Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
112th Congress: Everybody's Angry At Everybody
Posts
Who fucking cares
Seriously
I've never seen anyone get so much shit for agreeing with someone
If a dude says "I see no evidence of unicorn rape, therefore the Anti-Unicorn Act of 2011 is pointless," the correct response is to nod, or say, "Okay," not "Fuck off you fucking mouthbreather, there are no fucking unicorns"
This kind of obnoxious self-indulgent self-righteous bullshit is why people are disengaged from the political process
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
So what you are saying Mr. President is that when people utilize the emergency room without any form of insurance or ability to pay it increases the health care costs of all of us? Oh good, when are you planning on doing something about the inflation the health care costs of illegal immigrants are imposing on all of us? Oh that is right, never.
Moreover good luck getting a mandate for citizens to purchase insurance from a private company or face penalties to pass constitutional muster. Yes yes, health insurance for all. Sadly health insurance does not guarantee health care. How do you expect to ration health care under your new plan? Oh, you don't you just expect doctors to poof into existence wanting to work longer hours, for less pay.
Sigh, at least both sides are equally retarded and will hopefully keep each other busy fighting over the idiot ball.
Steam PSN: DerWaffleMous Origin: DerWaffleMous Bnet: WaffleMous#1483
You're never going to stop riding that particular hobby horse, are you?
So... what's your plan? Turn the illegals away from the ER? Let them die on the sidewalk?
Canada has a 10th our population, Great Britain somewhere between a 5th and a 6th. Neither is a great example for a variety of reasons not the least of which differences in culture, differences in what the populous expects from it's government, what they will accept from their government, and differences in law. Canada, the UK, and the US all have problems with their various implementations of health care. Trying to "be like them" is a fools errand. Hell we cannot even get people to understand health insurance does not equate to health care.
At the core we have two competing ideologies, some want the government to take care of them from cradle to grave, others want the government to stay out of their lives as much as humanly possible. At the end of the day health care costs money, and paying for those costs is going to primarily impact the middle class. Taxing the rich is both non-viable giving the current political landscape, nor could you conceivably tax them "enough" to completely offset the costs. Even if you could the reality remains health insurance does not equal health care and no one is talking about how they wish to ration health care.
That is one option. Obviously since the president has a problem with people unable to pay for using the ER, and causing this to inflate costs to everyone I eagerly await to hear his solution. Unless it is only a bad thing for citizens to use the ER with no health insurance, and for everyone else it is perfectly ok.
You solution would be a boon to the economy however as we would need more people picking up bodies off the street, more coroners, and more undertakers. The only problem is that we still have the US government footing the bill. Oh well, I have not really heard anyone complaining about inflation in the cost of dying market.
Solution: Require people to have insurance.
New Problem: Certain groups won't have insurance because they aren't legal citizens.
Solution: We can worry about that when it becomes a real problem, just accomplishing the first part will drastically reduce the amount of uncompensated care that needs to be made up for. (I for one can see a few ways to fix this problem, but really, we need to stop not implementing a plan because it will only solve most of a problem and not all of it. Perfect is better than good, but good is better than nothing).
Solution: Find a way to integrate illegals into American society so they can be legal citizens instead of having to hide among the fringes out of fear of deportation
Well yes, I would be for this, I'm pretty much pro-immigration in a much larger way than anyone I've ever talked to about it. Or more realistically, I'd be totally okay with a small payroll tax to cover uninsured medical procedures (since illegals are pretty likely to still be paying that).
Except your solution is unlikely to pass constitutional muster, and your problem is not really the problem at all.
Problem: We have a limited amount of medical care we can provide, currently we ration it based on what you can afford and how good your insurance is.
Solution: Give everyone insurance!
Wait wont that mean that the people with better insurance are going to get better care. Well of course.
Won't it also mean that given that we currently have a shortage of doctors that the additional demand is going to cause further strain on the system? Of course but everyone will have insurance!
Won't that just mean that the best doctors will be even more demand and be able to pick and choose what insurance they do not take? Well yeah... but everyone will have insurance.
Won't the people currently with no, or terrible insurance just end up with the absolute bottom of the barrel worst possible cheapest insurance they can afford in order to avoid being penalized by the government? Insurance that will pay doctors the least for any procedure? Won't doctors, already able to pick and choose patients just decided not to treat patients without certain levels of insurance? So now you have a situation where people are paying for mandatory insurance, but because of their income level that insurance is so bad that no one takes it? ...Insurance!
The US Census Bureau (pdf) puts the number of uninsured at 45.6 million, of which 9.7 million are non-citizens (this includes legal non-citizens as well as illegal immigrants) (Table 6). Focussing on a relatively small subset of the uninsured (and one that is hard to find and collect data on) is not as efficient.
You are trying to solve a completely different problem than I am, we are arguing past each other, which isn't going to solve anything. I don't accept your premise that there is a shortage of medical care available that increasing the number of insured folk is going to exacerbate. People are going to the ER now, without insurance. Are you trying to tell me that they are going to go to the ER more if we give them insurance, and not take advantage of said insurance to get (cheaper, less work intensive for the doctors) preventative care instead?
We are not rationing emergency medical care, it is illegal to do so.
1. Reality sucks, but we are already running a shortage of doctors. Especially Primary Care ones who can make more money by becoming a specialist.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/06/news/doctor_shortage_healthcare.fortune/index.htm
2. Hmm I wonder what happened in Massachussets with their health insurance. Oh that is right, giving people insurance increased the usage rates of the ER. Yes I am telling you if you give people insurance they will to the ER which is open between the hours of 5pm and 9am as opposed to visiting their primary care physician who only has specific office hours and would require an appointment.
http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2010/07/04/emergency_room_visits_grow_in_mass/?rss_id=Boston.com+--+Health+news
3. When you show up to the ER and have to wait that is rationing. When the doctor only has 2 minutes to spend with you before he has to move on that is rationing. When your tests are inconclusive and you are sent home and told to come back if things get worse, yep that is rationing.
Yeah. That's a thing that happened.
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
Yes, it will. The U.S. has done things like this all the time.
The rest seems strawmany to me. Lots of those things can be solved by a reasoned examination and creation of a solution.
You are confusing Legislative with Judicial. I said constitutional muster, not congressional. Congress can, and has, passed any number of illegal laws. Hence why it will eventually end up before the Supreme Court and very likely be shot down.
Infact, reward illegal immigrants who come forward with the names of the companies that aren't paying for the healthcare (and I seem to remember a while ago there was an article about how a lot of them were filing various taxes to pit the IRS against immigration or something like that, counted as proof of intent to emigrate or something) and you go towards solving both problems at once. You get the money from illegal immigrants (and make those hiring them generate a paper trail) and reduce the number of companies willing to hire them because of the former and the fact there is now a greater incentive for their illegal workers to turn them in.
Not at all, you see the problems of our health care system still remain. Nothing has been resolved. All we have gained is a ton of problems as businesses respond to the new legislation, the loss of countless jobs, and in the end aside from political theater we are worse off than we were before.
My problem will not be solved until our elections stop becoming popularity contests, and we actually elect some people with brains to public office. Given the current crop of politicians I don't see that happening for quite some time.
This post means less than nothing. These are the kind of platitudes that one of the current crop of politicians would throw out while campaigning.
Except businesses are responding to the legislation because they cannot operate under the assumption the law will be struck down. People are being fired, especially if a small business is close to 50 employees, and we will be worse off than we were before due to having wasted so much time and effort on failed legislature.
If you feel my post is worthless, why bother responding to it at all?
Do you have any evidence that people are getting fired due to ACA? I'd think Fox would be all over it if it were happening...
The marginal cost of underwriting risk decreases the more people you add to the pool, so with a larger population we could have a better cheaper plan than either Canada or the UK. Where did you get that particular factoid anyway? It should be destroyed at the source. It's making people dumber.
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
This is an excellent question.
This is an excellent point. It goes to the heart of how insurance works: defrayed costs through shared financial risk, so buy-in from a larger segment of the population does indeed defray the costs for each participant more. It can't make the system perfect, but it does make it better. And you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
In any case, the source of our escalating healthcare costs can be attributed in part to illegal immigrants but -- much like the voter fraud discussion from a few pages back -- their negative contribution is barely statistically significant. As a society, we're currently at the point where $1 out of ever $10 spent on health care can be attributed to diabetes, and that number keeps going up. The source of the spiking premiums isn't the Mexicans coming across our borders, it's all of the food laced with high fructose corn syrup and other refined sugars which spike our glycemic indices every time we sit down for another meal to stuff our fat faces.
I have no idea where this came from but it's nothing more than an argument from American Exceptionalism. "We're special and even though UHC works in all those other countries, we need a special solution".
Obama actually talked about the problem of illegal immigrants during the discussion. I didn't find a video of it last night (haven't looked this morning) but there's a complete transcript of the Q&A here.
And uh. I'm not exactly sure what to say to you if you think that "teh illegals" are what we should worry about when it comes to rising health care costs. The problem of rising health care costs is much more complicated than that. This American Life did a two parter on the subject that I feel explains it fairly well.
As for 'Doctors poofing into existence,' we have these things called 'schools.'
#FreeScheck
#FreeSKFM
Thanks for posting this, by the way.
Octoparrot attacks: 12 + 5 = 17
a duck! attacks 3 + 2 = 6
Deebaser attacks 14 + 4 = 18
Detharin attacks 13 + 5 = 18
spool32 casts Protection from Healthcare Argument
ahhh, that's better.
It's the Special Snowflake argument. America is different. Solutions that work everywhere else can't work there!
It's become so standard from American anti-health care reform types it's become a Godwin's Law type thing.
This is actually the most realistic and cogent argument against healthcare reform: America is just too dumb for it
You understand what an ER is, right? And how people currently without insurance still get to, and do, use them, right?
So, we already have enough doctors to work on the uninsured people.
So, how does giving the people currently already being cared for within our system, how does giving them insurance mean they will no longer be able to get care?
THEY ARE ALREADY BEING CARED FOR. THERE ARE ALREADY ENOUGH DOCTORS TO COVER THEM. BECAUSE THEY ARE ALREADY BEING CARED FOR.
Giving them insurance doesn't somehow kill off a bunch of ER doctors and make everyone worse off.