"Medicare is already guaranteed to be unable to pay its obligations in just a short time and this bill guarantees it will run out of money even sooner."
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That is not true. The bill actually extend's the expected life-span of Medicare by 9 years. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000691-503544.html.
" It then takes that $500 billion and spends it on subsidies while claiming the $500 billion as debt reduction."
"This bill also offloads a bunch of the medical costs it claims to cover on the individual states without funding them. "
Also untrue. The "Cornhusker kickback" was extended to the other 49 states in the reconciliation bill. The federal government picks up pretty much all of the tab on the Medicaid expansion.
Yes, but over time, larger and larger businesses are allowed to just buy off-the-shelf plans from the exchange. I remember in the Baucus bill, the time-frame was 10 years until all businesses could qualify, but the exact cut-off might be a bit different now.
Your statement would only be true if these were fixed excise taxes on goods, and if the price-elasticity of every good was precisely 0.
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The economic effects of raising taxes is theoretically ambiguous, because leisure curves are "backwards-bending", that is to say, at some wage, people work less in order to have more time to spend their money. So depending on where the worker is on the curve, income taxes can either increase or decrease output.
Despite that, I'd bet that raising income taxes probably has a negative effect on output. But frankly, countries like Sweden and the Netherlands have much higher income tax rates, a higher median wage, and *faster* growth then we do.
Also, as a final note, the macro-economic effects of our previous health-care system were terrible. People couldn't switch jobs or start businesses because they would lose their health-care. Faced with a life threatening illness, people had to quit their jobs and stop working in order to qualify for Medicaid and receive care.
So the onus on you is to show that the possibly negative effects of a small tax increase outweigh the benefits of fixing our health care system.
From what I understand, there are a couple of standardized plans care based on generosity, where co-pay and such are explicitly spelled out in the laws to prevent that sort of thing. There are also pretty stringent regulations on what sort of co-pay they can charge you
Insurance companies are allowed to submit different plans, but they have to be approved by the insurance commissioner.
Also, Exchanges will facilitate competition, since insurance companies are forced to bid on standardized plans. Also, the inability to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions makes it much easier to switch insurance companies.
To be honest, this won't help much in a place like Montana where you're never going to see much competition, but in most of the country, this should do a good deal to punish bad behavior.
You're going to need a cite for that, it's universally acknowledged as not true. Medicare has lower administrative costs then any insurance company. It does have relatively high costs, but that's because it only covers people over 65, who require considerably more care. I can't find the paper off-hand, but I recall a study that compared the spending of 64 year olds covered by private insurance vs Medicare on 65 year olds, and the difference was enormous and in Medicare's favor.
Come on, it's intellectually dis-honest to not point out that
1) There are several hundred billions of dollars that provide subsidies to people too poor to afford health-care, with an explicit rule that a family can not be forced to spend more then a certain % of their income on care (I believe it's 15%, but I don't remember the exact number).
2)The poorest of the poor already receive health care for free in the form of Medicaid, and that Medicaid is being expanded to cover 50% more people
3)People who pay the fine *gets something* for it. They still have the right to receive emergency care for free. Not only that, but they have the ability to purchase insurance if they ever get sick without paying an enormous bankrupcy-causing penalty for having a pre-existing condition.
"And that will - and this is the intent of the "insurance" crooks that drew up the bill - create a market for "Never Pay" cover, i.e. schemes that appear to meet the absolute minimum requirement, but which have such egregious exclusions and excess contributions that you'll never use them. In effect, free money for the insurers."
This is also not true. While there are different types of insurance with different levels of generosity, by law, at least 85% of premiums must be paid out in the form of health-care for any given plan, so "free money" for the insurance company is effectively outlawed..
Removal of life-time spending caps, ban on discrimation for people with pre-existing conditions, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies paid for by taxes on the rich, and strict limits on the profitability of Insurance companies (85% of premiums must go to actual care, not administrative fees).
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Also, over the next decade, the exchanges will get larger and larger. The exchanges are the market place where insurance companies will place bids on standardized plans(The idea is that by pooling everyone together and creating standards, we can avoid the market inefficiencies that currently plague the individual market). It's originally only open to small businesses and the poor, but the it ramps up to the rest of the population in a fairly quick time-frame. That, combined with the excise tax which effectively phases out the tax exemption of health-care, puts us on a path away from employer provided health insurance.
You can argue whether that's positive or negative, but that it indisputably moves us away from the employer-based model with very profitable insurance companies.
That's actually how it worked pre-bill, the poorest people qualified for Medicaid, and so the only way for a lot of people after they got sick was to get health-care was to stop working. Now you'll be able to buy subsidized insurance (or pay the fine), get health-care, and still be able to keep your job and make money. The subsidy's decrease smoothly enough with income so that the marginal return to money is almost always positive. So it would never make economic sense to make less money in order to make it back in health-care benefits. Seems like a big improvement...
That is how insurance works, but it's fucked up and morally bankrupt. Instead of having insurance companies spend billions of dollars estimating the actuarial risk of individuals and preventing people who are high-risk from getting health-care, let's just charge everyone pretty much the same rate (Maybe with stuff like discounts for exercise and penalties for smoking). This raises costs for healthy people a little bit, but really, that's fine with me. It also saves billions on administrative costs.
It's how they do things in every other developed country in the world. (Before you go on about socialism, I'll say this is a completely orthogonal issue. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, and in Germany, people get their care from private insurance companies. )
Short answer: Highly accelerating returns to scale in the health insurance market which lead to the formation of natural monopolies in local markets. This does not occur in the car insurance industry. In the presence of monopolies, government regulation is needed to keep markets efficient.
"Would you care to give some reasoning as to how it's a step in the right direction?"
Cuts the deficit by over a trillion dollars, lowers premium costs paid by familes, leaves 95% of the resident population with health insurance, creates exchanges where insurance companies can bid on standardized plans - making the health care market competitive and efficient, ends discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, steers our country away from bankrupcy, funds experiments in health care innovation to improve quality of care...
As for your other point: It's entirely irrelevent to this discussion, because this bill doesn't actually do anything to take the profit motive away from health care.
Still, medical school doesn't have to be expensive. In Israel, the state completely funds the training of doctors. In exchange, they work for the national health care service and make a moderately high flat wage. Since being a doctor is a pretty prestigious job, there are no shortages of doctors. Most of my family has dealt with the Israeli health care system, and it's been pretty good...
Medical device innovation is another issue. I don't see how you could take away the profit motive from that without effecting innovation. But even in Israel, bio-health companies just market their innovations to the national health service...
I don't see how it really increases competition. People are not too familiar with how health care actually works. Insurance companies have a fee schedule and negotiate rates with doctors and hospitals, and doctors are free not to accept them. The reason there isn't much competition in the market place is that if a insurance company has a lot of customers in an area, they can negotiate a better rate with a Hospital, and translate those lower costs into lower premiums which gets them more customers...
This dynamic leads to consolidation, and so I just don't see how letting someone come from another state accomplishes anything. Any out of state new entrant would be inordinately expensive because they have no customers in the area.
And as of now, nothing stops a health care company from setting up a plan in another state so long as they comply with it's regulations. So because of these factors, I'd think the race to the bottom would be the main effect.
Big health insurance companies can negotiate far better rates then smaller ones with hospitals and doctors. Because of their lower costs, they can have lower premiums, and so they capture more customers, which allows them to have lower premiums, which gets them more customers...
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The end result is that there are usually only going to be one or two insurance companies active in any particular health care market. So we're looking at a monopoly situation.
If you allow selling insurance across state lines, then a small state like North Dakota is going gut every insurance regulation in order to get the tax revenue that would occur from insurance companies incorporating in that state. This is exactly what happened in the credit card industry, where their regulation was *literally* written by Citigroup, and the governor of North Dakota publicly admitted as much.
And so now, the monopoly insurance company is going to move to North Dakota, and there's really nothing consumers will be able to do about it.
This doesn't hold for motorcycle insurance, because there are no accelerating economies of scale like there is in health insurance. I
You can't ban pre-existing conditions without a mandate. You get the insurance death spiral: In order to cover the costs of covering sick people, insurance companies have to raise premiums by a lot. But raising premiums will cause the healthiest people to leave. Because the healthiest people left the pool, this will force insurance companies to raise costs higher, which causes more healthy people to leave... the end result the insurance system totally collapses.
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So if you ban discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, you have no choice but to force everyone to buy insurance. But that's not fair, so you have to get subsidies to help people pay for the insurance you've made them buy.
To make the market more efficient, the bill also allows small businesses and individuals to and together in the exchanges, and allows insurance companies to form national products to sell across state lines.
And that's 99% of the bill. There is no bill that could have accomplished those points in a simpler way short of Single-Payer, and I challenge you to show otherwise. This is essentially identical to the Republican Health Care proposal from 1994! The truth is, about 5-10 republicans probably support the idea of this bill, but are following the party policy to obstruct *everything* in order to make the democrats look ineffectual. (That's a rather objective statement, the republicans have posted four times as many fillibusters this congress as any other in history, they've held blanket holds on appointees...)
"I'm quite worried that they are going to be adding a TON of new people to the medicare roles...a program which is already WAY in the hole. I believe Medicare is already, as is, slated to be many trillions of unfunded entitlement in the next 15 or so years. How are we going to help it by adding millions of new people? Where will the money come from?"
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If you had made any effort to read about the actual bill, you would know. Mainly from a payroll tax expansion, cuts in the Medicaire Advantage program, and a bunch of pilot programs to move us away from a fee for service model. This more then pays for the medicaid expansion and subsidies for employer insurance, which is why the bill ends up cutting the deficit by a massive amount over the first ten years and over 1.2 trillion in the second.
"Why can't they do a simple bill, with some main points everyone can agree on...in about 10 pages of simple language everyone can understand and agree on? Start from there and build on it?"
Legislative language is like coding in assembly. It literally denotes the exact instructions to modify previous laws. Stuff like "Insert article B after clause C in bill X". Because of this, any bill that does...anything, has to be really long if you want to avoid lawsuits and legal ambiguity later. But that has nothing to do with the actual complexity of the bill. It's really simple! I can describe it in a paragraph:
The bill sets up an exchange where companies competitively bid on standardized health insurance plans. The government bans discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, but in order to avoid an insurer death spiral (Prices drive away healthy people which drives prices up which drives away healthy people...), people are mandated to buy insurance. But, the government provides generous subsidies to pay for this insurance. Money to pay for these subsidies is found by slashing the Medicaire advantage program passed by the Bush Administration, a payroll tax expansion on people who make more then $250,000 a year, and a fixed excise tax on extremely generous health-care plans. The government will also begin a bunch of pilot programs on things like bundling and electronic medical records in order to find ways to make health care cheaper. There are also a couple of regulations on health insurance companies that prevent them from raising premiums without cause and a rule saying that administrative expenses can't take up more then 15% of premiums. (This is necessary because due to the fact that pricing power is proportional to size, there are going to be local monopolies or duopolies in most health care markets. Without government, there wouldn't be anything preventing insurers from jacking up premiums once everyone was required to buy insurance). Lastly, some more community health centers will be set up, and there will be a expansion of medicaid to people who make less then 133% of poverty, or $14,000 a year. ((Which actually saves money, because medicaid has the lowest health-care costs of anything in the US outside of the VA). And yes, there is a lot of mal-practice and tort reform and the ability to sell insurance across state lines. (And no, neither of those things are remotely as important as Republicans like to claim)
And that's pretty much it. Actually implementing that is going to take a lot of pages, but any bill would! Laws are like code for the executive to execute, and anything that gives instructions to the entire federal government is going to be complicated. But the actual ideas are quite simple! There really isn't simpler opposing ideas out there sort of single-payer that would accomplish anything of the same scope.
"I'm also concerned about what will happen to what is left of this bill after the SCOTUS challenges to it with regard to the Federal Govt. mandating that individual citizens be required to buy health insurance. "
Doesn't strike me as different from the mandate to buy auto-insurance, and that's been held up a bunch of times. And it's not really a mandate, if you don't have health insurance, you just pay a relatively small fine and still get the right to use emergency rooms. They don't send you to prison or anything. There's a reason no serious legal scholar thinks that it would get struck down...
Not really, in the second decade, the bill cuts the deficit by 1.6 trillion. And if the reconciliation component isn't extended, the second decade still cuts the deficit by a huge margin. So no, I wouldn't call that cooking the books. The savings grow over time due to the excise tax, which is the opposite from what you implied.
It depends on the effect size. The actual margin of error of the effect isn't important by itself. Suppose you took a poll with 64 people and found Candidate A had 10% support, with Candidate D taking 90%. You can still call the winner, even with such a big margin of error.
I can't actually find the paper anywhere, but the effect had to be pretty large in order for it to show up as statistically significant.
"If they switched the playstations to the other group and the first playstation group caught up to/passed the second one, that would be a step towards causation potentially."
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Not really, that would just needlessly complicate things. You take two identical groups, one gets a playstation and the other doesn't, and the group with the playstation performs worse, then if the effect size and sample size are large enough, you can claim that the playstation is the *cause* of the effect. That demonstrates causality.
What you're talking about, seeing if the group would catch up, is more of a test about Hysteresis(permanence) of the effect. That'd be interesting, but it has nothing to do with causality.
Also, to nit-pick, the most efficient sample design would probably be to sub-divide the samples into two further samples: [No Playstation ever], [No Playstation at first, Playstation later], [Playstation, then Playstation taken away], and [Playstation forever]. Switching the Playstations back and forth just creates interaction complications.
" However, this could easily apply to ANY activity that takes away time from studying."
Not really. If a student let's studying get in the way of sleeping, academic performance would probably suffer. There are all sorts of things like that: Exercise improves cognitive ability, learning an instrument boosts confidence, etc. There are people on the thread claiming that playing video-games helped their reading skills.
Whether these effects outweigh the effect of not studying is non-trivial. Hence the study...
"If it was causation, then what it would be saying is the act of playing video games dilutes the childrens' minds' ability to learn."
Not really, no. That would be an underlying mechanism of causation. Flicking a light-switch "causes" the light to turn on, regardless of the underlying wiring of the house. The study seems to demonstrate "Putting a playstation in a house that didn't have one before causes decreased learning ability relative to not putting in a playstation"
I know that's a bit nit-picky, but I think the world would be a better place if people had a better knowledge of statistics...
Sarcasm aside, if you can show the effectiveness of "locking kids in a library", I'd be for it. From a liberty perspective, locking kids in libraries and restricting their access to video games is hardly tyrannical compared to the whole "Forcing them to sit still for 8 hours a day, to the point where they must ask permission to use the bathroom" thing. So adding a little bit here and there to improve outcomes doesn't bother me.
Yes, they did. From what I understand, they had two random samples of children: One group that was given a Playstation, and another that didn't. The first group showed lower academic achievement then the second group, by a large enough margin such that it was very likely not chance.
The experiment design side-steps the correlation=/causation issue and directly measures causality. To answer your question specifically, there surely were parents of your that in both samples...
Basically, it's not allowed to "own" parcels of ocean far off the coast, and everything you do is subject to the International Tribunal of the law of the Sea or the International Seabed Authority.
The whole "International Waters as a free-for-all" thing is really a bit of a myth.
I get the joke, and the sentiment is funny. But reasonably, there is no blanket answer for most of these issues, sometimes in-sourcing is cost effective and sometimes outsourcing is, as with centralized/decentralized management structures. The idea is that, in theory at least, consulting companies have the expertise to know when to do what. And if a company goes to a consulting company, it's more likely then usual to be doing something wrong. So the apparent contradiction you brought up isn't really surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
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That is not true. The bill actually extend's the expected life-span of Medicare by 9 years. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000691-503544.html. " It then takes that $500 billion and spends it on subsidies while claiming the $500 billion as debt reduction."
Also untrue. This is a tired claim that has been debunked again and again. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/paul_ryan_and_the_true_cost_of.html goes through this step by step.
"This bill also offloads a bunch of the medical costs it claims to cover on the individual states without funding them. "
Also untrue. The "Cornhusker kickback" was extended to the other 49 states in the reconciliation bill. The federal government picks up pretty much all of the tab on the Medicaid expansion.
Yes, but over time, larger and larger businesses are allowed to just buy off-the-shelf plans from the exchange. I remember in the Baucus bill, the time-frame was 10 years until all businesses could qualify, but the exact cut-off might be a bit different now.
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The economic effects of raising taxes is theoretically ambiguous, because leisure curves are "backwards-bending", that is to say, at some wage, people work less in order to have more time to spend their money. So depending on where the worker is on the curve, income taxes can either increase or decrease output.
Despite that, I'd bet that raising income taxes probably has a negative effect on output. But frankly, countries like Sweden and the Netherlands have much higher income tax rates, a higher median wage, and *faster* growth then we do.
Also, as a final note, the macro-economic effects of our previous health-care system were terrible. People couldn't switch jobs or start businesses because they would lose their health-care. Faced with a life threatening illness, people had to quit their jobs and stop working in order to qualify for Medicaid and receive care.
So the onus on you is to show that the possibly negative effects of a small tax increase outweigh the benefits of fixing our health care system.
That's nice. Just explain why this hasn't happened in every other developed country in the world.
Insurance companies are allowed to submit different plans, but they have to be approved by the insurance commissioner.
Also, Exchanges will facilitate competition, since insurance companies are forced to bid on standardized plans. Also, the inability to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions makes it much easier to switch insurance companies.
To be honest, this won't help much in a place like Montana where you're never going to see much competition, but in most of the country, this should do a good deal to punish bad behavior.
You're going to need a cite for that, it's universally acknowledged as not true. Medicare has lower administrative costs then any insurance company. It does have relatively high costs, but that's because it only covers people over 65, who require considerably more care. I can't find the paper off-hand, but I recall a study that compared the spending of 64 year olds covered by private insurance vs Medicare on 65 year olds, and the difference was enormous and in Medicare's favor.
1) There are several hundred billions of dollars that provide subsidies to people too poor to afford health-care, with an explicit rule that a family can not be forced to spend more then a certain % of their income on care (I believe it's 15%, but I don't remember the exact number).
2)The poorest of the poor already receive health care for free in the form of Medicaid, and that Medicaid is being expanded to cover 50% more people
3)People who pay the fine *gets something* for it. They still have the right to receive emergency care for free. Not only that, but they have the ability to purchase insurance if they ever get sick without paying an enormous bankrupcy-causing penalty for having a pre-existing condition.
"And that will - and this is the intent of the "insurance" crooks that drew up the bill - create a market for "Never Pay" cover, i.e. schemes that appear to meet the absolute minimum requirement, but which have such egregious exclusions and excess contributions that you'll never use them. In effect, free money for the insurers."
This is also not true. While there are different types of insurance with different levels of generosity, by law, at least 85% of premiums must be paid out in the form of health-care for any given plan, so "free money" for the insurance company is effectively outlawed..
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Also, over the next decade, the exchanges will get larger and larger. The exchanges are the market place where insurance companies will place bids on standardized plans(The idea is that by pooling everyone together and creating standards, we can avoid the market inefficiencies that currently plague the individual market). It's originally only open to small businesses and the poor, but the it ramps up to the rest of the population in a fairly quick time-frame. That, combined with the excise tax which effectively phases out the tax exemption of health-care, puts us on a path away from employer provided health insurance.
You can argue whether that's positive or negative, but that it indisputably moves us away from the employer-based model with very profitable insurance companies.
That's actually how it worked pre-bill, the poorest people qualified for Medicaid, and so the only way for a lot of people after they got sick was to get health-care was to stop working. Now you'll be able to buy subsidized insurance (or pay the fine), get health-care, and still be able to keep your job and make money. The subsidy's decrease smoothly enough with income so that the marginal return to money is almost always positive. So it would never make economic sense to make less money in order to make it back in health-care benefits. Seems like a big improvement...
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SCHIP, Medicare part D, pretty much every healthcare program passed since the CBO came into existence in 74....
It's how they do things in every other developed country in the world. (Before you go on about socialism, I'll say this is a completely orthogonal issue. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, and in Germany, people get their care from private insurance companies. )
Short answer: Highly accelerating returns to scale in the health insurance market which lead to the formation of natural monopolies in local markets. This does not occur in the car insurance industry. In the presence of monopolies, government regulation is needed to keep markets efficient.
Cuts the deficit by over a trillion dollars, lowers premium costs paid by familes, leaves 95% of the resident population with health insurance, creates exchanges where insurance companies can bid on standardized plans - making the health care market competitive and efficient, ends discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, steers our country away from bankrupcy, funds experiments in health care innovation to improve quality of care...
As for your other point: It's entirely irrelevent to this discussion, because this bill doesn't actually do anything to take the profit motive away from health care.
Still, medical school doesn't have to be expensive. In Israel, the state completely funds the training of doctors. In exchange, they work for the national health care service and make a moderately high flat wage. Since being a doctor is a pretty prestigious job, there are no shortages of doctors. Most of my family has dealt with the Israeli health care system, and it's been pretty good...
Medical device innovation is another issue. I don't see how you could take away the profit motive from that without effecting innovation. But even in Israel, bio-health companies just market their innovations to the national health service...
This dynamic leads to consolidation, and so I just don't see how letting someone come from another state accomplishes anything. Any out of state new entrant would be inordinately expensive because they have no customers in the area.
And as of now, nothing stops a health care company from setting up a plan in another state so long as they comply with it's regulations. So because of these factors, I'd think the race to the bottom would be the main effect.
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The end result is that there are usually only going to be one or two insurance companies active in any particular health care market. So we're looking at a monopoly situation.
If you allow selling insurance across state lines, then a small state like North Dakota is going gut every insurance regulation in order to get the tax revenue that would occur from insurance companies incorporating in that state. This is exactly what happened in the credit card industry, where their regulation was *literally* written by Citigroup, and the governor of North Dakota publicly admitted as much.
And so now, the monopoly insurance company is going to move to North Dakota, and there's really nothing consumers will be able to do about it.
This doesn't hold for motorcycle insurance, because there are no accelerating economies of scale like there is in health insurance. I
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So if you ban discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, you have no choice but to force everyone to buy insurance. But that's not fair, so you have to get subsidies to help people pay for the insurance you've made them buy.
To make the market more efficient, the bill also allows small businesses and individuals to and together in the exchanges, and allows insurance companies to form national products to sell across state lines.
And that's 99% of the bill. There is no bill that could have accomplished those points in a simpler way short of Single-Payer, and I challenge you to show otherwise. This is essentially identical to the Republican Health Care proposal from 1994! The truth is, about 5-10 republicans probably support the idea of this bill, but are following the party policy to obstruct *everything* in order to make the democrats look ineffectual. (That's a rather objective statement, the republicans have posted four times as many fillibusters this congress as any other in history, they've held blanket holds on appointees...)
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If you had made any effort to read about the actual bill, you would know. Mainly from a payroll tax expansion, cuts in the Medicaire Advantage program, and a bunch of pilot programs to move us away from a fee for service model. This more then pays for the medicaid expansion and subsidies for employer insurance, which is why the bill ends up cutting the deficit by a massive amount over the first ten years and over 1.2 trillion in the second.
"Why can't they do a simple bill, with some main points everyone can agree on...in about 10 pages of simple language everyone can understand and agree on? Start from there and build on it?"
Legislative language is like coding in assembly. It literally denotes the exact instructions to modify previous laws. Stuff like "Insert article B after clause C in bill X". Because of this, any bill that does...anything, has to be really long if you want to avoid lawsuits and legal ambiguity later. But that has nothing to do with the actual complexity of the bill. It's really simple! I can describe it in a paragraph:
The bill sets up an exchange where companies competitively bid on standardized health insurance plans. The government bans discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, but in order to avoid an insurer death spiral (Prices drive away healthy people which drives prices up which drives away healthy people...), people are mandated to buy insurance. But, the government provides generous subsidies to pay for this insurance. Money to pay for these subsidies is found by slashing the Medicaire advantage program passed by the Bush Administration, a payroll tax expansion on people who make more then $250,000 a year, and a fixed excise tax on extremely generous health-care plans. The government will also begin a bunch of pilot programs on things like bundling and electronic medical records in order to find ways to make health care cheaper. There are also a couple of regulations on health insurance companies that prevent them from raising premiums without cause and a rule saying that administrative expenses can't take up more then 15% of premiums. (This is necessary because due to the fact that pricing power is proportional to size, there are going to be local monopolies or duopolies in most health care markets. Without government, there wouldn't be anything preventing insurers from jacking up premiums once everyone was required to buy insurance). Lastly, some more community health centers will be set up, and there will be a expansion of medicaid to people who make less then 133% of poverty, or $14,000 a year. ((Which actually saves money, because medicaid has the lowest health-care costs of anything in the US outside of the VA). And yes, there is a lot of mal-practice and tort reform and the ability to sell insurance across state lines. (And no, neither of those things are remotely as important as Republicans like to claim)
And that's pretty much it. Actually implementing that is going to take a lot of pages, but any bill would! Laws are like code for the executive to execute, and anything that gives instructions to the entire federal government is going to be complicated. But the actual ideas are quite simple! There really isn't simpler opposing ideas out there sort of single-payer that would accomplish anything of the same scope.
"I'm also concerned about what will happen to what is left of this bill after the SCOTUS challenges to it with regard to the Federal Govt. mandating that individual citizens be required to buy health insurance. "
Doesn't strike me as different from the mandate to buy auto-insurance, and that's been held up a bunch of times. And it's not really a mandate, if you don't have health insurance, you just pay a relatively small fine and still get the right to use emergency rooms. They don't send you to prison or anything. There's a reason no serious legal scholar thinks that it would get struck down...
Not really, in the second decade, the bill cuts the deficit by 1.6 trillion. And if the reconciliation component isn't extended, the second decade still cuts the deficit by a huge margin. So no, I wouldn't call that cooking the books. The savings grow over time due to the excise tax, which is the opposite from what you implied.
I can't actually find the paper anywhere, but the effect had to be pretty large in order for it to show up as statistically significant.
That's nonsense, you need to study more statistics.
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Not really, that would just needlessly complicate things. You take two identical groups, one gets a playstation and the other doesn't, and the group with the playstation performs worse, then if the effect size and sample size are large enough, you can claim that the playstation is the *cause* of the effect. That demonstrates causality.
What you're talking about, seeing if the group would catch up, is more of a test about Hysteresis(permanence) of the effect. That'd be interesting, but it has nothing to do with causality.
Also, to nit-pick, the most efficient sample design would probably be to sub-divide the samples into two further samples: [No Playstation ever], [No Playstation at first, Playstation later], [Playstation, then Playstation taken away], and [Playstation forever]. Switching the Playstations back and forth just creates interaction complications.
" However, this could easily apply to ANY activity that takes away time from studying."
Not really. If a student let's studying get in the way of sleeping, academic performance would probably suffer. There are all sorts of things like that: Exercise improves cognitive ability, learning an instrument boosts confidence, etc. There are people on the thread claiming that playing video-games helped their reading skills.
Whether these effects outweigh the effect of not studying is non-trivial. Hence the study...
"If it was causation, then what it would be saying is the act of playing video games dilutes the childrens' minds' ability to learn."
Not really, no. That would be an underlying mechanism of causation. Flicking a light-switch "causes" the light to turn on, regardless of the underlying wiring of the house. The study seems to demonstrate "Putting a playstation in a house that didn't have one before causes decreased learning ability relative to not putting in a playstation"
I know that's a bit nit-picky, but I think the world would be a better place if people had a better knowledge of statistics...
Sarcasm aside, if you can show the effectiveness of "locking kids in a library", I'd be for it. From a liberty perspective, locking kids in libraries and restricting their access to video games is hardly tyrannical compared to the whole "Forcing them to sit still for 8 hours a day, to the point where they must ask permission to use the bathroom" thing. So adding a little bit here and there to improve outcomes doesn't bother me.
The experiment design side-steps the correlation=/causation issue and directly measures causality. To answer your question specifically, there surely were parents of your that in both samples...
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Basically, it's not allowed to "own" parcels of ocean far off the coast, and everything you do is subject to the International Tribunal of the law of the Sea or the International Seabed Authority.
The whole "International Waters as a free-for-all" thing is really a bit of a myth.
I get the joke, and the sentiment is funny. But reasonably, there is no blanket answer for most of these issues, sometimes in-sourcing is cost effective and sometimes outsourcing is, as with centralized/decentralized management structures. The idea is that, in theory at least, consulting companies have the expertise to know when to do what. And if a company goes to a consulting company, it's more likely then usual to be doing something wrong. So the apparent contradiction you brought up isn't really surprising.