So ... who wants Obamacare to work like NHS in Britain?

contango · Jul 26, 2013

HonestTruth said:
~ move their operations offshore ~

Since there will be no more income taxes to pay for their machinery those who want war will have to pay for it themselves since the government won't have the money for it.

This sounds fine, except you were talking about taxing the very rich. The rich will make sure the taxes don't apply to them.

~ government to spend less time meddling and fiddling and leave me alone~

Good. That's why we need no wars and police to stop harassing people.

I wouldn't say we need no wars at all and the police should stop harassing people as a universal statement. We should only get involved in war if we, or those we have pledged to protect, face a genuine threat. Otherwise it inevitably turns into a political tool rather than a tool of self-defence.

The police should continue to harass criminals. It's just that the definition of "criminal" is perhaps a little too broad at the moment.

~ government-run welfare ~

Like you I also oppose it. But what bothers me is that the only objection to welfare that I see on this forum is welfare for the poor. I see virtually no objection to welfare for the rich. In fact I have seen some posts from people who are keen in maintaining a military presence in the Middle East which necessitates more taxes, more war, and more corporate welfarism that benefits the wealthy elites who never pay taxes.

I would like to see true conservatives in this forum stand up and say, get out of the Middle East, no more war, dissolve the military industrial complex, end corporate welfare. If they were true conservatives who applied their standards on a consistent basis they would demand no less.

Agree?

A lot of the time people do seem to focus on only one side of the equation. It annoys me when I see people who would gladly take the welfare away from a single mother but don't think twice about bailing out the banks, and it annoys me equally when I see people who would look to impose crippling taxes on "the rich" (a term that never seems to be defined) so more money can be handed out like candy.

What I see an awful lot of here is posturing that suggests that "conservatives" or "liberals" are an amorphous mass who all think the same way. It makes for easy cheap jibes at a political perspective, after all anyone who is "liberal" must vote Democrat and therefore give their full approval to every single thing every Democrat everywhere stands for (and likewise anyone who is "conservative" must be the same way where Republican ideas are concerned). In practise voting for a particular party doesn't mean you agree with everything they stand for, merely that on balance you prefer them to the other party.

If people spent more time looking at issues and less time taking cheap shots at their opponents based on "liberals eat babies" or "conservatives would sell their grandmother for a fast buck" or whatever other shock tactic is in fashion today we'd have a better chance of solving problems.

We'd also get a lot further if we could be more willing to accept that people who vote for the other party aren't automatically wrong on everything, and consider ideas on their merits rather than the perceived merits of the party that suggested the idea.

~ sounds fine in theory ~

The government can end tax shelters any time it wants. It had no trouble intruding into foreign countries in order to get what it perceived as an enemy in Saddam Hussein or in Manuel Noriega. Trust me, the Cayman Islands are in no position to stop the Marines if they were used to recapture any assets sent overseas.

So what gives the Marines the right to go into the Cayman Islands to capture assets? I thought you said you were against war. If a company is established and incorporated in the Cayman Islands it's nothing to do with the US, unless you want to specifically invade a foreign nation to steal their assets.

Stopping the corporate welfare state is easy. All it takes is a matter of political will. If conservatives were honest and had integrity or principle this is what they would demand.

It also takes a lot of public support. For all people are quick to decry the billions spent bailing out banks I wonder if they would have been willing to accept the economic pain associated with letting those banks fail. The trouble isn't liberals or conservatives as such, a large part of the problems facing us today is that so many people (of all political persuasions) want the benefits while expecting someone else to cover the costs.

HonestTruth · Jul 26, 2013

Jake Brake said:
I haven't heard of late any Health Insurance companies pitching a fit over Obama Care, maybe it is because they are getting some 30 million new and recurring clients. And at the doctor's office the other day, Doc said many doctors depend on MediCare to stay in business and when more citizens are insured more doctors will have much more business.

To me, this means that a boom in the Health Care industry is right around the corner.

It is well established that the medical profession was the # 1 lobbyist for health care reform.

HonestTruth · Jul 26, 2013

contango said:
This sounds fine, except you were talking about taxing the very rich. The rich will make sure the taxes don't apply to them.

I wouldn't say we need no wars at all and the police should stop harassing people as a universal statement. We should only get involved in war if we, or those we have pledged to protect, face a genuine threat. Otherwise it inevitably turns into a political tool rather than a tool of self-defence.

The police should continue to harass criminals. It's just that the definition of "criminal" is perhaps a little too broad at the moment.

A lot of the time people do seem to focus on only one side of the equation. It annoys me when I see people who would gladly take the welfare away from a single mother but don't think twice about bailing out the banks, and it annoys me equally when I see people who would look to impose crippling taxes on "the rich" (a term that never seems to be defined) so more money can be handed out like candy.

What I see an awful lot of here is posturing that suggests that "conservatives" or "liberals" are an amorphous mass who all think the same way. It makes for easy cheap jibes at a political perspective, after all anyone who is "liberal" must vote Democrat and therefore give their full approval to every single thing every Democrat everywhere stands for (and likewise anyone who is "conservative" must be the same way where Republican ideas are concerned). In practise voting for a particular party doesn't mean you agree with everything they stand for, merely that on balance you prefer them to the other party.

If people spent more time looking at issues and less time taking cheap shots at their opponents based on "liberals eat babies" or "conservatives would sell their grandmother for a fast buck" or whatever other shock tactic is in fashion today we'd have a better chance of solving problems.

We'd also get a lot further if we could be more willing to accept that people who vote for the other party aren't automatically wrong on everything, and consider ideas on their merits rather than the perceived merits of the party that suggested the idea.

So what gives the Marines the right to go into the Cayman Islands to capture assets? I thought you said you were against war. If a company is established and incorporated in the Cayman Islands it's nothing to do with the US, unless you want to specifically invade a foreign nation to steal their assets.

It also takes a lot of public support. For all people are quick to decry the billions spent bailing out banks I wonder if they would have been willing to accept the economic pain associated with letting those banks fail. The trouble isn't liberals or conservatives as such, a large part of the problems facing us today is that so many people (of all political persuasions) want the benefits while expecting someone else to cover the costs.

~ rich ~

We all know the story about the camel and the eye of a needle.

Unfortunately, too many right wingers forget their Christian beliefs and defend the elite's right to hoard the public wealth for themselves with help from the pols.

~ genuine threat ~

Vietnamese, Afghans, Iraqis never posed a single threat to any of us. Yet these wars have cost us thousands of lives and about $2 trillion. No need for these wars or anything like them.

~ police "harass" criminals ~

Government has no right to harass anyone. It must deal justly with all. As it says in the Bible, there must first be justice in order for peace to prevail in a society.

~ conservative v liberals (and vice versa) ~

We all have a tendency to group people into one (I often succumb to this fault as well) too often. But the true value of a forum like this is where we can clarify our views so that hopefully some can glean some good from it all.

~ Marines ~

If the government can send them into Panama or Iraq under false pretenses it can do so under real circumstances as well. I much prefer the use of legal remedies.

~ covering costs ~

The famous Harvard study which proved thousands died every year from lack of health care shows that far too many are willing to see others die in order to keep taxes lower. Remember Ron Paul's friends screaming out ''LET HIM DIE!'' What they fail to see is the loss of productivity, the loss of tax revenues lost due to lost man hours, and the added social welfare costs of having sick people who would have been productive if they had gotten proper health care and prevention.

See my earlier post about "the face of Obamacare". People's lives have already been saved because of it. Therefore, rather than defunding the program, we need to uphold it and build it up because this is not welfare but is a program that benefits society just like it does in Europe, Canada, Japan, and Israel.

NightHawkeye · Jul 26, 2013

HonestTruth said:
We all know the story about the camel and the eye of a needle.

Unfortunately, too many right wingers forget their Christian beliefs and defend the elite's right to hoard the public wealth for themselves with help from the pols.

Hi, HonestTruth. :wave:

I didn't know we had so much in common. Start here:

End up here:

Here's some of what the Fed has done ...

... by taking just a little bit at a time. ^_^

HonestTruth said:
Government has no right to harass anyone. It must deal justly with all. As it says in the Bible, there must first be justice in order for peace to prevail in a society.

Agreed ... so you're on board with this, too?

Good job, HonestTruth.

HonestTruth said:
We all have a tendency to group people into one (I often succumb to this fault as well) too often. But the true value of a forum like this is where we can clarify our views so that hopefully some can glean some good from it all.

HonestTruth said:
The famous Harvard study which proved thousands died every year from lack of health care shows that far too many are willing to see others die in order to keep taxes lower. Remember Ron Paul's friends screaming out ''LET HIM DIE!'' What they fail to see is the loss of productivity, the loss of tax revenues lost due to lost man hours, and the added social welfare costs of having sick people who would have been productive if they had gotten proper health care and prevention.

Like most studies, it offered a glimpse at what could be ... but no solution to achieve that vision.

HonestTruth said:
See my earlier post about "the face of Obamacare". People's lives have already been saved because of it. Therefore, rather than defunding the program, we need to uphold it and build it up because this is not welfare but is a program that benefits society just like it does in Europe, Canada, Japan, and Israel.

Ummh ... No.

Even Obama knows the employer mandate is unworkable.

One wonders if there are any parts of Obamacare worth salvaging.

contango · Jul 26, 2013

HonestTruth said:
~ rich ~

We all know the story about the camel and the eye of a needle.

Unfortunately, too many right wingers forget their Christian beliefs and defend the elite's right to hoard the public wealth for themselves with help from the pols.

So why do you fuss over what some vaguely defined right wingers are doing? Why not focus on what you are doing for the people who want to care about?

Don't you worship the God who fed 5000 men with the contents of one child's lunchbox? Don't you think that same God can work miracles with whatever you freely offer, however meagre that might seem?

Whatever "the elite" are doing, leave them to it. Otherwise all you have is impotent rage when you could have productive love.

~ genuine threat ~

Vietnamese, Afghans, Iraqis never posed a single threat to any of us. Yet these wars have cost us thousands of lives and about $2 trillion. No need for these wars or anything like them.

No arguments here. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, other than some politicians in the past have made some very poor decisions. Is this really a surprise?

~ police "harass" criminals ~

Government has no right to harass anyone. It must deal justly with all. As it says in the Bible, there must first be justice in order for peace to prevail in a society.

I don't have a problem with the police giving people like burglars, rapists and murderers a hard time. I'd rather they went after people like burglars and rapists than small children who didn't have the appropriate permit for their lemonade stand.

~ conservative v liberals (and vice versa) ~

We all have a tendency to group people into one (I often succumb to this fault as well) too often. But the true value of a forum like this is where we can clarify our views so that hopefully some can glean some good from it all.

Which is great, as long as we're listening to what others are saying rather than seeing the political party logo under their profile and assuming that because they are liberal/conservative/green/whatever they obviously know nothing and aren't worth listening to.

~ Marines ~

If the government can send them into Panama or Iraq under false pretenses it can do so under real circumstances as well. I much prefer the use of legal remedies.

What real circumstances would they be? Don't you think anyone shifting money into the Cayman Islands would do so under the auspices of doing business, such that the money became the legal property of the company set up in the Cayman Islands? So if you want to send in the marines you've got two problems now. Firstly you're wanting an end to war and achieving it by sending the marines to invade another sovereign state. Then you want to plunder the assets of that sovereign state.

~ covering costs ~

The famous Harvard study which proved thousands died every year from lack of health care shows that far too many are willing to see others die in order to keep taxes lower. Remember Ron Paul's friends screaming out ''LET HIM DIE!'' What they fail to see is the loss of productivity, the loss of tax revenues lost due to lost man hours, and the added social welfare costs of having sick people who would have been productive if they had gotten proper health care and prevention.

Sure, somewhere between an all-encompassing system that will give you an aspirin for your headache after an all-night drinking binge, and a system that shrugs and leaves you to die I'm sure there is a happy medium that doesn't cost the earth and doesn't just figure some folks just can't afford to be kept alive.

See my earlier post about "the face of Obamacare". People's lives have already been saved because of it. Therefore, rather than defunding the program, we need to uphold it and build it up because this is not welfare but is a program that benefits society just like it does in Europe, Canada, Japan, and Israel.

The eternal question with any form of healthcare, however it is funded, is where lines need to be drawn. There is only so much money to be allocated, whether it comes from taxpayers or insurance premiums or wherever else, and sooner or later the decision has to be made that one treatment can be justified while another cannot. Which works well enough as long as the treatment you need is the one that is justified.

It may benefit society but as with everything else most benefits come with a price tag of some form so the question isn't so much whether it benefits society or not but whether the price tag is acceptable for the benefits on offer. And there lies the thorniest issue of all - it's easy to throw around lines like "what value do you put on a life?", although most of us would value the lives of our own family members much more highly than the lives of complete strangers. If we're expecting a bottomless pit of money to keep Granny going another couple of years, at what point do we draw the line and say the treatments just aren't worth it any more? Would $1000 be a fair price to keep her alive for another year? What about $10,000? $100,000? $1 million? At some point the decision has to be made that the price is too great for the benefit. A lot of the time it seems the primary difference between a lot of healthcare schemes is who makes that decision.

HonestTruth · Jul 26, 2013

NightHawkeye said:
Hi, HonestTruth.

I didn't know we had so much in common. Start here:

End up here:

Here's some of what the Fed has done ...

... by taking just a little bit at a time.

Agreed ... so you're on board with this, too?

Good job, HonestTruth.

Like most studies, it offered a glimpse at what could be ... but no solution to achieve that vision.

Ummh ... No.

Even Obama knows the employer mandate is unworkable.

One wonders if there are any parts of Obamacare worth salvaging.

Hey Hawk,

~ so much in common ~

Well some things are just common sense so that is why despite differences many here can and do have agreements along the way.

Want to abolish Federal agencies? Sure - but let's pay off the deficit before we begin. As for which those agencies will be, start with the military industrial complex as that is what takes up the biggest chunk of the Federal budget. Gradually we can eliminate or significantly reduce the others.

~ strengthen the dollar ~

I'm with you there 100%. But the key is to call back all the capital that is sheltered overseas in tax free accounts. Then we can stop churning out greenbacks which have inflated values. No need for fiat when we have the real thing in hand.

~ employer mandate is "unworkable" ~

This is a message repeated by the Tea Party and its sponsors in Fox and by the Koch brothers. But it is incorrect as it works in every other country on earth as I have previously shown.

I have also posted a link to proof that insurance premiums are going downwards and evidence from the medical profession which endorses Obamacare. You may not like it but the evidence is quite contrary to your beliefs. And yes, lives have already been saved thanks to the little (too little in my mind) reform that has been made. Try putting a price tag on that.

Yes, there are common sense solutions to the problems we face in this society. All we need do is to set aside whatever partisan differences we may have and to compare our experiences with those overseas with reason and logic. Some say HCR is not wanted here or is unaffordable. Yet, many of those same critics see it working each and every day in Canada, Europe, Japan, and in Israel which has a system paid for by USA dollars. It is a total defiance of logic and common sense to say that it can only work overseas and not work here. Especially when it is YOUR tax dollars that enabled Europe and Israel to have their system which works so well.

Does it cost a lot of money? Sure it does. But so does the deaths of 45,000 per year and an innumerable amount of people who become disabled due to lack of health care. Again, try to quantify the loss of human lives or loss of man-hours with their productivity. That loss in total dollars is incalculable.

Now ask yourself why don't the Tea Party members or its defenders even attempt to quantify that. This is a question I have posted on numerous websites. To this day, not one Tea Party member has dared to try to answer it.

HonestTruth · Jul 26, 2013

contango said:
So why do you fuss over what some vaguely defined right wingers are doing? Why not focus on what you are doing for the people who want to care about?

Don't you worship the God who fed 5000 men with the contents of one child's lunchbox? Don't you think that same God can work miracles with whatever you freely offer, however meagre that might seem?

Whatever "the elite" are doing, leave them to it. Otherwise all you have is impotent rage when you could have productive love.

No arguments here. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, other than some politicians in the past have made some very poor decisions. Is this really a surprise?

I don't have a problem with the police giving people like burglars, rapists and murderers a hard time. I'd rather they went after people like burglars and rapists than small children who didn't have the appropriate permit for their lemonade stand.

Which is great, as long as we're listening to what others are saying rather than seeing the political party logo under their profile and assuming that because they are liberal/conservative/green/whatever they obviously know nothing and aren't worth listening to.

What real circumstances would they be? Don't you think anyone shifting money into the Cayman Islands would do so under the auspices of doing business, such that the money became the legal property of the company set up in the Cayman Islands? So if you want to send in the marines you've got two problems now. Firstly you're wanting an end to war and achieving it by sending the marines to invade another sovereign state. Then you want to plunder the assets of that sovereign state.

Sure, somewhere between an all-encompassing system that will give you an aspirin for your headache after an all-night drinking binge, and a system that shrugs and leaves you to die I'm sure there is a happy medium that doesn't cost the earth and doesn't just figure some folks just can't afford to be kept alive.

The eternal question with any form of healthcare, however it is funded, is where lines need to be drawn. There is only so much money to be allocated, whether it comes from taxpayers or insurance premiums or wherever else, and sooner or later the decision has to be made that one treatment can be justified while another cannot. Which works well enough as long as the treatment you need is the one that is justified.

It may benefit society but as with everything else most benefits come with a price tag of some form so the question isn't so much whether it benefits society or not but whether the price tag is acceptable for the benefits on offer. And there lies the thorniest issue of all - it's easy to throw around lines like "what value do you put on a life?", although most of us would value the lives of our own family members much more highly than the lives of complete strangers. If we're expecting a bottomless pit of money to keep Granny going another couple of years, at what point do we draw the line and say the treatments just aren't worth it any more? Would $1000 be a fair price to keep her alive for another year? What about $10,000? $100,000? $1 million? At some point the decision has to be made that the price is too great for the benefit. A lot of the time it seems the primary difference between a lot of healthcare schemes is who makes that decision.

Some of what you posed there is way out of left field and other comments have already been addressed to Hawk.

~ God can work miracles ~

On other doctrinal related threads the subject of the poor and the consequences of social injustices have been addressed. A fair reading of the Bible, especially the New Testament, gives you lessons on what we as a society need to do to deal with the poor. One thing's for sure - a society that enriches the wealthy at the expense of the poor is one doomed to perdition. See especially the Book of Amos. You talk about rage, see what God will do when his rage is provoked as the poor suffer due to the enrichment of the elites.

~ police ~

Give them a free hand and you might as well do the same to the IRS and NSA. But that would be applying a double standard and nobody who thinks logically and rationally wants that.

~ health care ... value ~

I addressed that issue to Hawk.

Jake Brake · Jul 26, 2013

HonestTruth said:
It is well established that the medical profession was the # 1 lobbyist for health care reform.

ok, so AARP & AMA supported ObamaCare. And Insurance companies, Big PharMa and Chamber of Commerce rallied against it.

Today, I haven't heard much from the Insurance companies complaining about it, why so? Also, looks like the Pharmaceuticals are liking it also.

Besides the Republicans, who are today's biggest complainers?

If it ever becomes a single-payer maybe then I'll hear some more complaints, until then I hope your State has ObamaCare Exchange, looks like it went over well in New York and Maryland.

contango · Jul 27, 2013

HonestTruth said:
Some of what you posed there is way out of left field and other comments have already been addressed to Hawk.

~ God can work miracles ~

On other doctrinal related threads the subject of the poor and the consequences of social injustices have been addressed. A fair reading of the Bible, especially the New Testament, gives you lessons on what we as a society need to do to deal with the poor. One thing's for sure - a society that enriches the wealthy at the expense of the poor is one doomed to perdition. See especially the Book of Amos. You talk about rage, see what God will do when his rage is provoked as the poor suffer due to the enrichment of the elites.

The point is you can't do anything about the elites. What you can do is steward the things God has entrusted to you in a way that honours God. When it comes to judgement day do you think God is going to be interested in excuses why you (or I, or anyone else) didn't do anything to help the poor all around us because we were waiting for someone else to do it? We just let them starve because we were too busy fighting to force someone else to pay to feed them, when we could have fed them ourselves? Remember the story of the widow's mite.

God can work miracles if we only trust him a little. The child who surrendered his dinner to Jesus fed the 5000 men (with presumably extra woman and children on top of that). When God calls us to do something we need to do it, not come up with lots of fine-sounding reasons why someone else is better placed than we are. Of course the people who have a net worth running to ten figures or more are better placed to help the poor than we are and, like us, they will answer for their decisions when they face judgement. In the meantime we are tasked to be good stewards of what God has given us. Do we really want to be like the servant in the parable who took his one talent and merely buried it in the ground?

~ police ~

Give them a free hand and you might as well do the same to the IRS and NSA. But that would be applying a double standard and nobody who thinks logically and rationally wants that.

I think you're misrepresenting me here. I don't want the police to have freedom to just cause trouble to anyone. I do want the police to have the powers that are required to deal with those who break the laws, and along the way I want the laws massively simplified.

~ health care ... value ~

I addressed that issue to Hawk.

You asked a few rhetorical questions about the value of a life, but the brutal reality is that any healthcare system, however funded, must put a value on human life and human suffering. Money that might be spent to cure a child so that they can live a full life might not be spent on an octagenarian who, statistically speaking, has had their allotment of life already. It's easy to use emotive questions like "what value do you put on a child's life?" but the appeal to emotion fails when you flip the question around and ask how many other children must die due to lack of funding so that this one can live. Even if you were to claw back however many trillions of dollars you want to point at and use every single one of them to fund healthcare, sooner or later you would run out of dollars and the questions would come back to the fore again, except by then people would be used to having every treatment under the sun paid for and would be up in arms that they couldn't be treated any more.

If you've got two patients (let's call them A and B for simplicity), and A has kidney failure and B has cancer. Both need treatment that will cost in the region of $500,000 but there's only $700,000 available. Which do you treat? If you treat the one who has paid more into the system you've merely traded one payment-based system for another. If you treat the one who has paid less into the system you've created a system where you pay into the system for your entire working life and then it abandons you when you need it. And that's just the beginning of the consideration over who gets first dibs on a fund that won't cover everybody. Do you treat the younger patient, on the basis they will hopefully have more life ahead of them? Or the one who is better educated, on the basis they will hopefully pay more taxes if they survive? If a system is politicised, what if one patient has been a major party donor? We can appeal to emotion all we want but ultimately someone has to make decisions that literally relate to life and death.

TemperateSeaIsland · Jul 27, 2013

Don't American hospitals have managers who are in charge of their running?

HonestTruth · Jul 27, 2013

contango said:
The point is you can't do anything about the elites. What you can do is steward the things God has entrusted to you in a way that honours God. When it comes to judgement day do you think God is going to be interested in excuses why you (or I, or anyone else) didn't do anything to help the poor all around us because we were waiting for someone else to do it? We just let them starve because we were too busy fighting to force someone else to pay to feed them, when we could have fed them ourselves? Remember the story of the widow's mite.

God can work miracles if we only trust him a little. The child who surrendered his dinner to Jesus fed the 5000 men (with presumably extra woman and children on top of that). When God calls us to do something we need to do it, not come up with lots of fine-sounding reasons why someone else is better placed than we are. Of course the people who have a net worth running to ten figures or more are better placed to help the poor than we are and, like us, they will answer for their decisions when they face judgement. In the meantime we are tasked to be good stewards of what God has given us. Do we really want to be like the servant in the parable who took his one talent and merely buried it in the ground?

I think you're misrepresenting me here. I don't want the police to have freedom to just cause trouble to anyone. I do want the police to have the powers that are required to deal with those who break the laws, and along the way I want the laws massively simplified.

You asked a few rhetorical questions about the value of a life, but the brutal reality is that any healthcare system, however funded, must put a value on human life and human suffering. Money that might be spent to cure a child so that they can live a full life might not be spent on an octagenarian who, statistically speaking, has had their allotment of life already. It's easy to use emotive questions like "what value do you put on a child's life?" but the appeal to emotion fails when you flip the question around and ask how many other children must die due to lack of funding so that this one can live. Even if you were to claw back however many trillions of dollars you want to point at and use every single one of them to fund healthcare, sooner or later you would run out of dollars and the questions would come back to the fore again, except by then people would be used to having every treatment under the sun paid for and would be up in arms that they couldn't be treated any more.

If you've got two patients (let's call them A and B for simplicity), and A has kidney failure and B has cancer. Both need treatment that will cost in the region of $500,000 but there's only $700,000 available. Which do you treat? If you treat the one who has paid more into the system you've merely traded one payment-based system for another. If you treat the one who has paid less into the system you've created a system where you pay into the system for your entire working life and then it abandons you when you need it. And that's just the beginning of the consideration over who gets first dibs on a fund that won't cover everybody. Do you treat the younger patient, on the basis they will hopefully have more life ahead of them? Or the one who is better educated, on the basis they will hopefully pay more taxes if they survive? If a system is politicised, what if one patient has been a major party donor? We can appeal to emotion all we want but ultimately someone has to make decisions that literally relate to life and death.

~ you can't do anything about the elites ~

Yes you can. Bill Clinton increased taxes and the Republican created deficit was ended.

There is nothing today that can stop this from happening again if people would just wake up and realize that it is the wealth elites who are screwing this country. We need the same equitable tax system that we used to have and to end all tax shelters. It was done in the past, it can EASILY be done today.

~ God can work miracles if we only trust him a little. ~

More people in America go to church every Sunday than in any other country on earth. The USA is the most Christian nation anywhere.

But as shown in the Bible (see my post on the Book of Amos) God will destroy a nation that enriches the wealthy and impoverishes the poor. When people wake up and practice REAL Christianity rather than right wing influenced television evangelism then we will benefit from miracles which will make this a better a nation.

~ the value of a life ~

You fail to answer my question again and again: if you as a taxpayer are willing to finance Israel's health care system which you do each and every year (also remember that the Marshall Plan which your parents and mine paid for created the present Europe health care reform system), how do you justify allowing 45,000 people per year to die in your own country because they lack health care?

Can you at least try to answer that.

We cannot solve these problems if you continue to accuse others of the emotionalism you are displaying. You need to address real issues such as the question posed above and to stop pretending that nothing can be done about them.

jgarden · Jul 27, 2013

Boise’s experience reflects a growing national trend toward consolidation. Across the country, doctors who sold their practices and signed on as employees have similar criticisms. In lawsuits and interviews, they describe growing pressure to meet the financial goals of their new employers — often by performing unnecessary tests and procedures or by admitting patients who do not need a hospital stay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/b...r-doctors-nationwide.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Allowing medical care to remain in the hands of the private sector rewards a system that encourages their doctors to perform "unnecessary tests and procedures or by admitting patients who do not need a hospital stay" to drive up corporate profits.

GarfieldJL · Jul 27, 2013

HonestTruth said:
~ you can't do anything about the elites ~

Yes you can. Bill Clinton increased taxes and the Republican created deficit was ended.

Actually the only reason spending got reigned in was because of Republicans, particularly Newt Gingrich.

HonestTruth said:
There is nothing today that can stop this from happening again if people would just wake up and realize that it is the wealth elites who are screwing this country. We need the same equitable tax system that we used to have and to end all tax shelters. It was done in the past, it can EASILY be done today.

If taxes were hiked all that would happen is Obama and Reid would come up with ways to spend more money. Boehner doesn't have the spine that Newt Gingrich had so raising taxes will only hurt the economy.

Clinton was not an ideologue, he had his problems but he at least knew how to work with Republicans instead of insulting them constantly.

HonestTruth said:
~ God can work miracles if we only trust him a little. ~

More people in America go to church every Sunday than in any other country on earth. The USA is the most Christian nation anywhere.

But as shown in the Bible (see my post on the Book of Amos) God will destroy a nation that enriches the wealthy and impoverishes the poor. When people wake up and practice REAL Christianity rather than right wing influenced television evangelism then we will benefit from miracles which will make this a better a nation.

Seriously, playing the religion card to try to justify Socialism... The democrats' "income redistribution" is nothing more than Government sanctioned theft, and that's part of the problem.

HonestTruth said:
~ the value of a life ~

You fail to answer my question again and again: if you as a taxpayer are willing to finance Israel's health care system which you do each and every year (also remember that the Marshall Plan which your parents and mine paid for created the present Europe health care reform system), how do you justify allowing 45,000 people per year to die in your own country because they lack health care?

Last I checked, the ER is required to treat anyone that comes in.

Question how many of those people that died without medical treatment was due to the fact paramedics couldn't get to them in time? Were those individuals included in that 45,000 people per year statistic?

HonestTruth said:
Can you at least try to answer that.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Mark Twain (there is a dispute as to who actually originally coined this quote but it is common to attribute it to Mark Twain).

HonestTruth said:
We cannot solve these problems if you continue to accuse others of the emotionalism you are displaying. You need to address real issues such as the question posed above and to stop pretending that nothing can be done about them.

Except you're using an appeal to emotion as well.

If we look at this logically, Obamacare was never designed to give people better access to healthcare (I think Democrats (not a single Republican supported Obamacare) are incompetitent but not that incompetitent).

Since it is cheaper for young people to pay the fine than deal with the costs of health insurance and there are numerous other disincentives to get health insurance we can logically conclude:

Obamacare is designed to destroy health insurance companies because it forces them to accept all the people with pre-existing conditions, but it is substancially cheaper for young people and businesses to simply pay the fine than actually get insurance.
This leads into forcing Government run healthcare onto everyone in the United States.
Which then essentially gives government the power to dictate everything in our lives all in the name of "health care."

Seriously, you have the IRS which admitted to targetting political critics of the President, in charge of implimenting Obamacare... The idea that they won't use that as a political weapon is dangerously naive at best.

contango · Jul 28, 2013

HonestTruth said:
~ you can't do anything about the elites ~

Yes you can. Bill Clinton increased taxes and the Republican created deficit was ended.

There is nothing today that can stop this from happening again if people would just wake up and realize that it is the wealth elites who are screwing this country. We need the same equitable tax system that we used to have and to end all tax shelters. It was done in the past, it can EASILY be done today.

OK, so you increase taxes and the very wealthy move their assets offshore at the stroke of a pen. Now what?

The simple truth is you cannot end tax shelters, unless you want to make it unlawful for Americans to have any interest at all in any foreign assets. That's not going to happen simply because people invest abroad and some people live abroad. Even if you did make it happen you'd just have people setting up all sorts of blind trusts and other clever accounting tricks to avoid paying. If a tax regime gets too oppressive people simply leave completely, potentially taking their entire asset base with them. If wealthy people can find a country willing to host them (and wealthy people are unlikely to have much trouble doing so) how do you propose to extract a single penny from them from the point they leave the country?

If it can easily be done perhaps you could explain how it could be done that would stop the wealthiest avoiding it completely?

~ God can work miracles if we only trust him a little. ~

More people in America go to church every Sunday than in any other country on earth. The USA is the most Christian nation anywhere.

But as shown in the Bible (see my post on the Book of Amos) God will destroy a nation that enriches the wealthy and impoverishes the poor. When people wake up and practice REAL Christianity rather than right wing influenced television evangelism then we will benefit from miracles which will make this a better a nation.

People going to church on a Sunday doesn't make the nation Christian and more than people going to the races makes the nation a horse.

If you could stop the endless digs at "right-wing influence(s)" and griping about what other people are doing you'd probably see what you could do right here and right now. You can't change what other people do, you can only change what you do.

It's also a bit rich to say the USA is "the most Christian nation anywhere" and then complain that people aren't practising real Christianity. Is it a Christian nation or isn't it? You seem to want it both ways with your post.

It's also not clear why other people have to do what you think they should do before you take ownership of what you can do. Why can't God work miracles through whatever you can do right now? Where would the 5000 people have been if that one boy had figured he wouldn't hand over his dinner because surely someone else would have the money to buy food for everyone and if only some random unknown but presumably rich person would pick up the tab he wouldn't have to give up his dinner?

~ the value of a life ~

You fail to answer my question again and again: if you as a taxpayer are willing to finance Israel's health care system which you do each and every year (also remember that the Marshall Plan which your parents and mine paid for created the present Europe health care reform system), how do you justify allowing 45,000 people per year to die in your own country because they lack health care?

Can you at least try to answer that.

I'm not a US taxpayer so I doubt I'm paying for Israel's healthcare system. You're throwing questions back at me without addressing the ones I'm asking, specifically how much money is it worth spending to save one life? Whenever healthcare is discussed this question arises time after time after time. Whether the money comes from people paying their own way, from general taxation, from grabbing the however many trillions of dollars it's claimed Nasty Rich People have stashed away makes no difference, sooner or later we have to decide whether to treat Patient A or Patient B. Sooner or later we have to make a judgement call that the cost of treating Patient C is too expensive given the likely gains. And there lies the problem - it's theoretically easy enough to say that someone aged 93 and in poor health isn't deserving of a new kidney when there's an otherwise healthy teenager who also needs it, but that 93-year-old is probably someone's father, someone's grandfather, someone's uncle and so on. To them their grandfather/father/uncle is more precious than some random teenager.

If we give money to another nation in the form of foreign aid that country ends up deciding what to do with the money. We could argue that some countries may not need aid any more but that's a different question to how we pay for our own healthcare. If you as a US taxpayer are funding Israel's healthcare system and dislike doing so, write to your Congressman and complain about it. It still doesn't change the fact that Israeli healthcare has the same decisions to take regarding who gets treated when the demand exceeds the supply, even if the person making the decisions is different.

We cannot solve these problems if you continue to accuse others of the emotionalism you are displaying. You need to address real issues such as the question posed above and to stop pretending that nothing can be done about them.

I'm not displaying emotionalism at all, I'm trying to demonstrate that once emotional concerns are taken out there are very difficult decisions to be made and that however healthcare is funded someone has to make those decisions.

How to ration healthcare is a very simple question when demand exceeds supply. When Someone Else picks up the tab it's highly unlikely that supply will ever exceed demand, simply because people will naturally look to gain a personal advantage if one is available - if having a checkup will cost you half an hour and $100 you might think twice about doing it, but if it will cost you half an hour and someone else pays the $100 you're more likely to take it.

I'm also looking to highlight the fact that you and I and everyone have been entrusted by God with some resources and how we steward those will form a part of how we are judged. When you and I stand before God to be judged we're not going to be given any marks for tirelessly complaining about how we'd all be so much better off if the nasty right wingers had only shared more nicely, or if the nasty left wingers hadn't sought to tax us so hard, we'll be judged based on what we did with what we had. So it makes sense to spare the vitriol against a group of people with different political preferences and spend more time looking at what we can do in the here and now. Whether we've been entrusted with 1 talent or a million, we have to answer for what we did with it. The guy with one talent doesn't get a free pass just because he was waiting for the guy with a million to do something first.

DaisyDay · Jul 28, 2013

HonestTruth said:
~ God can work miracles if we only trust him a little. ~

More people in America go to church every Sunday than in any other country on earth. The USA is the most Christian nation anywhere.

Vatican City?

Cjwinnit · Aug 7, 2013

DaisyDay said:
Vatican City?

I think Poland, Malta, Cyprus and maybe Greece also have higher rates of church attendance.

So ... who wants Obamacare to work like NHS in Britain?

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