Ah - sweet sweet schadenfreude!!

[Dartz]

I want to see what happens in a year's time..... One month. Two months. It's still too soon to tell if something will succeed anywhere or fail anywhere. It'll take time for things to stabilise and fluctations to work out. Nothing in government or policy is an instant fix, and the expectation of such often leads to mass disappointment or disgruntlement at best. Is that what you want someone to say?

it's the truth anyway.

I dislike the law for entirely different reasons to everyone else here. And no, I don't believe the insurance companies in the states are just 'doing what they have to'. Arguably, they're the very heart of the problem and exactly why the system is so broken. Nothing will fix the system unless it takes straight aim at them, but who's going to take aim at their biggest contributor? Or when the dreaded C-word gets trotted out in the face of any government policy that actually threatens a businesses profits or business model. There is one relevant quote that always comes to mind, from the Heinlein story Life Line

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest.

A government's duty is to do what is best of the people as a whole, not for one specific business model. Especially when that model is now clearly causing far more harm than good.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Valles]

Your silence says everything I need to hear. 

Speaking just for myself? It says that I don't care enough about you to wade through your gleeful, self-destructive malice to identify your actual claims. It says I have better things to waste my energy on that trying to convince someone who's already made up their mind.
It says that you, and those like you, have nothing to offer the public discourse - so we don't listen.
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Logan Darklighter]

Dartz wrote:

---

I want to see what happens in a year's time..... One month. Two months. It's still too soon to tell if something will succeed anywhere or fail anywhere. It'll take time for things to stabilise and fluctations to work out. Nothing in government or policy is an instant fix, and the expectation of such often leads to mass disappointment or disgruntlement at best. Is that what you want someone to say?

it's the truth anyway.

I dislike the law for entirely different reasons to everyone else here. And no, I don't believe the insurance companies in the states are just 'doing what they have to'. Arguably, they're the very heart of the problem and exactly why the system is so broken. Nothing will fix the system unless it takes straight aim at them, but who's going to take aim at their biggest contributor? Or when the dreaded C-word gets trotted out in the face of any government policy that actually threatens a businesses profits or business model. There is one relevant quote that always comes to mind, from the Heinlein story Life Line

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest.

A government's duty is to do what is best of the people as a whole, not for one specific business model. Especially when that model is now clearly causing far more harm than good.

See for the most part I respect this POV. And pretty much agree with you vis-a-vis the insurance companies. 
I disagree that we need to wait to see what'll happen in a years time. Lets leave the whole website thing by the side. THAT will be fixed by this time next year most likely. At least well enough it will no longer be the joke it is now. But the damage will have already been done by then. As Whittle said in one of the above videos - it took longer for them to produce a working WEBSITE than the length of time from Pearl Harbor to the end of WW2 (won't say what he said - "longer than it took us to win WW2" because it was hardly the USA alone that did so) and they FAILED horribly. The question then becomes - do you trust these people to handle your healthcare? Cause I sure don't. 

So yeah. Website operational in a year? Sure. I'll give you that. But it's not the most important thing, and it won't matter. It's just fun to make fun of now. And it's a fun tool to beat the lefties over the head with rhetorically. I'll admit that straight up. Why hide it?

What will still be a horrible failure in a years time is that tens of millions of people are going to lose their healthcare plans - that they were perfectly happy with - and they'll have to pay much much more to get LESS overall coverage along with things that they don't need. I don't need maternity care, so why do I have to pay for it in my plan? Oh yeah - that's right. I'm paying for someone else to have it. It's called redistribution of wealth. Thanks Barry. Mr. "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. PERIOD." Well that was a lie. How about costing less? Well that's a lie too. In fact the entire "official" name of the thing - "The Affordable care act" is now widely regarded as a misnomer and a bad joke.

And we won't be able to keep the doctors that we want either. In fact we're about to suffer a massive doctor shortage as those doctors in their 50s look at the onerous regulations and likely most of them will opt for early retirement - "Screw this!" And who will be there to replace them? Who will want to get into a field where the future of advancement and monetary return looks so bleak? 

Yeah - a lot of this can be laid at the feet of the previous system of insurance, as I've agreed with you before on. But you know what? One very simple fix would have been to allow interstate competition such as the car insurance companies have now. There are national auto insurance companies now where there were none a generation ago and that's GOOD for consumers. It has resulted in extremely low auto insurance rates across the US. One of the major reasons why medical insurance was so high in the first place was that companies couldn't compete or advertise across state boundaries. And the medical insurance companies encouraged this to protect their regional monopolies. Then they got into bed with Obamacare thinking to salvage some part of the old system rather than allow competition. Well now it's come back to - as I said before - bite them in the ass. And I'm damn sure not crying for them. 

I do like your Heinlein quote and agree with most of the rest of your position. 

[Logan Darklighter]

Valles wrote:

---

Your silence says everything I need to hear. 

Speaking just for myself? It says that I don't care enough about you to wade through your gleeful, self-destructive malice to identify your actual claims. It says I have better things to waste my energy on that trying to convince someone who's already made up their mind.
It says that you, and those like you, have nothing to offer the public discourse - so we don't listen.

Gleeful? Yes. Self-destructive? Hardly.  I'm reveling in the self-destruction of some of the key ideological underpinnings that the Elitists of the left (and some on the right) have had for decades.
Oh yeah. Mind pretty much made up in case that wasn't obvious. But still open enough to debate and talk if someone is serious. Check out comments to Dartz above. 

Edit: Eh no. Excised a bit that was straying a little too far into troll territory. I can be better than that.

[Dartz]

I'd argue that there's nothing especially wrong with wealth redistribution through taxation and the like - but that requires a different view on society. It's a way of bringing more money into circulation and generating economic activity because money injected into the bottom of a society will usually be immediately be spent in local stores and the like, where it goes towards keeping people in employment and keeping them consuming, keeping others in employment and so on and so on. It then filters on its way back up to the top rather than just stagnating up there, or shuttling between the different tops.

A dollar is best in the hands of the person most likely to spend it, than sat in a bank account accruing interest. It'll filter its way back up eventually, probably with interest because so many people will be actually partaking in the economy. The more people able to take part in the economy, the better it is... even if their sole function is to stay at home and buy food, pay rent and make car payments. That money goes to someone, then on to someone else.

The economy is healthiest when the most people are able to take some token part in it.

But that's another argument....

I disagree that we need to wait to see what'll happen in a years time. Lets leave the whole website thing by the side. THAT will be fixed by this time next year most likely. At least well enough it will no longer be the joke it is now. But the damage will have already been done by then. As Whittle said in one of the above videos - it took longer for them to produce a working WEBSITE than the length of time from Pearl Harbor to the end of WW2 (won't say what he said - "longer than it took us to win WW2" because it was hardly the USA alone that did so) and they FAILED horribly. The question then becomes - do you trust these people to handle your healthcare? Cause I sure don't

I doubt they were working on it for 4 whole years. Even so, 4 years is a surprisingly short time to go from nothing, to something so massive. Amazon, Google and the like have taken 10-20 years almost to get to the size they are now, growing organically as functionality has expanded and new avenues of business introduced. It's a Big Damn Project, not just 'a website'. This thing is starting from scratch, to a full-featured functional site. It's like trying to launch a moon mission when you haven't even mastered sub-orbital flight, and haven't even flown the whole rocket stack yet.

Also, if my experience is anything to go by, 90% of signups happen in the last 10% of time available. 5% of them happen after that. It's human nature.

Yeah - a lot of this can be laid at the feet of the previous system of insurance, as I've agreed with you before on. But you know what? One very simple fix would have been to allow interstate competition such as the car insurance companies have now. There are national auto insurance companies now where there were none a generation ago and that's GOOD for consumers. It has resulted in extremely low auto insurance rates across the US. One of the major reasons why medical insurance was so high in the first place was that companies couldn't compete or advertise across state boundaries. And the medical insurance companies encouraged this to protect their regional monopolies. Then they got into bed with Obamacare thinking to salvage some part of the old system rather than allow competition

That all depends on who owns the companies in the first place. Whether they're not all regional subsidiaries of much larger national organisations. If that's the case then you're right back to the same problem - except the new larger national juggernauts can just squash the few pure regional insurers remaining. It strongly depends on who owns what and how it's structured. In theory, a wholly national market would work - in an ideal world. The right deregulation can work if someone kept an eye on it. It'd need someone on the ball looking for anti-competitive behaviours and the like, but nobody really seems willing to do that anymore.

Nobody seems willing to challenge large businesses anymore, especially when they start getting destructive. A free market is like a free society. It needs proper policing. For a long time it did, and it worked reasonably well. The right controls stabilise a free market and protect everyone's freedoms - rather than allowing one group to tramp over everyone elses. It's one thing the EU does well is that it tends to kick companies being anti-competitive.

However, I think for a fully free market to work, not having insurance needs to be an option as well. People always have the option not to buy a car - do you really have the option not to go to hospital? When even a minor injury can lead to bankruptcy because of exorbitant hospital charges, is not having insurance really an option? Even without a law requiring it, effectively you have a mandatory purchase already...

This means either getting hospital bills under control to the point where a child's broken arm won't bankrupt the average family (Even assuming they have insurance, and the company decided to drop them like a hot potatoe as soon as they actually need their coverage), or instituting a proper public healthcare system as a backstop. Medicaid/medicare is a crock, in part designed to appease those people who call anything that directly challenges the insurance industry as 'anti-business', or again the dreaded C-word. As I understand it, the government isn't even allowed to negotiate on the prices a healthcare provider asks? That's not fair. That's not pro-business - that's a blank cheque with taxpayers money. No wonder the US government spends twice as much as the rest of the world on healthcare - per capita.... and that's before individual insurance contributions come into it. That's a ridiculous statistic.

In many ways, hospital care is an emergency service, the same as the police or the fire department. It's something everyone needs at some stage, or everyone will need. And definitely something everyone will benefit from. I certainly benefit from someone coming along to put the fire out in my neighbours house, as do I benefit from a police service. I also benefit from my neighbours either not spreading disease, or being chronically ill and either losing all their money to the hospital, or just dropping out of participating the economy, falling out of work and going onto benefits. Or dying... I like my neighbours not to die. They're nice people. Good healthcare is clearly a public good. Everyone benefits from it.

It keeps more people in the economy. And more people in the economy is a good thing for everyone in the economy. It keeps other people in employment. It keeps other businesses afloat. It keeps money moving.

It doesn't mean the death of private insurance or mass layoffs in the private system either.

Britain, with the NHS, proves that a private healthcare system can operate in parallel with a public system. It means that the private providers actually have to work for their money and provide a good service because going uninsured is an alternative. Arguably, they do. The NHS is great at making people not die. The private system is great at quality-of-life operations like hip-replacements that might take years on an NHS waiting list to get. It works, despite what David Cameron wants the world to believe. They work in tandem, each complimenting the other's benefits. Nobody in the UK but the cranks dares threaten the NHS.

Unfortunately, the insurance industry seems to have grown averse to working for its profits. In fact, it's built on supplying as little benefit as possible, while raking in as much money as possible. And it'll aggressively attack anything that threatens its cosy little moneyspinner, no matter where it comes from.

Pure free-marketism doesn't work - it's inevitably self-destructive. Neither does pure 'socialism', but the right mix allows both to compliment each other's benefits.

Huh... funny. I managed to completely avoid the ACA by accident....
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Rajvik]

and the admittance of their failure continues

http://news.yahoo.com/democratic-senato ... 25028.html

Valles, if we learn nothing from history its that communism and its cousins socialism and command economy as an economic pattern does not work. Money doesnt come from the government, it is an arbitrary value given to goods and services due to their value to the person. If we were to be dropped in the barter system again, (gods forbid) what would you value your healthcare at, the chicken that the government is paying the doctors, or the month of various supplies that the insurance company is routinely forced to pay out because the hospitals are trying to cover both their operating costs, and the doctor and nurses salaries. The reality should as Dartz pointed out be somewhere in the middle.....you know what, i'm done argueing your not paying attention anyway seeing again what you posted to Logan. when the payments bite you in the butt because your in the "IDEAL PAYMENT" age group and your job drops its healthcare AND your hours let me know, i'll hand you a hankie.
 

[Dartz]

I can't help but notice that communism and socialism keep being brought up like the traditional bogeymen. Really. It's been nearly 20 years since the Cold War ended.... and people still can't stop using 'Communism!' as a thought terminating cliche. It's outdated and foolish and smacks of the 1950's. It's also bloody annoying. Arguably, it's the screams of 'Communism!' that're leading to car-crashes such as the ACA and the like because people are afraid to actually grab the bull by the horns, despite wanting to reform the system properly.

A 'Federal Health Service' or the equivelant is not 'Communism' and neither would it be a command economy. It is the Goverment stepping in to correct what is clearly an ongoing market failure by taking control and establishing an alternative. An FHS will take some of the expensive people out of the insurance system, be able to fund research into drugs and treatments that're necessary but being ignored by the market (Like antibiotics and the like), and provide a backstop that'll keep people productive and healthy and participating in the economy.

This goes right back to how 'freedom' and 'liberty' are defined.

Would you like to live in a world where the police are privatised? And will only investigate crimes on behalf of the people who're able to afford to have them investigated? What sort of society would that be like? Especially when you consider just how expensive a rape, or murder investigation can be in time and effort. Think about it for a second and just let the nightmare settle in.... And yet there are some people out there who would call that a free country when the result would actually be a dystopian nightmare.

Ultimately a 'free' people requires some intervention from the government to maintain that 'freedom', for the benefit of all the people.

I would propose that in its current iteration, the healthcare industry in the States is acting in a way that acts as an attack on people's freedoms. It forces people into bankruptcy, or out of the working economy. Massive insurance premiums act as a further drag on the economy, even after people have paid their taxes - more of which goes towards medicare and medicaid by proportion than in any other country in the world. (Including Canada, the UK and France). And instead of acting as a way for employers to entice people to jump jobs, the company healthcare plan is now an extra piece of leverage to hold over worker's head. Or, depending on how you feel about the ACA, a reason the kick even more workers down to part-time work. Furthermore, it is one of the few industries where there is a commercial disincentive to provide the services the customer has already paid for - when a person finally needs their insurance, the company begins to lobby for loopholes or mistakes on its own part to let themselves out of the contract.

You can no more control getting ill or having an accident, than you can control a house-fire or becoming a victim of crime. You can take actions to minimise the risk, but that's about it.

This is a system that, far from supporting people and improving their chance to achieve a strong future or any modicum of personal security in the future is now actively working to suppress people and keep them from advancing and improving their lot in life. It is negatively impacting basic liberties and personal securities.

And right now, this is a point where the government should intervene and should take command. It needs a full reboot and a ground-up reconstruction. This is how most public health services were built in the aftermath of WWII, and this was also one area where the red parts of the map did rather better than the blue ones.

There are some things private enterprise is good at and others it isn't. One of the things it is clearly failing at is basic, living healthcare. And it is something would be almost trivial for a country as wealthy as the United States to provide for it's people - with a massive benefit to the people's overall economic and personal freedoms and potential. It could be done at less cost to the economy than the current system, with a much greater benefit.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Rajvik]

but who bells the cat Dartz? with the way this thing is set-up its a half step, not even a whole one, to saying that you have to have all kinds of insurance coverage, and damn to the insurance companies who want to stay above water because they are having to cover every Tom Dick and Harry who want to make frivolous claims on their policy and they aren't allowed to drop them due to "Grandfather" clauses and "Pre-existing Conditions". As i said there needs to be a median, but the government arbitrarily stepping in and saying that everyone must have insurance and the insurance companies MUST cover them no matter what is a recipe for disaster. And what happens when the insurance companies pass the buck when they go out of business, does the US goes even deeper in debt, or are we all just left hanging out in the cold with our snarglies exposed to the axe. The ACA is not dropping the cost, people are paying 2-4 times their usual rates as of next year to cover the old and "pre-existing conditions" who should be getting their help elsewhere or by heavens pay for it themselves. you want a solution, open the state borders and allow the populace to go "Out of State" searching for their healthcare coverage. The ACA doesnt do that, it just makes a bad system worse by putting more strain on it.

As for how wealthy the U.S. is, our nation is over 17 Trillion dollars in debt either through bonds sold to the populace, (if memory serves something like 70% of the national debt) or loans from foriegn nations and powers. I look at Greece and see the U.S. in about 10-15 years because we can not seem to get people into office who can reign in the spending, and the ACA is just another welfare program that is not needed. If you're poor in the U.S. there is MEDICAID, if you are a senior citizen there is MEDICARE and Social Security, (the last having been robbed by all parties for pet prodjects and never repaid.) Charity is not a job of the government, it is a job of the church, the people of the area and if thats not enough to help some people, then by all thats holy those people should get a bloody job. I dont mean a job that you want, but any job you can bloody well lay your hands on. Right now i work a job i HATE, i hate it because the people i work with are absolute idiots, not ignorant, ignorance can be cured these people are just bone deep stupid, as are half the people i work for, but i stick with it because i cant get hired for anything better in the area right now. Are there other jobs out there, oh hades yes, some of them i am physically incapable of doing, others i dont have the know how and am willing to admit it, and then i have a felony conviction hanging over my head that makes most others hard if not impossible to get. Right now i'm stuck doing physical labor as my body slowly tears itself apart, but i'll stick with it until i'm able to secure something better.

people have commented (not in this thread but elsewhere) that there is no such thing as a "Welfare Queen" well they obviously havent been down in some neighborhoods around me where its 3rd generation welfare recipients, sometimes 4th, not because the people are incapable or uneducated, but because they know they can sit on they're dead arse and collect a government check for doing nothing. several government checks at that and for someone who grew up with his parents making the sacrifices, scrimping and doing without so that they could hold their heads up and say, "My child does not eat reduced or free meals at school." it irritates me to no end watching people be lazy.

As for communism and socialism as a "Boogeyman" just because the russians are no longer communists doesnt mean its not still out there, and are the poster children for "Oppressive Regimes" and whether they are or not does not negate the failure of the command economy.
 

[Dartz]

The ACA is a crock... I'm not arguing that. I've stayed away from trying to defend it and agree with many of the arguments levelled against it - though perhaps for very different reasons. At the same time, it remains to be seen just what will happen. The system's been perturbed and it's ringing around and it'll take a while to settle down and see what happens and who the true winners and loosers are. (Arguabley, the Insurance companies and Everyone else not on Medicare/aid but that's me being cynical).

The US National debt is strange. It won't go Greece because what happened in Greece wasn't that the government couldn't pay - it was that investors began to doubt they could pay which pushed interest rates so high that in the end they couldn't pay. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Borrowing for nations works a little different than it does on a personal scale because most nations have control over the value of their money.

Put succinctly, interest rates on US treasury bonds are so low, that they're actually lower than the annual rate of inflation. People earn interest on their bonds, but at the same time the value of the dollar decreases year on year. If the bond yields 2% interest, but the dollar inflates at 3% annually, then the bondholder in effect loses value over the lifetime of the bond, while the treasury gains. In effect, the US makes a profit on each and every bond it issues. And because of this, each time bonds come due the US is able to roll them over by selling more bonds to pay for it, then cover additional expenses. And so long as the currency inflates faster than the interest on the bond, the treasury makes a profit.

If the interest rate does climb too high then the US can artificially inflate the value of it's currency because it has control over it's fiscal policy. Being tied to the Euro's value - this is something that Greece couldn't do. So the only option available is to crank up taxes and cut back spending which is arguably the worst thing to do in a recession because it kills what little circulating money their is in the economy. Never mind that Greece is a special basket case - in theory they had their social programs paid for and it was all covered by taxes, but they were coooking the books wildly.

The downside of doing this is that it'll utterly annihilate people's savings, stuffs bondholders hard and stealing a loaf of bread suddenly becomes grand larceny. But people who have their money as physical assets might ride it out better - anyone with dollars in a bank or an investment/retirement plan dependent on bonds gets the shaft however.

Now, as to welfare queens. So what? There're always people who take advantage, but the additional bureacracy and hoop-jumping necessary to be seen to be tackling them costs far more than just ignoring them and letting them be. The amazing thing about welfare queens is that they spend the money they're given - it doesn't get locked in a bank account somewhere. It goes into circulation, paying salaries and suppliers up the chain. Just because they're either don't want to, or are unable to, find legitimate work, doesn't mean they can't be used out of a fashion. Ultimately, they're always going to be a drag on society in some way and far better to have them indoors and eating than on the street begging or worse. At least, it's better for their kids who might yet choose to make something of themselves.

The 'Welfare Queen' issue is not something to be corrected bureucratically - that just makes even more headaches for the honest people who genuinely need the service. It's to be corrected socially by changing people's attitudes. Or do you want to add yet another layer of government bureacracy and snooping? You let a person's neighbours and acquaintances deal with the problem. It's very hard to create a basket case state through welfare alone - contrary to what the People's Republic of Haven would have you believe - ultimately you need some people to work on some level anyway just to keep shops open and farms ticking over - and many people are going to want to work anyway even when there are genuinely less jobs than workers because most people want to feel like they're contributing - and contributing in a manner that puts them at their best. Others are ill-suited to certain types of position.

I have my doubts about charity. More and more you see that 90% of the donations a charity takes go towards soliciting more donations and salaries for charity employees than it does towards actually getting things done. There're some hideous examples out there - wasn't there a nasty scandle there recently in the US over that. At least in government, there is theoretically oversight from somewhere - somewhere for the buck to stop and that ultimately these individuals are answereable directly to the people. That right there is the power of democracy.

It'd be an interesting experiment to try and run a command economy with Facebook-level data mining..... information technology is thousands of times more advanced today than it was in the 70's. Soviet Five-year-plans were a monumental bureaucratic undertaking - even without the layers of party politics and nomenklatura they all had to be done effectively on paper, with some assistance from basic computing hardware. Many basic needs such as food and housing and heavier industries are relatively predictable constants - it's in consumer goods where the real flexibility is required because people are faddish. Part of the reason the command economy failed as implemented in the USSR was a lack of flexibility.

I'd also argue that the USSR was only nominally 'communist'. May of the criticisms levelled at 'communist' countries are not things wrong with communism as such, but the party that's running the country. The basic ideal of the Eastern-Bloc was that the 'vanguard party' was attempting to mould society towards proper communism in the future. Where Lenin arguably got it wrong was with the idea that he had to beat people over the head to do it, and then as the revolution turned into a regime, the Party became more concerned with securing it's own prominent position and privilege than providing the for needs of people or advancing the true goal of the revolution - then it began to age and stagnate as the grandfathers clung on to their personal privelege to the detriment of the people and focused more on stomping dissent than on actually improving things. There's a really good joke about Brezhnev going to pick up his mother in his State limousine, with her complaining that he'd better be careful or the Bolsheviks will take it away.

I could make a cynical comparison at this point, but I won't.

Not helping the cause is that many truly oppressive regimes merely use the veil of 'communism' to give themselves an air of legitimacy when in reality they are anything but - or to snaffle up Soviet arms and food aid. For many it was a way of getting themselves backed by one of the big superpowers to secure their position. (DPRK anyone, which only recently gave up on the idea in favour of Juche). Other tin-pots snuggled up to the States by portraying themselves as anti-communist.

It's also interesting to not that the Soviet Union was a democracy too - far more than many People's Republics ever where. A Soviet is a local council elected by direct democracy - then you have regional councils on the same format, all the way up to national councils then to the supreme soviet itself. In theory, the whole lot was democratic, and people could choose between candidates, then councils choose candidates to the next council and so on with each picking the one who best represented their interests. In practice whoever got to be a candidate had already been hand-vetted by the party not to rock the boat too much for the grandfathers above.

There were still opportunities to be had for anyone willing to work for them. All that changed was who you had to convince to fund the idea. Work was a right. Arguably arts and culture were more respected rather than commoditised and it was possible for an ordinary textile worker to get a shot at going into space. Healthcare and literacy rates were higher. It wasn't that people had no rights as such - they had different rights.

The point is, 'communism' and Sovietism were not the big evil bogeymen that the echoes of McCarthyism still try to paint them as. Ultimately, communism or socialism are little more than different paradigms for society and government, each a system that arguable has its own merits in certain circumstances, with it's own drawbacks. Capitalism, and corporate capitalism is the same... The idea system of government is probably somewhere in between hard capitalism and hard communism, taking the best strengths of both paradigms.

This 'privatise everything' malarkey is utterly poisonous and ultimately just as destructive for society as any tinpot.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[ECSNorway]

My father spent 35 years in the insurance industry at every level, from mail room to CEO. He views the ACA as an abominable mess not for what it supposedly wants to do, but because of the hack-handed way it goes about it. It's a mess, far more convoluted and overreaching than it needs to be.

There are basically three groups that the ACA is supposed to be helping.

1) those unable to afford the pre-ACA insurance market. This is what Medicaid is for. Expand eligibility based on regional averages so you're not comparing W.Va to NYC and DONE.

2) those who don't want insurance. Ok, let them do without. DONE.

3) those who can't get insured because of pre-existing conditions. New York has prohibited denying coverage on this basis for decades, and the market hasn't gone under. Extend that to the nation and DONE.

Simple. Clean. Based wholly in existing law and precedent. Recommended by a multiple-decade veteran of the insurance industry and a die-hard Republican.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Foxboy]

Ah, but it would be done under a Democrat president and "he'd get all the credit."

Which is why, IMHO, the Republicans on the hill at the time did their level best to spike, pork-barrel and toxify the bill in front of them instead of putting forth a counter-proposal. Or their Insurance Company "secret masters du jour" slipped them some bribes campaign contributions to do so.

Hanlon's Razor here. Including "short sightedness" and "greed" with "Stupidity."

But then it all boils down to this Popeye cartoon, with Olive Oyl standing in for Obama starting at 4:23: 
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[ECSNorway]

Republicans on the hill at the time did their level best to spike, pork-barrel and toxify the bill in front of them instead of putting forth a counter-proposal.

Really? Have you read through the bill and separated it out by who proposed which addition? Can you prove this rather blatant accusation?

I doubt it.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Logan Darklighter]

Ah yes - the new talking point that ObamaCare was "damaged" and fell due to Republican “sabotage.” 
Republicans on Capitol Hill refused to vote for it, refused to like it and support it. They tried repeatedly to repeal it and defund it.and voted against it TO A MAN.

All this is true. But it is not sabotage. This is opposition.

Democrats and leftists of all stripes are admitting with this charge that ObamaCare is a disaster. They no longer want to argue that it is not. Instead they are trying to argue that it is a disaster brought about by Republicans. 

No. Sorry. That isn't going to fly. The Republicans were shoved aside when the Democrats held all the cards. So once again, just to drive the point home - the Democrats OWN THIS. There is not the slightest sliver of blame for any of the failures of Obamacare that can be laid at the feet of the opposition. 

[Foxboy]

Norway, I'm venting. I don't give a rat's arse either way, really. Both sides screwed the pooch. I'm just far more willing to say Republicans got paid to screw up. Dems will do it gratis.

Besides, this is the 21st century. Facts don't enter political "debate" anymore. It's who can shout louder and get prettier talking heads on TV. *grumpy old coot*
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Rajvik]

And that foxy is buying into the stereotype that republicans are at the beck and call of special interest and the democrats are not which is blatantly untrue.

Unfortunately Logan, now that Boehner has given the party a vasectomy with a 12ga. we are looking at a possible split of the conservatives from the rest of the party.

Also like the comments by the President about being able to keep one's insurance policy if you liked it. I remember him telling the republicans to sit down in the backseat and shut up because it was the democrats turn to drive. Well looky where they took us.
 

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, both sides are at the beck and call of special interests. That's a fact of life in American politics since at least the 19th century. The question is which special interests back which party. And which ones you like. After all, your "special interest" is my "evil organization" and vice versa.

It's pretty obvious that the ACA is a muddle. But so were Medicare and Social Security when they both started. It took years, from what I understand, for Social Security to get kicked into a shape that everyone was more-or-less happy with. Sitting to one side and gloating because the ACA isn't perfect from day one is the moral equivalent of being in elementary school and laughing at the kid who answered a teacher's question wrong on the first try -- and being both unwilling to answer the question yourself and perfectly willing to pass the same kid a wrong answer just for the lulz.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

Ah yes - the new talking point that ObamaCare was "damaged" and fell due to Republican “sabotage.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill refused to vote for it, refused to like it and support it. They tried repeatedly to repeal it and defund it.and voted against it TO A MAN.

All this is true. But it is not sabotage. This is opposition.

No, it's contrariness and stubbornness, hindering the operation of government. And I'd say that if the parties were in each other's places.

If you want to see how opposition should work, look at the United Kingdom and Canada.

In the meantime: Get over it, move on, and get your economy into a shape where it isn't pulling our economy down.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Black Aeronaut]

I'm just going to say my 2 Cents and bow out of this thread - I simply find the blindness in the political views to be utterly repugnant. Burn me in effigy if you will, it matters not to me.

The thing is, there is no way around it. We need the AHA so badly that even a flawed version of it will suffice... for the moment, anyhow. That's how bad things have been. Liken it to having your car breakdown on the side of the road. The mechanic that comes along to help doesn't have what you need on hand, but he has something that will at least hold out long enough get you to his shop. That's pretty much where America is at right now. And the Tea Party is not helping by acting like some old grandmother in the back seat screaming about how we did thing back in the old days when all you had to rely on was yourself and God. (And don't try and tell me differently. That's Ted Cruz's platform to a T).

As for the Republicans and the Tea Party... They have gone so far to the Right that the Republicans of Bush-The-First's and even Clinton's era would be aghast. Oh sure, they had Newt. But even then he was considered a charismatic outlier. He didn't last terribly long as the Majority Leader of the House.

But anyhow... as I said, even though it's flawed, the AHA will do for now. We can fix it later. The care providers and pharmaceutical companies will be beaten into submission over costs submitted to the insurers... and then we'll kick the insurers into line where we need to. It will take time, and it will be a painful process... but it will happen, so long as the Republican party quits trying to undermine the AHA outright and focus on the real problems at hand.

That's all for me. Catch you guys later. Not having Internet blows.
PS: Platinum level coverage at about 65USD a month?  No deductible?  25USD Co-pays?  High-level Dental for another 15USD?  I don't care if I don't get any tax credit back for the 2014 tax returns, that's a win for me.  Thank you, AHA.

[ordnance11]

Kathleen Sibelius Resigns
So..how come no Hosannas? Someone should be happy at that news. Sibelius resigning I mean.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Logan Darklighter]

Oh I chortled mightily. Partly because it's obvious that she was a sacrifice - yet ANOTHER "thrown under the bus" by the Obama regime. 
But MAINLY because she couldn't even finish her speech properly. There was a page missing! 

She can't even get a SPEECH done correctly without a 404 Error in her BRAIN!!! ROTFLMAO!!!! ^_^


Classic. Utterly classic. And a perfect metaphor for the failure that is Obamacare. 
A fitting send-off for the Shemp of the Obama administration. Oh sure, The mic didn’t short out and no one knocked over the podium, so let’s consider it a moral victory.  ^_^

[Rajvik]

Why should we crow over the dismissal of yet another sacrificial lamb, honesty I'm not even going to rejoice when the time comes for I told you so's, only when its all over and repealed will I be happy.
 

[Logan Darklighter]

Well you can either laugh or rage.
It's pretty much all over for this country in its current form anyway. We used to be a republic bound by the constitution. But the constitution is a dead letter that both parties wipe their feet on. We have a secret police that spies on everyone. An unelected bureaucracy that answers to no one. Does any of this sound familiar? The powerful and elite have forgotten that Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and Orwell's 1984 were warnings and not instruction manuals.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the 
beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those
200 or so years, these nations have progressed through the 
following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith; 
2. From spiritual faith to great courage; 
3. From courage to liberty; 
4. From liberty to abundance; 
5. From abundance to complacency; 
6. From complacency to apathy; 
7. From apathy to dependence; 
8. From dependence back into bondage--Alexander Fraser Tyler
We're well into the "dependence" phase of the cycle and there's not much left to do but watch the whole circus burn down and laugh at the clowns as they go up in puffs of hot air and fecal material. 
Bring the pain. Maybe when people get enough of what they voted for - GOOD and HARD - they'll decide it's finally past due to water the tree of liberty. 
It all has to burn.

Until then,  may as well just pass the popcorn and have fun watching the show.

[Dartz]

Huh....

Well, problem 1 is that Western Civilisation is not, exclusively, America. By the same metric, the EU is somewhere around year 60 and stage 4-6.

Problem 2 is, well, that this is utter and total drivel.
The things that normally tip civ's over the edge are:
1: The local environment changing beyond the civilsation's ability to manage.

2: Their island exploding beneath them,
3: Someone elses island exploding beneath them, and washing them away as colateral.
4: Being conquered by another nearby civilisation.
5: Being discovered by the Emperor and his iron ships and men with boomsticks.

Even then, most cvilisations don't so much go away, as feed into others that came after them. Half of Europe is still living with the consequences of the Roman Empire and it's Catholic Church. It still exists in language and customs and traditions, as do the Greeks.

Number 5 is an outlier for Earth. If something like that does happen, there isn't much we can really do to prevent it.... but it's also extremely unlikely. As is number 4, unless someone triggers WW3 over some stupid thing in Eastern Europe or the China Sea. Number 2 and 3 may happen to the US of Yellowstone goes pop, but that's unlikely in our lifetimes. Number 1 is possible, and even then we're in a position to either mitigate or adapt because we're aware it's coming.

Political upheaval is another matter. But even then, I doubt a full-bore revolution is possible. Enough people are happy and happier. Even Greece which has been showing the first odious rumbling of true black-shirted fascism, in the face of 50% unemployment and worse, still hasn't gone over the edge into full blown rebellion.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Logan Darklighter]

It's not rebellion and upheaval I'm afraid of.

[Foxboy]

The REAL problem we have is that there's not enough people in the middle willing to work with "the idiots on the other side."

Someone did a study about social media and how it related to what their topic was, and put the results into a physical graph showing the distribution of links between tweets, facebook pages, and other sites.

Political discourse everywhere else in the first world looks like a dumb-bell: Two big lumps representing left and right connected by a narrow channel of news and civil debate.

The good old USofA right now? Two blobs separated by miles of virtual paper. Because neutral news doesn't make any money in advertising, but screaming opinion does.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll