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Lastly, I'm pretty sure this thread basically ended when me and Aestu agreed.

So... I guess we are making progress.

When you say things like this, it drives home others' perception of your views as driven by stupidity and ignorance. Defend your beliefs or shut the hell up.

The comparison I made (between great lawgivers in history, e.g., Moses, Lycurgus, Romulus and Jefferson) and Tuhl developed on (the recurrent inability of future generations to interpret those ideas in a constructive way and to instead resort to reactionary dogmatism) is valid unless you can prove otherwise.

If the best you can do is to respond with a "NO U"-type remark, then people naturally assume that, since you can't bring any facts or reasoning to the table, your beliefs must be driven by nothing more than brainwashing and mental laziness. Surely if there were more to what you believe, you'd share the facts and reasoning you can't seem to provide. No?

Which, of course, also contradicts the premise of your libertarian nonsense.
What business do you have expecting others to help themselves if you won't do the same?



Yes and no. I also agreed with Eturnal's overall perception of Obama as an incompetent president. But as with my agreement with you, believing the right thing for the wrong reason is less meritous than believing the wrong thing for the right reason.

By the same token, I have scant regard for the many morons in the OWS movement or that stupid blog React linked.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I'm going to start highlighting all my facetious remarks in a pretty color that reinforces my sarcasm.

You mail someone a box full of nothing but styrofoam pellets. They complain the box is full of nothing but styrofoam pellets, so next time, you dye all the pellets yellow, just to make sure they don't miss any of them.

Common sense would suggest that the problem is not the presence of styrofoam pellets but the absence of anything else.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different result.

Expecting an argument to be anything other than a complete waste of time is insane.

If something is entertaining, or something learned, or minds changed, or something was done productively, it wouldn't be.

But none of that happens.

So I've opted for my entertainment in cracking jokes or doing something productive in lieu of even being here.

-/-/-/-/-/-

I was thinking of pink , but yellow works too.

Druid: Meowth
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Just because you can't profit from debate or discussion and are too brittle to adjust your views in the face of new facts and information does not mean that no one else can.

The very constitutional system you are so quick to praise was arrived at by people arguing about shit. If discussion and debate were futile our way of life would not exist.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

If the fat people want to die, I don't see why this is a problem.

RETIRED.
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Mayonaise[/armory]
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Jerkonaise[/armory]

If they made bacon out of fat people, I would totally buy it.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about the decision. In my opinion, Roberts really stuck it to Obama hard. The court finally said there were some limits under the commerce clause, which is generally abused and stretched beyond all legitimate meaning. The constitutionality of the law now lay in the tax power of congress...which makes a lot of people look bad since they spouted all that "this ain't no tax" bullshit when they were attempting to pass this monstrosity. I think part of the reason Roberts allowed them to make the tax argument before the court was because the law was passed in the senate using reconciliation, which is (allegedly) only supposed to be used for a handful of purposes mostly relating to taxing/spending.

I think this is going to, or has done, a couple of things. For starters, it's made President Obama out to be either a liar or a fool. "It's not a tax," he told George Stephanopoulus...



...so either the President of the United States, who holds a law degree from a fairly prestigious school, doesn't know what a tax is, or he does and is lying. It doesn't look good.

It will probably impact the upcoming election. It's not popular, and with one party doing cartwheels and high-fives over it and the other promising to kill it with fire, I can only assume that if this remains a big issue until election day the "kill it with fire" party is going to do well. Now that Roberts has said this is a tax bill, that leaves it open for a republican-controlled house (which we already have) to change/destroy as they see fit. If enough people are pissed about this, even in the reliably blue states, they may end up with the votes to get it through the senate...or, and I can't wait to see the shit-fits if this happens, they may have enough of a majority to squeak it out of existence with the same sorry, underhanded bullshit reconciliation move that brought it to life in the first place. That assumes that the occupant of the White House changes, as well...which is still a possibility.

Some of you say this is a good thing, that it's "progress" or "moving forward." Sometimes progress is realizing you're going in the wrong direction and turning back the way you came. Our system has a lot of problems, but I don't think the ACA does anything to fix them, it just subsidizes them. High demand is part of our problem, but we've removed any real personal cost for choosing to seek medical care. There are too many people heading for a doctor's office when they have the sniffles, because it's only $10-$25 to get your doctor to tell you what any idiot should already know: you're sick, go the fuck to bed and enjoy your chicken noodle soup. You can pay $10-$20 out-of-pocket to monopolize 1/2 hour of a doctor's time. Part of the problem with this is that we allow only doctors to write prescriptions for things like anti-biotics, which a properly trained nurse or physician's assistant could prescribe.

Another part of the problem is that the government, though programs like Medicare and Medicaid, jack up costs for everyone else by telling providers what it's going to pay. Between the government paying 3/5-4/5 of what goods/services are worth and people who don't pay anything at all, that leaves a lot of money to make up for providers, and they make it up with little tricks like the infamous $12 Tylenol. I know this is, in part, an attempt to fix that, but I think a better answer would be for providers to develop a price for a particular good/service, and all payers, be they private individuals, insurance companies, or the government, should pay that cost.

The law also does nothing to reform any of the tort law that is driving up the cost of malpractice insurance. I guess that's not surprising considering how many lawyers are in congress, or how much many lawyer's groups toss at congress. I'd suggest some huge reforms to malpractice law including caps on damages, some basic rules of evidence for bringing a suit, and some sort of third party/government body with the power to review and settle most claims without the expense of a trial.

The only thing I really liked in the bill was that insurance companies can't just drop customers after years of service because they start getting sick and costing money.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

It's popular with basically everyone who has a pre-existing condition or a relative with one, as well as with everyone between the age of 21 and 26 who is unemployed but has parents with insurance (as well as their parents).

Between those two groups, you are talking about tens of millions of Americans. I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, just that in purely objective terms, the bill can't but be popular.



"Backwards" is "let people die".

You're also overlooking something very important.

Simple math: if per capita productivity grossly exceeds per capita consumption, full employment is mathematically impossible. And if full employment is mathematically impossible, so is privatized healthcare.

For reasons that have nothing to do with politics etc and everything to do with technology, working women, and the fact that the Third World now has industrial capacity and is no longer completely reliant on imports from the West for their needs, export/shortage-driven full employment is no longer mathematically possible even if we had a perfect trade balance.



I agree with this.



Why do you believe this?



This is false. Medicare and Medicaid have lower comps than private insurance, but their admin overhead is also a small fraction of private insurance. Public healthcare is simply more efficient.



Malpractice abuse is over-exaggerated. The burden of proof is high and so is the cost of bringing a suit. Doctors as a class have a vested interest in protecting the integrity of their profession. And doctors are typically well-off and therefore have the financial means to defend themselves against a suit. If a doctor is getting sued for malpractice, odds are it is because he did something very wrong.


Not quite. What the bill does is make it so means providers can't refuse to cover people because they have a pre-existing condition.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Let me try a different tack:

I think we both would agree that we find organized religion and conventional social mores wanting. Surely neither of us would feel much at home in a world where your only sexual partner in life is that who becomes your spouse, and where your local church is the font of all worldly and otherworldly wisdom. You would agree?

If there is one thing feminism and liberalism has done well, it is played devil's advocate, demonstrated the profound extent to which traditional values and religion brought some sense of order and moral direction to life, kept society stable. Something that would have no doubt otherwise been lost on you, me, and everyone else who never considered the alternatives. You would agree?

Yet change was inevitable. The romanticized world of "American Gothic", if it ever even really existed, is gone forever. Feminism or no, social change, changes in our way of life and ways of thinking, and also the way in which religion discredited itself through dogmatism and being flatly on the wrong side of many moral issues, doomed the traditional way of life. Again, you would agree?

Feminist-inspired ideas and the ridiculous pretense of quantitative and qualitative gender equality are clearly not viable social ideas. So - if traditional ideas aren't going to work, and neither are feminist ideas, clearly, we need a third alternative. Probably some sort of synthesis of the two doctrines, with some original elements. Agreed?

So now what does this have to do with medicine and economics?

The point I am making is that perhaps you should look at the free market and privatized medicine the same way. A system with a certain wisdom and effectiveness to it that, like traditional values, is self-obsolescent and breaks down past a certain point.

For purely mathematical reasons - excessively high productivity and economic surpluses, trying to keep boosting production and consumption ultimately reaching the sheer limits of human tolerance as well as supply of raw materials etc - the full employment that is/was the premise of the private healthcare system - how can you pay for it if you don't have a job? - doesn't work.

The point where the system breaks down is roughly where nominal per capita productivity exceeds nominal per capita consumption. GG power of the Internet + two wage-earner households at sending productivity through the roof.

When that point is reached, it is necessary to look for a new set of ideas. Some of those sets of ideas that are on the table - e.g., Stalinism, or corporate socialism - are clearly bad. As with feminism. But what is relevant, common to both examples, is that the need for a new system cannot be ignored. There is no turning the clock back without forfeiting everything that's been acquired along the way.

So as with post-feminist society, the question regarding our post-libertarian economy is: where do we go from here? How shall we live? According to what values should we define our way of life? What should we consider important?

Now for once, I don't claim to have all the answers. But the point I want to make here, Jubber, is that in both cases, the "answer" has to be a bit more cogent than "let's just pretend nothing has changed". New ideas are necessary. So I would ask you to contemplate what those ideas should be.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Very interesting article.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18713267

Sort the comments by "Highest Rated" and note the observations of the US immigrants, Germans and British. Do you notice who they usually blame - and who they never blame?

What do you think, Weena? Eturnal? Jubber?

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18699631

Again, top-rated comments are very interesting.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

So people who post here are brainwashed but people who post there are scholars and geniuses.