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First, I didn't know that his policies weren't working, if you are referring to the ACA, since it won't fully take effect until 2014. Evidently you have a time machine. I, for instance, have seen no change in insurance premiums. I know people who due to the 80%/85% rule, have received REFUNDS from their insurers. Most of the scaremongering is from AM talk radio or from businesses that themselves haven't read the law or had it explained to them by accountants etc familiar with the law, and as such they are in no position to talk let alone have an opinion on the matter until they are informed. There is widespread consensus among economists that the Obama stimulus - which was sharply cut by rural Republicans - was one of the only things that kept us out of a second depression, and make no mistake - this austerity and sequester thing we're doing in the name of balanced budgets, is a mistake. It is well known that the current Republican House majority only exists as a result of extensive Gerrymandering, and that with non-politically drawn districts, the House would be at a tie or a slight Democratic majority. It is well known that the Tea Party and the GOP's support is sharply lower in more developed counties, and outside the south and far west, both of which for the most part lack real cities, infrastructure, and civic investment. I believe he has done everything possible to work with these clowns and still accomplish something useful during his time in office. He is right not to negotiate further with them, as they are essentially economic terrorists pushing an inferior cultural and economic agenda. We should have finished reconstruction, or maybe we should resume reconstruction, because the clearly visible cultural divide is not helping us, let alone the fact that one side's culture is objectively inferior. Let's also not forget who started two ongoing, expensive, and completely unnecessary wars, and did nothing to regulate the trading of derivatives and other obscure but powerful financial products that got us into this mess in the first place. So that's that. But I guess 4 people dying in Behghazi and a Dept of Energy loan to Solyndra is way more important.
The premium increases have already hit many and are about to hit virtually everyone else. It's not scaremongering, its fact. Max Baucus, who helped write the damn law, calls it a trainwreck. And way back on April 30, 2013, if you can remember that long ago, Obama himself (may peace be upon him) said his signature law was almost fully implemented.
The state legislatures are the knuckle draggers. I love the Midwest and don't like seeing these a-holes trying to turn it into some variation on the south.
That's the last thing you should be worried about.
Whatever negatives you perceive the south to have simply cannot happen in places like Minnesota. The cultural differences between the two regions are far too deeply embedded to be affected by policy.
What happened/is happening in Wisconsin, for example, will not change Wisconsin into North Alabama. Wisconsin's culture is too strong, too different for that to be a possibility.
Prosperity? Education? It's all cultural. No liberal can go down south and make it the top performing region in the country.
Side note: education down there isn't always as bad as outsiders think. The schools themselves often do as good a job as they possibly can, but with large blocks of poverty and cynical views towards education, it's often an uphill battle.
Nothing Scott Walker will do can cause Wisconsin to drop to #50 on the schools list.
The south has been the way it is for a very long time: relatively unchanged through democratic and republican leadership, and various degrees of religious fundamentalism infiltrating politics.
But the south isn't easily defined by politics. They are who they are regardless of who they happen to vote for.
As for Missouri, it's still a border state. It can go either way at any time.
Last edited by northbound74; 05-03-2013 at 09:19 PM..
I don't know if the bill that passed the house really addresses anything. A business owner does not have to do business with the gun toter. Anyway, if the gun is stored away in the vehicle how does the business owner see it?
All this bill is is a way for Republicans to demonstrate that they have a tight grip on everybody's stick.
First, I didn't know that his policies weren't working, if you are referring to the ACA, since it won't fully take effect until 2014. Evidently you have a time machine. I, for instance, have seen no change in insurance premiums. I know people who due to the 80%/85% rule, have received REFUNDS from their insurers. Most of the scaremongering is from AM talk radio or from businesses that themselves haven't read the law or had it explained to them by accountants etc familiar with the law, and as such they are in no position to talk let alone have an opinion on the matter until they are informed. There is widespread consensus among economists that the Obama stimulus - which was sharply cut by rural Republicans - was one of the only things that kept us out of a second depression, and make no mistake - this austerity and sequester thing we're doing in the name of balanced budgets, is a mistake. It is well known that the current Republican House majority only exists as a result of extensive Gerrymandering, and that with non-politically drawn districts, the House would be at a tie or a slight Democratic majority. It is well known that the Tea Party and the GOP's support is sharply lower in more developed counties, and outside the south and far west, both of which for the most part lack real cities, infrastructure, and civic investment. I believe he has done everything possible to work with these clowns and still accomplish something useful during his time in office. He is right not to negotiate further with them, as they are essentially economic terrorists pushing an inferior cultural and economic agenda. We should have finished reconstruction, or maybe we should resume reconstruction, because the clearly visible cultural divide is not helping us, let alone the fact that one side's culture is objectively inferior. Let's also not forget who started two ongoing, expensive, and completely unnecessary wars, and did nothing to regulate the trading of derivatives and other obscure but powerful financial products that got us into this mess in the first place. So that's that. But I guess 4 people dying in Behghazi and a Dept of Energy loan to Solyndra is way more important.
My premiums have steadily gone up. Amazingly, the coverage has gone down.
The "Obama diverted the next great depression" argument is nothing but speculation. No one knows what would have happened if the economy were left alone to naturally adjust itself. But liberals had to rely on what-ifs this last time around because of Obama's lack of a good record. So they take refuge knowing people who get their news primarily from a comedy network can easily be scared into thinking republicans will magically send us back to the 50's and starve the children.
Last edited by northbound74; 05-03-2013 at 09:50 PM..
"The premium increases have already hit many and are about to hit virtually everyone else."
And like the people I know whose premiums were briefly increased and then refunded thanks to the 80%/85% rule, these increases will be temporary now and nonexistent in the future. The increases are just another form of fearmongering, or bad math, or both. Either way, within a generation, we will have the single payer system we should have had two generations ago, and none of this will matter.
If you think health insurance rates will increase by 30 or 40 percent, you clearly haven't bothered to learn about what the law actually does and doesn't do, and you lack math skills.
The math states that you can't add a bunch of people to the ranks of the insured and have costs decrease. You can't require insurers to take on people with conditions known to be very expensive to treat and have them only pay the "normal healthy person" premium and not have costs go way up for everybody. You also can't also add a bunch of regulation that is very expensive to comply with and expect costs to decrease either. That requires accounting shenanigans that would make Bernie Madoff blush. Also, many people say their premiums are going up closer to 75% than 30%. The ones whose premiums are only going up 30-40% are often having things that used to be covered but aren't required under Obamacare being dropped.
Quote:
Originally Posted by STLviaMSP
And like the people I know whose premiums were briefly increased and then refunded thanks to the 80%/85% rule, these increases will be temporary now and nonexistent in the future. The increases are just another form of fearmongering, or bad math, or both. Either way, within a generation, we will have the single payer system we should have had two generations ago, and none of this will matter.
It seems like you are the one lacking the knowledge of what the bill does and also lack math skills. You have swallowed the administration's impossible assertion that the sole reasons healthcare is so expensive are because insurance companies are reaping enormous margins, there is extensive fraud from physicians and hospitals, and far too many tests and scans are being ordered. This couldn't be further from the truth.
- Insurance companies are not making significant margins and many are in fact non-profit entities. Their margins are a few percent and have been that for a large number of years. Case in point- my insurance carrier is a for-profit company that my employer and I have paid tens of thousands of dollars worth' of premiums to over several years prior to Obamacare passing. I was refunded a whopping six dollars when the 85% rule went into effect. That means they were already shelling out around 85% of their total proceeds back out in direct reimbursements. Having a total overhead + margins adding up to 15% is very low compared to most of the rest of the business world. For example the doc's office you go to has an overhead of at least 50-55% and if they are very, very lucky they just might break even.
- The vast majority of the "fraud" the government speaks of does not exist. The big "fraud" topic right now is "code creep." Docs used to chronically under-code and under-bill everything ("everything's a 99202 or 99213") just for simplicity's sake plus nobody every got investigated for a charge that was too low. The greater proportion of lower-paying Medicare and Medicaid patients and large expenses of the new regulations and EMRs that the government forced on docs has led to a much greater emphasis on more accurate billing to get the full amount of reimbursements for the services actually provided. This has led to a much higher rate of using higher billing codes which the government does not like (they have to pay more) and immediately jumps to the conclusion of fraud. They have to know what's actually happening since they get the records from the docs and can and do review them. It just doesn't fit with the whole leftist narrative and so they refuse to admit it.
- The "waste and abuse" is likewise largely a fabrication. Things like offering mammograms annually starting at 40 per the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommendations instead of biennially starting at 50 per the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force are considered "waste and abuse" and are a major focus of the government. This is not waste or abuse. There are multiple sets of slightly differing treatment/screening guidelines for pretty much any condition you can think of made by well-respected groups with studies to back them up. The government just balks at anything that isn't the absolute cheapest for itself and can't admit that they are making those kinds of decisions.
- The biggest expenditures in health care are by far related to end of life care. About 90% of the amount of money one person spends on health care in their entire lifetime is spent in the last year of life. Most people die in a hospital and over 10% die in an ICU. The government refuses to address this because this would absolutely be the "government death panel" that they have vehemently denied. The government also does not have patients shoulder any sort of a proportional cost related to their care so that they have any sort of a financial interest in reducing the cost of their own care. That's furthermore made illegal in many cases such as prohibiting balance billing.
We will also never have a traditional full socialized system because of the above points. The government simply isn't willing to have the rationing boards that every other socialized medicine country has, nor can they pay for the largely unlimited, largely free-to-the-patient care they are promising. The "value-based purchasing" that is being discussed is what will happen. This will essentially be a capitated payment from the government to a hospital or health system to provide all of the care for a certain number of patients. The hospital or health system has to be the bad guy and do the rationing and eat all of the costs that exceed the amount that they are paid. This is a win-win for the government as they get to continue to score political points by promising that everything will be covered and not paying for it. They furthermore get to point fingers at the hospital/health system when the patients are unhappy and also further decrease the amount they pay because of poor satisfaction metrics. Of course this will collapse in short order as hospitals and health systems refuse government-pay patients and/or go belly-up since they can't pay for everything for everybody any better than the government can. But that will be how socialized medicine will play out in the U.S.
Quote:
Originally Posted by STLviaMSP
^ I think he's saying it is somehow Obama's fault that the backward parts of the country are too backward to make good policy, and that it's also his fault that those parts of the country have stood in the way of every sane thing his administration has attempted to achieve. It's pretty faulty reasoning.
The real backwards parts of the country are the ones who support the thoroughly discredited statist ideology from the 1800s that has failed in pretty much every country it's been tried in. The ones where it hadn't led to a failure of the state led to a dictator or dictatorial regime taking the reigns, such as in China. These backwards liberal states are trying to use the feds to force their failed ideology on the conservative states that are successful because they are upset their productive residents and businesses are leaving for the conservative states.
Flyover Country, your well-reasoned response is good, but wasted. You are arguing with idiots, and no amount of reason or fact will enlighten their benighted minds. They, like cockroaches, are most comfortable in the dark, while lousing up the house for the rest of us. What we need is not a reasoned debate, but an exterminator.
When Republican districts learn how to build real cities, great universities, top notch public park systems, dynamic arts scenes, and tech startups, and part ways with the SBC, birthers, science denyers, tea partiers, and the nativists, I'll start giving consideration and respect to GOP policy and policymakers. Till then, not so much. They are, quite literally, the party of the bad parts of yesterday.
Flyover Country, your well-reasoned response is good, but wasted. You are arguing with idiots, and no amount of reason or fact will enlighten their benighted minds. They, like cockroaches, are most comfortable in the dark, while lousing up the house for the rest of us. What we need is not a reasoned debate, but an exterminator.
I suppose you are right. You'll get farther in yelling at a brick wall and expecting it to move than trying to get the liberal out of a goofball from "The Cities." Lord knows I see enough of them where I live right now, a whopping 15 miles from the southwestern border of Minnesota. They scurry across the border to escape their mother ship's punitive taxes but then them to institute much of the same garbage they just fled from.
Getting rid of the liberal pestilence will likely take them running out of borrowing power. People giving out free stuff are very, very popular. They are more like drug dealers than anything. They give people money in exchange for exhibiting behavior that wrecks their ability to be an independent, productive citizen- paying them not to work, paying them to be (or act) disabled, not to save any money for retirement, paying them to have a small army of children by the time they are 25 and never consider marrying any of the fathers, etc. Then when they are totally screwed, all the statist liberals have to do is imply that their opposition will stop the handouts and they are cemented in power. Medicare and Social Security continuing to pay out transfer payments isn't a "third rail" for no reason. However statists are very restrictive on social issues. Having the government tell you what size of a drink you can buy or what material your clothes can be made out of becomes much more of a pain in the butt when you are no longer getting a big check from them. So they'll get kicked to the curb as soon as they run out of China's money. That minute can't come soon enough, I am afraid.
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