,000 more for healthcare than a family in the U.K. Well, let's see, I paid about $4,500 last year, so in the U.K., the healthcare system pays the average family more than $31,500 a year?
I am interested to know how they figure the per capita costs. Do they actually break down your taxes in the UK and say X amount was for healthcare, or do they hide the expenses like Obama did for us by using proceeds from selling houses to pad the healthcare budget.
So who would have been paying the 2000 if he had been living in the US?
In the U.S., the provider eats that cost.
Are you suggesting that in a system like what we have today, someone would actually spend the $3000+ they're asking to retrieve the records?
I sure wouldn't. I have transferred my records a number of times and have never been charged and would not expect to be charged. That is part of the providers cost of doing business which they generously pad into their care of me.
They're also arrogant enough to try and pass the costs on to the customer.
What other industry could ever have the balls to charge a customer more based on a bad decision that the company made? Well, other than the Cell Phone industry, and ISPs, and Banks, and Insurance Companies.
Healthcare is always strapped for cash
Maybe in the U.K., but here in the sates, the healthcare industry is extremely wealthy. They also are extremely cheap. They pay crap wages for IT and will not invest in IT unless absolutely forced to (maybe this is the same in UK). But meanwhile, they are constantly expanding their billion dollar hospitals which all have much nicer furniture, flooring and trim then my house, and of course, they all have to have the absolute latest fad equipment to use on the patients for top dollar. But yeah, their backend software and behind the scenes hardware is usually ten year old equipment living on life support.
I'd take Britain's system over here in the US where paramedics check to see if you have a valid insurance card before they check your pulse
Saying a thing doesn't make it true.
Of course you have to weigh the whole platform. I don't think anybody is arguing that one plank was enough to get their support. Why do you think the race was so close? Obama had some things people were in favor of and some that they weren't. Same with Romney. There is not one candidate for me that meets all of my criteria, and I would have thrown both of them out and asked for new candidates if it was in my power to do so. In fact, 94 million people voted for neither candidate, whereas only about 60 million voted for the winning candidate, so it is clear that the country wants neither of them.
My perfect candidate would support small business, would endorse a fair tax system that doesn't kill the middle class, would slash the military budget, would completely nix the TSA, would slash the entitlement programs, would in fact slash government down to a shoestring budget, would properly fund education, would properly fund infrastructure, would enforce the notion that government cannot establish a state religion, and would enforce the constitutional rights that have already been outlined in the constitution and the bill of rights, and not allow the SCOTUS to simply put the word "not" in front of sentences in the constitution that they don't like.
He might even have won if he wasn't a mormon, there are just too many christian conservatives who consider Romney a heretic.
On the other hand, most of the Christian conservatives I know voted for Romney because although he claims to be a Mormon, he supports Christian platforms, whereas Obama, although he claims to be a Christian, does not support Christian platforms.
the republicans are butt-hurt about a black guy winning.
Right, because there weren't any black folks that voted Obama simply because he was black. Yeah, some white folks are pretty intolerant, but you want to find a REAL racist? Find yourself a minority.
In other news retires Skype, Replacing it with GoogleTalk.
I fought like the devil not to get on Skype, but it was company policy that I had to have it, so now I have it, and now they have decided it is TEH SUCK and are replacing it with Google Talk.
Trillian still works for me and that is what all my outside contacts use.
I voted in Oklahoma, too. It was a 30 minute wait for me. I noticed that there were campaign posters on the grounds of the facility where I voted, a public school. I guess I don't know all the rules, maybe they just can't post within X many feet of the polling place, but I thought it was no posting on the grounds period.
Not sure if the long line was due to more voter turnout or just fewer precincts. I voted in a different place than last election, so they may have consolidated some precincts to save money.
Happened to some people from work to. He and his wife moved here several years ago. They registered to vote but never received the cards. They went to vote and were turned away.
Scale brings efficiency;
If that were true (and economics says it is, and I believe it), then when big companies merged, they would be able to offer their product for cheaper. However, what we are seeing is that companies use the increase in subscriber base as justification to charge MORE per customer for their product.
Ahh, but does Amazon remit all of the tax it collected?
They only have to do that in states where they have a physical presence. In states where they have no physical presence, they could still collect sales tax and then just not remit it because the stat ha no authority to demand that they pay it or that they stop collecting it.
Taking a hint from the last election, if the news outlets all say that Obama will win, then everybody will vote for Obama because everybody loves to vote for the winner. They got him in last time and they are doing their best to get him in this time. Not that I think Romney is great either, but Obama has just been awful for our country, for international relations, and for me personally.
I visited Florida once and purchased a lottery ticket. The drawing was after I got home and it turned out I won $14. I read the directions on how to claim which said to send the ticket in. So I did. After about 10 weeks I got a response saying that they had determined my ticket was not a winning ticket. So I contributed $1 to Florida's education system, and some flunky at the Lottery headquarters got $14.