Is it me or is Long Island starting to lose its luster? (Hicksville: loan, hotels)

[dreamofmonterey]

Originally Posted by Crookhaven

Dont get me wrong, I love my fair Isle but I did a fair amount of traveling this Summer and LI really looks like hell.

Houses are run down, businesses closed....trash, traffic and graffiti everywhere, Cops losing the war on heroin etc etc etc.

I think this recession is really kicking the crap out of us.

I know we'll bounce back, Im just not sure what the ball will look like.

Your thoughts?

Crooks

lol. It lost its "luster" in 1990. I hated it. Overpriced, too close to your neighbors, and the winter weather sux.

[Razor123]

Originally Posted by dreamofmonterey

lol. It lost its "luster" in 1990. I hated it. Overpriced, too close to your neighbors, and the winter weather sux.

+1

[Interlude]

America has lost its luster. Your are witnessing the decline of this country and it's only going to get worse. You think property taxes and traffic are you biggest problems - wait until the millions of unemployed have to start turning to crime, when health care costs spiral further out of control and out of reach of those who barely have it now, when the conservatives finally get their way and hand the rest of this country over to the banks.

[SilverBulletZ06]

Originally Posted by Interlude

America has lost its luster. Your are witnessing the decline of this country and it's only going to get worse. You think property taxes and traffic are you biggest problems - wait until the millions of unemployed have to start turning to crime, when health care costs spiral further out of control and out of reach of those who barely have it now, when the conservatives finally get their way and hand the rest of this country over to the banks.

So drugs don't cause crime but UE does? Fishy, I thought they both did.


HC costs are going to continue spiraling out of control, our ability to keep people alive costs exponentially more and as better tech comes out then the standard of care increases... costing more. LI is in the top ten percent (92-93% IIRC) in costs occured at end of life, I don't see that changing either. Theres a few things we can drastically do to decrease HC costs: 1) tort reform then slowly change practices to reduce CYA medicine which is about 30% of all proceedures/tests. 2) Get used to people who don't have insurance being treated at a different level then those that do. Stabilization of a patient is the easy part, the chronic care is what kills costs. 3) Futile Medicine Law: allows medical workers to place patients on pallative care. If presented and followed correctly you would save billions.


Hand over to banks? You mean hand people the money that would have otherwise gone to the government so the individual can do with it what they will. Come on, the welfare state (both NYS and the federal government) has done more to kill blue collar business in this country then anything else.

[LilTownBlues]

Originally Posted by Interlude

America has lost its luster. Your are witnessing the decline of this country and it's only going to get worse. You think property taxes and traffic are you biggest problems - wait until the millions of unemployed have to start turning to crime, when health care costs spiral further out of control and out of reach of those who barely have it now, when the conservatives finally get their way and hand the rest of this country over to the banks.

Don't worry...Obama will bring change.

[Interlude]

Originally Posted by SilverBulletZ06

So drugs don't cause crime but UE does? Fishy, I thought they both did.

The illegality of drugs causes crime due to high prices and gang control of territory. Alcohol doesn't cause crime currently but did during prohibition.

HC costs are going to continue spiraling out of control, our ability to keep people alive costs exponentially more and as better tech comes out then the standard of care increases... costing more. LI is in the top ten percent (92-93% IIRC) in costs occured at end of life, I don't see that changing either. Theres a few things we can drastically do to decrease HC costs: 1) tort reform then slowly change practices to reduce CYA medicine which is about 30% of all proceedures/tests. 2) Get used to people who don't have insurance being treated at a different level then those that do. Stabilization of a patient is the easy part, the chronic care is what kills costs. 3) Futile Medicine Law: allows medical workers to place patients on pallative care. If presented and followed correctly you would save billions.

Or we recognize that the American system is broken. We spend more than twice as much per person as the rest of the first world and still have millions uninsured and even more underinsured, leading to healthcare costs being the main cause of personal bankruptcies. And even with all those costs, we lag behind in most every health metric. The problem is health insurance companies and the inefficiency and waste they introduce into the system. Simply extend Medicare to cover all Americans and the problem goes away.

Hand over to banks? You mean hand people the money that would have otherwise gone to the government so the individual can do with it what they will. Come on, the welfare state (both NYS and the federal government) has done more to kill blue collar business in this country then anything else.

The Federal Reserve just created $13 trillion out of nothing and gave it to the banks that caused this economic crisis. What we pay for the "welfare state" (whatever the hell that is) is peanuts.

[Interlude]

Originally Posted by LilTownBlues

Don't worry...Obama will bring change.

Laugh. Obama is part of the problem. The crisis in America is that wealth is being redistributed upward at an alarming rate with no end in sight and somehow the poor are getting poorer. It's quite historic and a few years ago I thought it was basically impossible in developed countries but somehow it's happening, the already much too poor are actually getting poorer. It will take more than a corporatist-centrist with dark skin to reverse that.

[SilverBulletZ06]

Originally Posted by Interlude

The illegality of drugs causes crime due to high prices and gang control of territory. Alcohol doesn't cause crime currently but did during prohibition.

ETOH causes crime, plenty of violence outside of local watering homes not to mention DWI.

Illegal drugs, sex trade, theft, extrotion, kidnapping. People will do whatever is most lucritive to ensure nefarious enterprises continue.

Or we recognize that the American system is broken. We spend more than twice as much per person as the rest of the first world and still have millions uninsured and even more underinsured, leading to healthcare costs being the main cause of personal bankruptcies. And even with all those costs, we lag behind in most every health metric. The problem is health insurance companies and the inefficiency and waste they introduce into the system. Simply extend Medicare to cover all Americans and the problem goes away.

It is broken, we have a system that people will pay into and take many times more then they put it in out. The problem is less private insurance and more having to do with public systems. Medicaid/Medicare payments are horrible. I know a Dr. that got paid something like $60 from medicare to come in and perform an emergency appendectomy. Thats outrageous!

And our health metrics are actually pretty good for non-self imposed issues (heart disease, obesity, diabetes). Our survival rates for cancers is above par. But on the same note,a re you familiar with forgein countries costing the US HC system trillions because they basically take the drugs and medical technology for pennies on the dollar? Talk to your government official about how we are subsidizing englands nationalized HC.

The Federal Reserve just created $13 trillion out of nothing and gave it to the banks that caused this economic crisis. What we pay for the "welfare state" (whatever the hell that is) is peanuts.

The starring role in the collapse was the mortgage bubble: brought to you by the CRA changes in the mid-90's. Then propagated by our .gov friends Fannie and Freddie who just kept buying up securities without regard to solvenecy. Banks sure played a role, but I'd look at the horse as to why the cart is flipped on the side of the road.

[Interlude]

Originally Posted by SilverBulletZ06

ETOH causes crime, plenty of violence outside of local watering homes not to mention DWI.

People act irresponsibly under the influence, but that's a far cry from the vast criminal enterprise that is supported by illegal narcotics.

It is broken, we have a system that people will pay into and take many times more then they put it in out. The problem is less private insurance and more having to do with public systems. Medicaid/Medicare payments are horrible. I know a Dr. that got paid something like $60 from medicare to come in and perform an emergency appendectomy. Thats outrageous!

Yes let's base our evaluation of the entire system on your anecdotal evidence. The problem is entirely private insurance and, to a lesser extent, the premium cost of end-of-life care.

And our health metrics are actually pretty good for non-self imposed issues (heart disease, obesity, diabetes). Our survival rates for cancers is above par.

Even assuming complete parity of outcome, we're paying twice as much, not covering millions, and driving millions of others into bankruptcy.

But on the same note,a re you familiar with forgein countries costing the US HC system trillions because they basically take the drugs and medical technology for pennies on the dollar? Talk to your government official about how we are subsidizing englands nationalized HC.

Yes. Our government decided that not even Medicare can negotiate for lower drug prices, which is patently absurd.

The starring role in the collapse was the mortgage bubble: brought to you by the CRA changes in the mid-90's. Then propagated by our .gov friends Fannie and Freddie who just kept buying up securities without regard to solvenecy. Banks sure played a role, but I'd look at the horse as to why the cart is flipped on the side of the road.

That's the finance sector apologist way of looking at it. Another was is that sleazy lenders like Countrywide and New Century first created huge masses of bad loans, committing every conceivable kind of fraud to get people into loans (from doctoring income statements with white-out to phonying FICO scores to engineering fake appraisals). They then moved the bad loans quickly to the big banks, which pooled them and chopped them up (this is the “securitization” process), sprinkled hocus-pocus math on them, and them sold them to suckers around the world as AAA-rated securities. When the whole thing blew up in their faces, they twisted the government's arm into bailing the whole system out.

If there was a silver lining to all this, it has been to demonstrate that if the Treasury and Federal Reserve can create $13 trillion of public obligations – money – electronically on computer keyboards, there really is no Social Security problem at all, no Medicare shortfall, no inability of the American government to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.

[ABACAB]

Originally Posted by Interlude

The problem is entirely private insurance and, to a lesser extent, the premium cost of end-of-life care.

If you think the only problem with the healthcare industry is private insurance and end-of-life care, then you need to open up a newspaper. Private insurance is so insignificant to overall healthcare spending. The funding mechanism does need to be fixed, but the broader issue is the cost of medical technology, the fact that it's ever changing, and the arms race by healthcare organizations to have the latest and greatest. Despite the fact that the medical arms race is the signle greatest contributor to the exhorbitant cost of healthcare in the US, you don't pay attention to it because it doesn't fit into your biased agenda.