OT: Health insurance

[Norminn]

I look at a loved pet two ways: the blessing of having had them, and the ability to truly love. Both are gifts.

[Kurt Ullman]

Affirmative action, as initially envisioned, only required people to go looking for minorities, etc. You could make the original law happy by going to (for instance) black colleges and universities looking to recruit people. It was only after the courts got involved that quotas, etc., were put in place.

[The Daring Dufas]

My older brother attended a seminary for training Catholic priests but he changed his mind when puberty hit and he got interested in girls. ^_^

TDD

[The Daring Dufas]

In the last few years, I've seen grown men cry when their dogs died or had to be put down. Last year, the little critter belonging to my late roommate adopted me before I could find a home for her. I was very ill and when I woke up, I found Sandy, a Red Deer Head Chihuahua curled up next to me under the blankets like a 4 legged hot water bottle keeping me warm. I can't get rid of her now since she claimed me. I imagine I'd be very upset if something happened to my little barking rat. I wasn't looking for a dog, one found me. ^_^

TDD

[The Daring Dufas]

The funniest 60 Minutes program episode I ever watched was about traditional Black universities recruiting White students and giving them full scholarships. When a group of very smart Black students were interviewed about the practice, they were very angry about the White students being given a free ride when they, the Black students had to work hard to get where they were and having to scrape up the money to attend college. The White students who got the scholarships were total morons who couldn't get into any other college because of their low grades. Oh the irony. ^_^

TDD

[Wes Groleau]

Hey, you want to counter the dingbats who think melanin is inversely proportional to intelligence, how better than to put some counter-examples in there?

Phil Donahue used to pull the same strategy. He'd get someone smart who agreed with him, and hunt up an imbecile to give "equal time" to the other side.

[Wes Groleau]

I do work in health care, and I do understand that like every human endeavor it has its share of idiots, liars, and thieves.

The fact that incentives for bad care abound doesn't make it true that

[Wes Groleau]

The third party cares. Whether due to greed, concern for the patient, or what, all of them try to keep costs down. Some do it by vigilance to prevent docs from the sort of abuse you describe. Others do it by ignorant denial of needed services. And the government does it by flat out paying peanuts.

[Ashton Crusher]

Those are just the state tax rate and without knowing how they assess value that data is useless. In AZ the Assessed value can be considerably LOWER then the actual value. So what's the setup in NY, is the tax applied to an arbitrary lower value, as in AZ or to the actual price the home would sell for? Those number also do not include all the special taxing districts, country tax, city tax, school tax, bonds and on and on. You need to compare the actual TOTAL property tax bill of a typical 2000 sf house in a typical NJ medium sized city to the same 2000 sf house in another state to get the real picture.

[Ashton Crusher]

You are exactly right. You are paying in property tax about twice what I pay for what sounds like a slightly less expensive house. And the deal with the politicians just setting the rate to get what they want is what they do in most places to set the tax rate - While people bit and moan over the fed income tax changing a couple percent they don;t even pay attention when the local city councils, county boards, and school districts raise tax RATES by double digits. My taxes on my house went up 15% in one years time. My income sure as hell didn't.

[Stormin Mormon]

Liberal logic: When companies choose to hire white people because of their race, it's racist. When the government mandates that companies hire black people because of their race, it's affirmaive action.

. Christ>

[Stormin Mormon]

Ah, that made my day. Thanks.

A white mind is a terrible thing to waste.

. Christ>

[Robert Green]

Just got an enormous and IMHO poorly planned survey from the USPS. Obviously geared to customer satisfaction there really wasn't anywhere to say "Everything's 100% OK with my delivery service EXCEPT when the regular letter carrier is away. Then it turns to crap." That's probably important for them to know, but I didn't see any questions among the dozens of questions covering the same subject in slightly different ways about it. Worse, still, the survey asked for numbers that couldn't possibly be anything but guesses from the respondent. Oh well.

For a while I was with a unit that designed surveys for DoD, many for the Council of Colonels. The most interesting results came in scrawled in cursive on the margins and even on the backs of the OCR forms (each of which we reviewed by hand). While I thought the "off-label" remarks described areas where our survey was deficient my boss thought the comments had to be studiously ignored, refusing to include them in the database of results. Reminds me of the lawyer who's asked "how much is two and two?" and responds "how much do you WANT it to be?"

[Robert Green]

What CAN we damn the whole profession for? It's an AHR tradition! (-:

[Robert Green]

"dadiOH" wrote in

Nature seems to deal those out every half century or so. It could be in the cards. I expect the problems in Egypt to get much, much worse. Iraq is descending into sectarian violence as well. The irony of us fighting the Islamacists is that they don't need our help at all. Sunnis and Shias will destroy each other - FREE! Why not let them?

The ratchet effect. It's very pervasive and as you point very difficult to overcome. I think it's why the D's realized they had to get something passed that had tangible benefits, like no lifetime limits and no refusal to take pre-existing conditions. While both are morally fine things to want, the reality on the ground about how to pay for such largesse is not quite so good. Those "gifts" require a huge pool of insured to spread the risk around sufficiently and that's the problem.

What I remember most is how concerned my *parents* were that I buy health insurance at a time in my life (early 20's) when I rarely saw a doctor and didn't feel the need to get it. Many kids still feel that way. That's why the "coat tailing" on a parent's insurance was also introduced with the ACA. Once people face losing these benefits, the hope is that they'll finally get behind the ACA. I am not sure those three items (no caps, no pre-existing limits and kids staying on their parent's policy) are enough to swing it. The law is an abomination of complexity.

Is major medical still available?

While this probably brands me a lib, I favor a basic level of care

*provided* by the state instead of the state doing what they did to you. We're paying for indigent and uninsured health care anyway. That's partly because of the emergency room visits that cause the uninsured to run up huge bills when some early treatment might have headed off the crisis. I also don't want the fry cook at Wendies to come to work with Lhassa fever (hyperbole alert!) and infect my entire community because he had no basic health care.

In defense of my liberal bent on *some* things, I have very conservative views on others. I often tell my liberals friends that I think that a woman should have to volunteer for a tubal ligation if she wants any government welfare support for her child. It horrifies them so much their panties wad up and get sucked way up into their colon. (-: My only indecision on that plan is whether you draw the line at the first baby or the second.

Haven't you heard the blood-curdling screams of the people who are going to be forced to buy health insurance under ACA or be penalized? (-: I agree with your sentiments but that ship has sailed and universal healthcare is coming like a runaway freight train. The only question is who gets killed when it leaves the rails? Other countries (many of our allies) have done it without going bankrupt or creating a nation of slackers. When I saw a Wal-mart employee indoctrination form explaining how workers who weren't being given healthcare could apply form Medicaid, I knew "the fix was in."

However you and I can buy uninsured motorist coverage to protect ourselves against the dipwads that drive without insurance. How do we handle the dipwads who don't believe they need health insurance and end up going on SSDI, SSI or Medicaid when they finally get their first major heart attack and need expensive medical care? Short of FOAD, that is. (-:

Someone in this thread mentioned whether a smoker should get a new government purchased lung and that go me to thinking. We could apportion levels of care based on good citizenship. If you ever got arrested for drunk driving, no liver transplant for you. Busted for heroin? No heart transplant. That might even create an incentive for better behavior (though I doubt it). Drive drunk and you're going to hospice when your liver fails from cirrhosis, not to the transplant wing. I would sanction that far sooner than FOAD. (-:

We bail out the investment banks, we spend blood and treasure fighting the enemies of our allies - the moral hazards are already in place across the board. If American tax dollars are going to be spent, I'd prefer they be spent on Americans and American infrastructure and not payoffs to foreign banks or "free military care" for sick nations all over the world.

[Norminn]

I did stand-in mothering for my grandson last week when he had four wisdom teeth pulled under general anes. He is a cell-phone devotee, and his last words prior to procedure were, "I'm glad grandpa isn't here taking my picture." 45 min. later, my precious zombie is trying to wake up, ice pack wrapped around his head, and his eyes kind of rolling around when he tries to open them. At the moment, I had custody of HIS cell phone and decided there was nothing wrong with taking a picture of his brief goofiness with HIS phone...snapped a couple of good pix, and he reached over, took the phone, set the camera to "video" and told me to take a video.....so I did an on camera interview while he was still very groggy. Good stuff!

So, anyway, the point of this rambling is that I also dogsat for his Schnauzer....little Fritz stayed in attendance with my grandson all day while he slept off the anes./meds. Our Schnauzers have all been good nurses and babysitters....they know if we are in bed during the day they need to check often.

Be glad you don't have a cat....they like to jump onto your face when yer sleeping.

[Norminn]

Healthy people don't NEED to go to the doctor often. The sicker they are, the more they go, the more doc gets paid.

[Dan Espen]

I'm in NJ.

Same deal, house is assessed for a lot less than market value.

I understand the possible limitations of that chart. There are a lot of variables to consider.

There were a lot of sites with comparisons of state tax rates. Feel free to reference others if that one doesn't suit your viewpoint.

[Norminn]

Yay!! UHC is long overdue. The con/lib arguements will continue to echo as people slowly find out that they pay for healthcare from the right pocket or the left....pay higher prices for goods and services from companies (fewer and fewer) who insure their employees, pay higher taxes for M'care/M'caid, pay higher fees for your own care to docs/hospitals/med device makers so they can pick a number to hit you with and let the wealth trickle down. If you have no health care, wait till you are REALLY damn sick, take a $3K ambulance ride to the hospital for a $500K stay while they do their damndest to run a tab, give you an infection or the wrong med and possibly save your life.

[Kurt Ullman]

There was a person writing one of the financial self-help books who made (the very valid point) that the poor plan for next week whilst the rich plan for the next generation. I think this outlook is one of the major reasons (up to a point) that one is rich and another is poor (anoher wag noted that the first $100 million is hard, the second $100 million inevitable). There is ample evidence that this applies to healthcare as well. Many studies show that even those who have MCaid don't take advantage of the annual physicals, etc., available through the plan. They don't see any reason, don't think it is worth their while, etc. You can lead a person to healthcare, but you can't make them partake. Heck even among the middle class, many don't take advantage of these benefits.

Maybe something reversible so that she could reproduce again if she was off welfare for a certain amount of time (grin).