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Claw Offline
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Post: #21
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 09:31 AM)Ohio Poly Wrote:  We'll have ACA or Medicare For All, take your pick.

Like hell we will. Try to take away my right to buy private health care and you will start a civil war.
12-15-2018 11:44 AM
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solohawks Offline
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Post: #22
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
They didnt repeal the tax.

They set the tax at $0. Practically it's the same, but technically it might matter
12-15-2018 12:00 PM
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Post: #23
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.
12-15-2018 04:26 PM
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Post: #24
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.
the bold is what the British health care service does now.
12-15-2018 05:53 PM
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solohawks Offline
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Post: #25
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

Yep. This is why it costs more to fix your bumper than it does parts of your engine. No insurance for auto mechanic but all insurance for body work
12-15-2018 06:23 PM
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Post: #26
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.



12-15-2018 06:31 PM
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Post: #27
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




W.'s expansion of the drug benefit was necessary. People weren't taking their medicines and dying or getting sicker. Its not for a lay person or you to determine which medicines are needed.

W. gets derided for the drug benefit and No Child Left Behind from right and left, but those were both answers to real world problems. People couldn't afford their drugs. Schools were focusing on the good students and ignoring poor, minority and special needs kids, with the result that we had a lot of people with no HS diplomas and unfit for the workforce.

Unlike a lot of the Democrats and the Freedom Caucus, W. actually understood the real world in the US (had a little trouble with understanding Iraq).
12-15-2018 08:32 PM
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Post: #28
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 08:32 PM)bullet Wrote:  W.'s expansion of the drug benefit was necessary. People weren't taking their medicines and dying or getting sicker. Its not for a lay person or you to determine which medicines are needed.

W. gets derided for the drug benefit and No Child Left Behind from right and left, but those were both answers to real world problems. People couldn't afford their drugs. Schools were focusing on the good students and ignoring poor, minority and special needs kids, with the result that we had a lot of people with no HS diplomas and unfit for the workforce.

Unlike a lot of the Democrats and the Freedom Caucus, W. actually understood the real world in the US (had a little trouble with understanding Iraq).

bullet, I'm not sure your response here makes sense. As a conservative, I am reticent to endorse any large-scale expansion of government as a matter of course. That said, I am wondering about your characterization of the prescription drug entitlement as "necessary" because "people weren't taking their medicines and dying or getting sicker." People themselves need to decide if and how important taking their medications are to them individually. Many wish to consult with a doctor of their choice, some do not. That is their choice, not yours, or mine or especially the governent's.

The government has no business interfering, which is my point. The marketplace and market price are also a valid components of helping people determine their choice to take or not their medications and whether they are worth the cost. By interfering in the natural marketplace, the government is artificially skewing the decision tree by reducing or eliminating the vitally important market cost factor, which should be front and center in all health related decisions. This appears to be one of the primary causes of the introduction of the extraordinary waste factor that creates the unreasonably high costs in the first place.

While they may have been answers that W et al came up with, they appear to have been the wrong answers, and made problems worse by "fixing" them with more government intrusion where it did not seem warranted. To the extent people recognize this is the extent those "answers" suffer from deserved derision, as you put it. IOW, nice try, but try again. Further, without W's expansion we might well never have gotten the abomination of ACA. Ironically, W's action in many ways appears to have helped softened up the aptitude to pave the way for Obamacare.

People couldn't afford their drugs. Okay, what the heck does the government have to do with that? That's a cost-benefit problem. By introducing an artificial intrusion the problem only gets more complicated, expensive and overall, worse. If people can;t afford something, they will have to make an economic choice. If they can't afford it, they will have to get better educated, get better jobs, give up creature comforts (cable TV, fancy cars, vacations in the right places with the right people, too expensive housing, etc...

I speak as a single parent person with no health insurance, a special needs child, and limited resources I must choose how to utilize. The most inefficient use of my limited resources are public education, which is worthless, health "insurance" plans that do not do anything we need, and doctors who overcharge for their overblown services because of an artificially protected market fixing ponzi scheme started with medicare and perpetuated logarithmically until today's unaffordale ACA.

Yet, somehow my child gets the very best therapy-- negotiating skills and outside the box methods go a long way instead of paying through the nose, has improved his educational level beyond what any public school can or would provide due to extensive personal parental involvement (and admittedly forgoing more selfish pursuits I could be using the time I spend with him for) and we are seldom sick and almost never need doctors or drugs--basic hygiene, regular showers and keeping clothes and house clean (which many people do not do), constant hand washing (62% of men and 40% of women don't wash hands--yeech), especially in winter, and a relatively inexpensive array of readily available over the counter generic store brand items takes care of 95% of our health care needs. How do we do this? By making rational choices and prioritizing what is really important over "needs" that are really "wants." Also, by self-educating whenever and wherever possible. And eating a normal diet that has some junk, but ensures I can always fit into the same pants and shirts I did in school, which is my baseline basic health check.

It is a lie that "healthcare" and health insurance have to be as expansive or as necessary as they are purported to be. It is a lie that people need most or in many cases any of their prescription meds. The socialists want you to think that you have to have these things and the truth is you do not. The only thing I might, stress might, go for is a universal catastrophic policy for all legal citizens. But it would have to be so basic as to only cover the very worst scenarios. Anything else is a lifestyle choice and largely a question of economic priorities, which is why removing cost from the decision tree is the very problem that keeps us spinning around these same artificial circles we have allowed to be created for us., Well, not for me, but for too many others, apparently.

W, god bless him,. lived a priveldged life and could not relate to real world economics. I wish he had beeen successful introducing the free market elements into Social Security like he wanted to in the speech I saw him give, but alsa, he bent to the political winds like they do from both sides when it comes to the important issues. W's expansion was a mistake. So was Obama's. And the next expansion will be just as wrong a band-aid of an "answer." Let the market and individual people handle it . If government wants to do anything, then mandate published prices for services so people can make better choices. Doctors are merely fancy service techs, hospitals are garages. Looking at them as they really are will decrease costs and improve health for all citizens.

Last time I had an x-ray a few years ago it cost me just $32 for 3 of them. Over the objections of some friends who had insisted I go to the emergency room and waste several thousands of dollars. I grew up working in a pharmacy and I was in the medical business for several years, dealt with doctors, hospitals and insurance and I am fully cognizant of the tremendous waste involved. But the very same x-ray at a hospital or doctor's office would have cost $500-$1500 or more (I know as I quoted out the prices at several locations before I made my decision on where to go get one--having been appalled at the rampant entitled greed and graft presented against my inquiries). Don't tell me what does and does not have to be expensive. I am a motivated parent to find and negotiate the very, very best price. But then, I'll drive across the street to save on gas, too. Would that the system encouraged more people to be as tenacious and careful in spending their family's money.
12-15-2018 10:41 PM
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JRsec Offline
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Post: #29
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




I get tired of having to go for 3 tests I don't need in order to get the one I do need simply because the government insurance protocol says I have to have an ultrasound, before I can have an injection fraction test for a gall bladder in order to rule out a gall bladder I know is not giving me trouble before I can have a cat scan I know will prove inconclusive before they can finally clear my liver with an MRI.

If I had had a serious issue with my liver I might have been halfway dead a month later before I could have found out. Meanwhile back to Vet. If they suspect anything internal they rule out the worst first by doing the MRI first thing. You know things are screwed up when your pet gets better and more rational care!

As to Bullet's post below, yes the kids all got diplomas after no child left behind. But it was very apparent to the low end work force that they still lacked what were once average skills in communication, reading comprehension, and math when they entered the work force. It was like issuing a certificate of authenticity for a counterfeit jewel. It looks good, makes the counterfeit feel better, gets his/her parents of the back of the educators, but is apparent to those who take the product that it is still grossly inferior. That may be solution for bureaucrats, but it's not in the work place.
12-15-2018 10:50 PM
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RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 01:12 AM)Attackcoog Wrote:  Frankly, Demcrats, Republicans, and all Americans should be euphoric. They get another at bat. How about this time you work together in a bipartisan manner,

They’ll all piddle and wait for the courts to bail them out, and if forced to take action will piddle some more tossing symbolic votes at each other making the other side vote against apple pie, then finally at the final hour up the mandate tax from $0.00 to $0.01 and all declare victory.
12-15-2018 11:44 PM
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Post: #31
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 11:44 PM)58-56 Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 01:12 AM)Attackcoog Wrote:  Frankly, Demcrats, Republicans, and all Americans should be euphoric. They get another at bat. How about this time you work together in a bipartisan manner,

They’ll all piddle and wait for the courts to bail them out, and if forced to take action will piddle some more tossing symbolic votes at each other making the other side vote against apple pie, then finally at the final hour up the mandate tax from $0.00 to $0.01 and all declare victory.

lol...sounds about right. 04-cheers
12-16-2018 01:45 AM
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Post: #32
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

So in typical democrat fashion they destroyed health insurance to eventually get to setting prices for healthcare providers. Convoluted logic is a democrat trait.....
12-16-2018 08:24 AM
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Post: #33
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




every bit of this in a capitalist system makes sense...

there's only one problem.....once you spoil the children, you can't resume sanity until the money runs out....and this country is chock full of spoiled motherfuckers....

the US is on an economic path to unsustainable "xyz".....and we've done it to ourselves in less than 100 years....

it's only a matter of when it crumbles at this point...there is a difference between real inflation and subsidized inflation....and we're doing a great job at promoting the latter...

#fragilebreakingpointhorizon
12-16-2018 09:12 AM
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Post: #34
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-15-2018 10:50 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




I get tired of having to go for 3 tests I don't need in order to get the one I do need simply because the government insurance protocol says I have to have an ultrasound, before I can have an injection fraction test for a gall bladder in order to rule out a gall bladder I know is not giving me trouble before I can have a cat scan I know will prove inconclusive before they can finally clear my liver with an MRI.

If I had had a serious issue with my liver I might have been halfway dead a month later before I could have found out. Meanwhile back to Vet. If they suspect anything internal they rule out the worst first by doing the MRI first thing. You know things are screwed up when your pet gets better and more rational care!

As to Bullet's post below, yes the kids all got diplomas after no child left behind. But it was very apparent to the low end work force that they still lacked what were once average skills in communication, reading comprehension, and math when they entered the work force. It was like issuing a certificate of authenticity for a counterfeit jewel. It looks good, makes the counterfeit feel better, gets his/her parents of the back of the educators, but is apparent to those who take the product that it is still grossly inferior. That may be solution for bureaucrats, but it's not in the work place.

If you remember the 70s, you had a 50/50 chance of getting a cashier to give you the correct change. Now they actually know how to count. And kids today as a whole are better with verbal skills. The stuff they do in high school today is far advanced over what I did in the 70s and I went to one of the best public high schools in my state and was very well prepared for college. I think they actually push college prep too much and cause many to fail. Yes, there has been grade inflation, but the skills level and knowledge are higher.

Graduation rates have gone up since NCLB. Public schools aren't very efficient, but they are making serious efforts to solve problems in a lot of the inner city schools. Before NCLB and state efforts, they just ignored those schools. And they could ignore poor students. They could just focus on the top students and not be measured on the bottom students. The teachers' unions hate metrics, which tells you just how important it is that NCLB forced the use of them. And I have a special needs child and see how difficult it can be even with NCLB. Warehousing kids and spitting them out when they reach 18 was a failure for the kids and for the economy. The path of least resistance for the bureaucracy called public schools is no longer to ignore the challenging students.
12-16-2018 10:28 AM
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Post: #35
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
As for the drug benefit, it was for Medicare, our health insurance for the retired. With our employer based system (which is a separate topic), medicare is essential for the elderly. And without being able to afford drugs, they essentially couldn't be treated for most conditions.

We don't and haven't had a true market system in that segment of the marketplace. Most of the drugs for the elderly are very expensive.
The idea that all these elderly people have lots of unnecessary prescriptions is a fiction. And I know people who didn't take important medicine because they couldn't afford it.

The drug benefit was one of the best things W. did. The real world (not some fantasy of a perfect free market) is that people are alive and living better lives because of it.
12-16-2018 10:38 AM
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Post: #36
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
I still think the solution for education is to do what every other advanced country does, and that is to track students instead of trying to mainstream them. Put the students going to Harvard, Yale, Emory, Vandy, Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, Rice, and the military academies, or into advanced programs at state universities, into an A section. Put the students going to regular programs at state universities in a B section. Put the students with no interest in going to university, who need to learn the skills necessary for a trade, into a C or vocational section. To make this work, we have to make our vocational education much better. Bill Clinton once proposed a work-study vocational path, with retired mechanics, plumbers, hairdressers, and such serving as mentors. That strikes me as a useful approach. Those other countries also have vocational education paths that continue to community college and associates' degrees. The model is there, they get better results for less money, so why don't we do it.

I find it interesting that the same criticisms leveled against our health care in the period leading up to Obamacare--most expensive in the world, and middling results--also apply to education. But the same people who insisted that our health care was a "failed system" seem to think that the solution to education is simply to dump more money into it.

Both systems produce less than optimum results because both paradigms are flawed. Bismarck systems get the best results in health care, primarily IMO because they get government out of a lot of what government now does here, and tracking students seems to be the key to getting better education bang for the buck. So why isn't some party, or even somebody, posing either or both? I have no clue, except that winning political games is more important than solving problems.
12-16-2018 11:01 AM
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Post: #37
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-16-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:50 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




I get tired of having to go for 3 tests I don't need in order to get the one I do need simply because the government insurance protocol says I have to have an ultrasound, before I can have an injection fraction test for a gall bladder in order to rule out a gall bladder I know is not giving me trouble before I can have a cat scan I know will prove inconclusive before they can finally clear my liver with an MRI.

If I had had a serious issue with my liver I might have been halfway dead a month later before I could have found out. Meanwhile back to Vet. If they suspect anything internal they rule out the worst first by doing the MRI first thing. You know things are screwed up when your pet gets better and more rational care!

As to Bullet's post below, yes the kids all got diplomas after no child left behind. But it was very apparent to the low end work force that they still lacked what were once average skills in communication, reading comprehension, and math when they entered the work force. It was like issuing a certificate of authenticity for a counterfeit jewel. It looks good, makes the counterfeit feel better, gets his/her parents of the back of the educators, but is apparent to those who take the product that it is still grossly inferior. That may be solution for bureaucrats, but it's not in the work place.

If you remember the 70s, you had a 50/50 chance of getting a cashier to give you the correct change. Now they actually know how to count. And kids today as a whole are better with verbal skills. The stuff they do in high school today is far advanced over what I did in the 70s and I went to one of the best public high schools in my state and was very well prepared for college. I think they actually push college prep too much and cause many to fail. Yes, there has been grade inflation, but the skills level and knowledge are higher.

Graduation rates have gone up since NCLB. Public schools aren't very efficient, but they are making serious efforts to solve problems in a lot of the inner city schools. Before NCLB and state efforts, they just ignored those schools. And they could ignore poor students. They could just focus on the top students and not be measured on the bottom students. The teachers' unions hate metrics, which tells you just how important it is that NCLB forced the use of them. And I have a special needs child and see how difficult it can be even with NCLB. Warehousing kids and spitting them out when they reach 18 was a failure for the kids and for the economy. The path of least resistance for the bureaucracy called public schools is no longer to ignore the challenging students.

Bullet, I never received incorrect change in the 70's. But it happens all of the time now, and in a college town.

Look, I graded graduate papers at a top 20 AAU school and the honor's graduates of every blue blood state flagship from New York to California to Texas and throughout the Southeast had trouble with sentence structure, let alone grasping the concepts of paragraph construction. And we dare not even broach the subject of spelling.

I'd take a high school graduate from the 70's every day and twice on Sunday before I would hire the spoiled offspring of helicopter parents, who are children who have been given grades to abate their parents bitching and constant filing of complaints against teachers and principles. I'd take a high school graduate from the 70's who barely passed, came from a broken home, or a disenfranchised minority family because those kids expected nothing and felt they had to prove themselves. Now even the poor kids are entitled snowflakes who don't want to work, feel oppressed when it is expected, and claim abuse when they are corrected.

I don't know where you've been living but it isn't the same places I've been.

The school system today is an unmitigated cluster ****. But I knew that when my oldest daughter complained about the drug trafficking at her award winning drug free school. When I told the local chief of police about it he told me his hands were tied because the principle wouldn't let him on campus because 1 arrest would keep them from retaining the status of a drug free high school, which of course got them federal perks.

And that was back when they were actually still trying to teach a wee bit.

You do realize that the SAT and ACT test has been dumbed down and altered at least 4 times since the 60's? Most revisions were to atone for cultural bias. What a crock!

So I'll agree with you on social mores, most politics, but offering words of grace for a cesspool called public education, I just can't go there! And calling the new generation a better example of the educations system is something I have no confidence in whatsoever beyond the minority of very gifted people they are producing. As my Dad was found of calling them, they are $2 pistols. They won't work, can't be fired, and if you try to repair them they may blow up in your face. I wouldn't trust them to have the common morality to be law officers, teachers, or any other public servant, and I sure as hell wouldn't want them at my back in a combat situation.

The current morass in politics is being exacerbated by the woeful miscarriage of public education which is nothing more than a ruse for political indoctrination by the enemies of a free society.

Our family mantra is, "Stay away from stupid people. Stupid people get you killed!" Well Bullet the present public education system is the greatest purveyor of stupidity and ignorance in this nation's history. And it's because they teach so many lies with the truth that the poor kids don't have a chance. Instead of finding confidence in an education they find public acceptance for right think and right speak and that is then what they expect to be able to parrot back for success in life. It's appalling and I'll never accept it in any way until the ability to think, reason, and dig for the truth on your own replaces it.
12-16-2018 03:35 PM
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Post: #38
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-16-2018 09:12 AM)stinkfist Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




every bit of this in a capitalist system makes sense...

there's only one problem.....once you spoil the children, you can't resume sanity until the money runs out....and this country is chock full of spoiled motherfuckers....

the US is on an economic path to unsustainable "xyz".....and we've done it to ourselves in less than 100 years....

it's only a matter of when it crumbles at this point...there is a difference between real inflation and subsidized inflation....and we're doing a great job at promoting the latter...

#fragilebreakingpointhorizon

Grudgingly I know that your final assessment is probably correct. But as long as I have breath I will not capitulate to it! But when my time comes, I have the confidence of knowing that if my foes have been victorious, that all they have done is to seal their own fate as well, and there is at least a small solace knowing what they too must face. It is merely my children and grandchildren's futures I will mourn.
12-16-2018 03:46 PM
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mptnstr@44 Offline
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Post: #39
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-16-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:50 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:32 AM)bullet Wrote:  Obamacare attacked the wrong problem. Health insurance is not the problem. The cost of health care is the problem.

Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




I get tired of having to go for 3 tests I don't need in order to get the one I do need simply because the government insurance protocol says I have to have an ultrasound, before I can have an injection fraction test for a gall bladder in order to rule out a gall bladder I know is not giving me trouble before I can have a cat scan I know will prove inconclusive before they can finally clear my liver with an MRI.

If I had had a serious issue with my liver I might have been halfway dead a month later before I could have found out. Meanwhile back to Vet. If they suspect anything internal they rule out the worst first by doing the MRI first thing. You know things are screwed up when your pet gets better and more rational care!

As to Bullet's post below, yes the kids all got diplomas after no child left behind. But it was very apparent to the low end work force that they still lacked what were once average skills in communication, reading comprehension, and math when they entered the work force. It was like issuing a certificate of authenticity for a counterfeit jewel. It looks good, makes the counterfeit feel better, gets his/her parents of the back of the educators, but is apparent to those who take the product that it is still grossly inferior. That may be solution for bureaucrats, but it's not in the work place.

If you remember the 70s, you had a 50/50 chance of getting a cashier to give you the correct change. Now they actually know how to count. And kids today as a whole are better with verbal skills. The stuff they do in high school today is far advanced over what I did in the 70s and I went to one of the best public high schools in my state and was very well prepared for college. I think they actually push college prep too much and cause many to fail. Yes, there has been grade inflation, but the skills level and knowledge are higher.

Graduation rates have gone up since NCLB. Public schools aren't very efficient, but they are making serious efforts to solve problems in a lot of the inner city schools. Before NCLB and state efforts, they just ignored those schools. And they could ignore poor students. They could just focus on the top students and not be measured on the bottom students. The teachers' unions hate metrics, which tells you just how important it is that NCLB forced the use of them. And I have a special needs child and see how difficult it can be even with NCLB. Warehousing kids and spitting them out when they reach 18 was a failure for the kids and for the economy. The path of least resistance for the bureaucracy called public schools is no longer to ignore the challenging students.

No they don't. Most of the cashiers today can't make change without a calculator or cash register because they can't do math in their head.

It's also a huge problem for today's college student to be able to write complete sentences not fragments, identify parts of speech, and spell correctly (they've grown up using the shorthand that has developed from text messaging).
12-16-2018 04:01 PM
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mptnstr@44 Offline
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Posts: 11,047
Joined: Aug 2011
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I Root For: Nati Bearcats
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Post: #40
RE: Obamacare unconstitutional
(12-16-2018 03:35 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-16-2018 10:28 AM)bullet Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 10:50 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 06:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  
(12-15-2018 04:26 PM)JRsec Wrote:  Yes and no. Yes he attacked the wrong problem and no cost is not the whole problem but rather the result of the problem.

The problem is that because insurance plans basically set a national average acceptable average cost for a procedure and then pays a high % of the cost billed, the doctors/hospitals don't make the bill for the actual charge, but rather the actual charge inflated by what they know the insurance company's percentage is.

And here is where it goes foul. People without insurance once were just charged actual costs. Those folks have been wiped out by the bill inflation game between the insurance companies and the doctor/hospital. The latter inflates, and the insurance company lowers the % they will pay and the cycle repeats.

Insurance companies don't mind this because it drives up the public's understanding of the need of insurance which profits them. The hospitals and doctors just continue to play the game. But what the ACA actually did by mandating insurance was to make those without it criminally liable which lessened the hospitals responsibility for treating the indigent. 20 years ago nobody would have been refused care at an ER for inability to pay. Hospitals wrote off indigent care against profits for tax purposes, and likewise Doctors did the same for their services. Now that the sick indigent person is liable by law for insurance the burden of their care falls more upon them. Thankfully most hospitals still treat the indigent, but it may be legally argued now that by doing so they are abetting a law breaker (the one without mandated government sponsored healthcare).

The real problem Bullet is that most of the poor can't afford the ACA. The monthly costs were initially around $750 a month when these people didn't bring home $1500 for the same time frame. Minimum wage jobs for employer refusing to allow 40 hours a week which help them dodge the requirement to furnish benefits, means that most of these folks have to give to the ACA 1/2 or more of their disposable monthly income. They simply can't afford it!

But this kind of cluster*&^% is exactly what you get when government gets involved. Overshight of insurance companies permit the % payout, the hospitals and doctors respond with inflation. The law requires them to bill the uninsured the same way as they bill the insurance companies or they can be charged with fraudulent billing, and ultimately the poor get priced out of health care altogether and a high minimum, age specific, government backed program hoses them even more by penalizing them if they don't have it, and charging them half of what they make if they do have it.

Oddly enough pets are now being affected the same way. With the advent of Pet Care Insurance the prices at the Vet have gone way way up. A cat with a simple respiratory infection cost us $450 because that was the inflated charge so the Vet could collect from pet owners with insurance their usual rates adjusted by %.

I told my wife no more pets for us when these beloved kitties are gone. You can't afford the Pet care bills. Our neighbors cat developed a cyst in her bladder. The diagnosis and treatment was $2700. My dad would have come home and told us that kitty died! But that's the perfect microcosm explanation for what has happened in human medicine.

that's actually a relatively good take on what has been going on and the wrong way to fix it. Ronald Reagan warned against government involvement in insurance markets in this way back in the 1960s, but few listened. He was arguing against Medicare and warned that it would eventually lead to this kind of nonsense, which it has.

Insurance is supposed to be just that- a way to protect yourself from catastrophic loss in the event of a major disease or illness. It was never supposed to be conflated with normal health maintenance expenses like common cold, pap smears, etc.. Further, Bush II's ridiculous expansion of Medicare for prescribed drugs was a HUUUGE mistake, and made the problem from bad to worse. Most people don't need any of the dozens of medications they are being prescribed. Allowing drug manufacturers to advertise basically unregulated to consumers is also a hugely bad idea and has created artificial demand for drugs most people do not need.

The main solution is to return healthcare to a fee-for-services based idea,get rid of the free drugs programs and Medicare as it exists, allow free markets for providers/hospitals, clinics and let the MARKET decide how many there should be instead of artificially limiting it and to separate out insurance for covering limited catastrophic costs and forbid insurance plans from covering regular healthcare costs at all. Prices will drop like a rock back down to normal market levels. Doctors would be forced to charge reasonable prices that the market could bear of risk going out of business like any other normal businessperson providing a service.

Doctors are not magicians, they are mere service providers not much different from plumbers, heating and air and auto repairmen--they are mostly only brilliant in their actual field of specialty (and many are not even smart in that), but have been wrongly conflated to be "business geniuses" and "experts" because they have the protected, government mandated (by Medicare, which Reagan warned us about) price-fixing structure that negatively skews the market. Give auto mechanics the same government-mandated protected negative market influencing and all of a sudden you'll see your local grease-monkey being elevated to "genius" status the way people wrongly do to physicians.




I get tired of having to go for 3 tests I don't need in order to get the one I do need simply because the government insurance protocol says I have to have an ultrasound, before I can have an injection fraction test for a gall bladder in order to rule out a gall bladder I know is not giving me trouble before I can have a cat scan I know will prove inconclusive before they can finally clear my liver with an MRI.

If I had had a serious issue with my liver I might have been halfway dead a month later before I could have found out. Meanwhile back to Vet. If they suspect anything internal they rule out the worst first by doing the MRI first thing. You know things are screwed up when your pet gets better and more rational care!

As to Bullet's post below, yes the kids all got diplomas after no child left behind. But it was very apparent to the low end work force that they still lacked what were once average skills in communication, reading comprehension, and math when they entered the work force. It was like issuing a certificate of authenticity for a counterfeit jewel. It looks good, makes the counterfeit feel better, gets his/her parents of the back of the educators, but is apparent to those who take the product that it is still grossly inferior. That may be solution for bureaucrats, but it's not in the work place.

If you remember the 70s, you had a 50/50 chance of getting a cashier to give you the correct change. Now they actually know how to count. And kids today as a whole are better with verbal skills. The stuff they do in high school today is far advanced over what I did in the 70s and I went to one of the best public high schools in my state and was very well prepared for college. I think they actually push college prep too much and cause many to fail. Yes, there has been grade inflation, but the skills level and knowledge are higher.

Graduation rates have gone up since NCLB. Public schools aren't very efficient, but they are making serious efforts to solve problems in a lot of the inner city schools. Before NCLB and state efforts, they just ignored those schools. And they could ignore poor students. They could just focus on the top students and not be measured on the bottom students. The teachers' unions hate metrics, which tells you just how important it is that NCLB forced the use of them. And I have a special needs child and see how difficult it can be even with NCLB. Warehousing kids and spitting them out when they reach 18 was a failure for the kids and for the economy. The path of least resistance for the bureaucracy called public schools is no longer to ignore the challenging students.

Bullet, I never received incorrect change in the 70's. But it happens all of the time now, and in a college town.

Look, I graded graduate papers at a top 20 AAU school and the honor's graduates of every blue blood state flagship from New York to California to Texas and throughout the Southeast had trouble with sentence structure, let alone grasping the concepts of paragraph construction. And we dare not even broach the subject of spelling.

I'd take a high school graduate from the 70's every day and twice on Sunday before I would hire the spoiled offspring of helicopter parents, who are children who have been given grades to abate their parents bitching and constant filing of complaints against teachers and principles. I'd take a high school graduate from the 70's who barely passed, came from a broken home, or a disenfranchised minority family because those kids expected nothing and felt they had to prove themselves. Now even the poor kids are entitled snowflakes who don't want to work, feel oppressed when it is expected, and claim abuse when they are corrected.

I don't know where you've been living but it isn't the same places I've been.

The school system today is an unmitigated cluster ****. But I knew that when my oldest daughter complained about the drug trafficking at her award winning drug free school. When I told the local chief of police about it he told me his hands were tied because the principle wouldn't let him on campus because 1 arrest would keep them from retaining the status of a drug free high school, which of course got them federal perks.

And that was back when they were actually still trying to teach a wee bit.

You do realize that the SAT and ACT test has been dumbed down and altered at least 4 times since the 60's? Most revisions were to atone for cultural bias. What a crock!

So I'll agree with you on social mores, most politics, but offering words of grace for a cesspool called public education, I just can't go there! And calling the new generation a better example of the educations system is something I have no confidence in whatsoever beyond the minority of very gifted people they are producing. As my Dad was found of calling them, they are $2 pistols. They won't work, can't be fired, and if you try to repair them they may blow up in your face. I wouldn't trust them to have the common morality to be law officers, teachers, or any other public servant, and I sure as hell wouldn't want them at my back in a combat situation.

The current morass in politics is being exacerbated by the woeful miscarriage of public education which is nothing more than a ruse for political indoctrination by the enemies of a free society.

Our family mantra is, "Stay away from stupid people. Stupid people get you killed!" Well Bullet the present public education system is the greatest purveyor of stupidity and ignorance in this nation's history. And it's because they teach so many lies with the truth that the poor kids don't have a chance. Instead of finding confidence in an education they find public acceptance for right think and right speak and that is then what they expect to be able to parrot back for success in life. It's appalling and I'll never accept it in any way until the ability to think, reason, and dig for the truth on your own replaces it.

^Yes to al of this.

More on standardized testing...
Wonder why we have so many more students get perfect scores on the SAT and ACT now?

Perfect scores weren't unheard of but used to be rare not because the students were dumber…the tests were harder.

In 1997 0.00771% of test takers got a 36.
In 2011 that number climbed to 0.04337%.
12-16-2018 04:09 PM
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