How is Obamacare Working Out for You?

[problemz]

I hate Obama because of his endless cost overruns that the left doesn't seem to even notice. If the costs are kept down, more people can be treated, and our economy will not implode. If you read carefully you will note that I also attacked Romney for the same reason.

Obviously we need to treat children with Lyme (1% of the population has now been stricken with Lyme, although only about 9 million dollars of research goes into finding a successful method to treat it). The AIDS people get about 30 billion dollars for a disease that I don't think can be fixed.

I'm a bit shocked by inequities. It doesn't mean that I want the gays to die just because they are mixing blood and feces. It's dumb, but they are under the illusion that they love each other, and that this is the correct way to express it, and then they point to the Greeks. The Greeks didn't have anal intercourse with one another, but the contemporary gay people can't be expected to do any actual research.

The deal is that we need to have a way to cover people's medical needs. But this has to be kept as cheap as possible while delivering the best possible care. This is not to say that our resources are infinite, as the bird-brained left believe. I sometimes get the strong impression that the left thinks the US resources really are infinite. Thinking like that is stupid, and is going to get us killed by China (a vicious, crazy, communist nation).

We are competing with other nations. We must remain strong. Healthcare is a priority but it is not the only variable in our economy. We also need to maintain a military, and police, and roads, and education, and we need to do it while keeping incentives for business innovation, and incentives for employment, and strong motives for R & D in many spheres.

The left always gets up on a high horse and starts making insane demands that don't take the whole picture into account, and it leads to some birdbrain like Obama taking over and promising the sky and offering us nothing but endless stupidity.

Bush wasn't a lot better but because he came from a family with a few people with brains in it, he was functional. Obama comes from a background with a deadbeat moron for a father, a flibbertigibbet for a mother, a welfare queen for a wife, and nothing with any quality in it. As a result, we have a guy whose sole competence is knowing how to get an excellent crease in his trousers. I don't sniff at that - it's a real competence and if he was a talking model for Men's Wearhouse or something like that, he might contribute something to our nation aside from debt and dumbness.

 

[Skarekrow]

I hate Obama because of his endless cost overruns that the left doesn't seem to even notice. If the costs are kept down, more people can be treated, and our economy will not implode. If you read carefully you will note that I also attacked Romney for the same reason.

Obviously we need to treat children with Lyme (1% of the population has now been stricken with Lyme, although only about 9 million dollars of research goes into finding a successful method to treat it). The AIDS people get about 30 billion dollars for a disease that I don't think can be fixed.

I'm a bit shocked by inequities. It doesn't mean that I want the gays to die just because they are mixing blood and feces. It's dumb, but they are under the illusion that they love each other, and that this is the correct way to express it, and then they point to the Greeks. The Greeks didn't have anal intercourse with one another, but the contemporary gay people can't be expected to do any actual research.

The deal is that we need to have a way to cover people's medical needs. But this has to be kept as cheap as possible while delivering the best possible care. This is not to say that our resources are infinite, as the bird-brained left believe. I sometimes get the strong impression that the left thinks the US resources really are infinite. Thinking like that is stupid, and is going to get us killed by China (a vicious, crazy, communist nation).

We are competing with other nations. We must remain strong. Healthcare is a priority but it is not the only variable in our economy. We also need to maintain a military, and police, and roads, and education, and we need to do it while keeping incentives for business innovation, and incentives for employment, and strong motives for R & D in many spheres.

The left always gets up on a high horse and starts making insane demands that don't take the whole picture into account, and it leads to some birdbrain like Obama taking over and promising the sky and offering us nothing but endless stupidity.

Bush wasn't a lot better but because he came from a family with a few people with brains in it, he was functional. Obama comes from a background with a deadbeat moron for a father, a flibbertigibbet for a mother, a welfare queen for a wife, and nothing with any quality in it. As a result, we have a guy whose sole competence is knowing how to get an excellent crease in his trousers. I don't sniff at that - it's a real competence and if he was a talking model for Men's Wearhouse or something like that, he might contribute something to our nation aside from debt and dumbness.

Wow...stepped off the deep-end!
I don’t think you know how fucking bonkers you actually sound...especially as a “professor”.
You sound so out of touch with reality I almost think you must be trolling at this point.
If you aren’t then....holy shit.
(Lyme disease...really? That is the most pressing disease we should be trying to eradicate? Not maybe...cancer?)

 

[problemz]

God is American. Therefore the whole universe is ours under the Monroe Doctrine. We must keep our soldiers healthy but not mollycoddle them. It's almost very important to be Spartan in finance so that American justice and medicine can prevail first. Over the solar system and then the galaxy and finally the universe. It is our Manifest Destiny!

 

[Skarekrow]

God is American. Therefore the whole universe is ours under the Monroe Doctrine. We must keep our soldiers healthy but not mollycoddle them. It's almost very important to be Spartan in finance so that American justice and medicine can prevail first. Over the solar system and then the galaxy and finally the universe. It is our Manifest Destiny!

 

[Lerxst]

I was about to post something but I just spit coffee all over my keyboard while laughing at this reply Time to clean up....

 

[the]

I thought infjs were supposed to be cookie cutter pie in the sky. Turns out -NOPE! I'm glad to have this example for the future.

 

[jimtaylor]

I want what he is smoking....

 

[Kanamori]

It's working out for me, one of those few thousand worthless mofos who could have saved any given bank tens of millions, if not more, God forbid. Totally not worthy of anybody's time... food for thought.

 

[problemz]

I was a leftist for many years so I know how to create a thought that will be convulsively funny for my former self. It's a lot of fun to do. But I can and have switched sides. I think it's important to try to switch sides as often as possible. I am glad that Obamacare has worked out for a few of you.

It's especially fun to see people that you used to hate, as now being on your side. It's like dodgeball, I guess. The people who threw the hardest on the other side, are now on your side, and you wish them more strength to their sword arm.

I feel sorry for the Obamables or Obamatons or commiecrats or whatever they are calling themselves these days because God too has switched sides. God is an American. He is red white and blue in the face over what's happening to the national debt. It's a macroeconomic picture when most of us are only concerned with our own microeconomics, but macroeconomics do finally impact microeconomics. When bubbles burst, it can leave a nation in dire straits. Rome didn't last.

I do think we could do better with health. As I walk around Wal-Mart I am puzzled as to how so many are now in wheelchairs. Their baskets are filled with Twinkies and other ook. I wouldn't slap those things out of their heads, or employ the Heimlich Maneuver to make them throw it up as Bloomberg seems to want to do. I just think that the body is the temple, and Twinkies don't belong in our faces. We should drop them on countries like Canada that we wish to conquer.

We need all that room. Plus, let's take Greenland while we're at it. If global warming continues, that is going to be prime real estate again in a few years. Greenland is already self-sufficient again in terms of grain production. We would only have to take on a few Eskimos and it would belong to the US of A. Let's forget about Iraq and Afghanistan and other hard places, and take over Greenland. It's a loss-leader for the Danish anyhoo.

 

[Skarekrow]

I was a leftist for many years so I know how to create a thought that will be convulsively funny for my former self. It's a lot of fun to do. But I can and have switched sides. I think it's important to try to switch sides as often as possible. I am glad that Obamacare has worked out for a few of you.

It's especially fun to see people that you used to hate, as now being on your side. It's like dodgeball, I guess. The people who threw the hardest on the other side, are now on your side, and you wish them more strength to their sword arm.

I feel sorry for the Obamables or Obamatons or commiecrats or whatever they are calling themselves these days because God too has switched sides. God is an American. He is red white and blue in the face over what's happening to the national debt. It's a macroeconomic picture when most of us are only concerned with our own microeconomics, but macroeconomics do finally impact microeconomics. When bubbles burst, it can leave a nation in dire straits. Rome didn't last.

I do think we could do better with health. As I walk around Wal-Mart I am puzzled as to how so many are now in wheelchairs. Their baskets are filled with Twinkies and other ook. I wouldn't slap those things out of their heads, or employ the Heimlich Maneuver to make them throw it up as Bloomberg seems to want to do. I just think that the body is the temple, and Twinkies don't belong in our faces. We should drop them on countries like Canada that we wish to conquer.

We need all that room. Plus, let's take Greenland while we're at it. If global warming continues, that is going to be prime real estate again in a few years. Greenland is already self-sufficient again in terms of grain production. We would only have to take on a few Eskimos and it would belong to the US of A. Let's forget about Iraq and Afghanistan and other hard places, and take over Greenland. It's a loss-leader for the Danish anyhoo.

^^^^^^^^^

 

[Skarekrow]

This is why the system needed to be changed and regulated...if you disagree with how it was done then fine....work to fix it, don’t just sit there and point fingers and projectile hate-filled vomit on those involved...how pointless and wasteful.
Anyhow, enjoy ---

A 20 year-old man came down with appendicitis in October of this year. He posted the bill on Reddit and it has gone viral. The US Health Care system is a topic of much debate, not only in the US but around the world. A lot of countries get ‘free’ health care, so needless to say, this has stirred up a lot of conversation.
As if waking up in excruciating pain isn’t enough, this is the bill he received in the mail a couple months later. Take a look:

The original cost was over $55,000. Because the 20 year-old man was on his father’s insurance, the cost was lowered to $11,000.

zcypher​

Which is still an obscenely high bill to pay for such a young man. He was in the Recovery Room for 2 hours and it cost him $7,500.

zcypher​

The actual surgery cost $16,000.

zcypher​

This bill caused quite an uproar. A lot of citizens of other countries chimed in with their own experiences.

An Australian with appendicitis never even saw a bill.



A Canadian’s mother had foot surgery and her only charge was $60…for cable.



A Malaysian paid the equivalent of $25 for an appendectomy.

​

And then other Americans gave their two cents (or hundreds of thousands of dollars):

This American got cancer and had to file for bankruptcy. At age 24.



His cousin died because he had reached his “lifetime limit” for treatment. He was 27.



$2000 for a night’s stay, a juice box and a pill.

​

We don’t take political sides here in any way, but it’s hard to deny that these costs are absurd. No matter how you think this should be fixed, I think we can all agree that it needs to be.

 

[problemz]

Most countries don't allow big lawsuits against hospitals.

 

[Skarekrow]

You honestly think that it is lawsuits that make up the huge cost of medical bills?
Sorry....try again.

 

[problemz]

Estimates on the causation of skyrocketing costs vary. The fear of malpractice causes many doctors to order extensive tests, often very expensive, to cover themselves in case of a lawsuit. Wall Street Journal has a piece here on this:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125193312967181349

One of my most important objections to the centralization of medical insurance in a single-payer system is that it concentrates too much power in one location. This has been known to cause genocides. Friedrich Hayek argues in his book The Road to Serfdom that it was Bismarck's caving into socialists and allowing for a state-sponsored medical program that led to the death camps. He argued that once a massive dragnet of information is housed in one place that holds the medical records of everyone, that same information can be used to create death camps, overseen by the very doctors that were supposed to provide longevity to the population. So, you got Mengele and others out of the same pool of people that were supposed to keep people alive.

This may not happen immediately. There was a half a century or more between Bismarck's reforms and Hitler's death camps. It's just that if you put all the information in one place, and then start to put power and money there, too, the result is generally speaking a genocide. It will almost invariably occur. Rudolf Rummel at the University of Hawaii is a specialist in Marxist and socialist genocides and he claims that you can't have a socialist society without also having a genocide. Once you adopt a socialist system, all those who threaten it have to be killed. It has happened every time. Although I do have short range problems with Obamacare, I also have longterm concerns. Not so much with Obama himself, or his idiot father from whom he claims to have gotten his ideas, but with far squirrelier people who may yet arise in the future of our country and who will use the controls he's put in place in order to create a genocide.

The very same massive network that can supposedly keep people alive longer can also be used to terminate whole populations. Genocides generally begin from within a state-controlled apparatus. The idea should always be to keep governments as small as possible, because once there are not checks against their power, someone almost invariably arises to use the power to destroy their enemies. Democrats don't seem to sense this. It isn't clear to me why that is so. They are so busy projecting their own evil on to Republicans that for whatever reason they don't see their own hideous aggression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_genocide

There are eight stages of genocide. The first consists of marking off the good and the bad. That has already happened to a degree with the "rich" being designated as vermin. Stage five is still cultural. Once the pot is boiling, though, the last stage is remarkably quick and irreversible, and is always denied. It could be the holocaust with its deniers, or it could be the Turks with millions of dead Armenians at their feet, or it could be China with its eighty million dead in the Cultural Revolution, or it could be Vietnam after we left and the millions of dead Christians that they buried as payment for supporting the South Vietnamese government and the American Army.

So I have both small issues, and larger ones.

Holocausts and genocides take generations to foment. Obama would not by himself be able to cause one here. He has not stopped them elsewhere. He's a happy go lucky guy who hasn't got much of an idea of who he is, what he's doing, or even what his father meant when he said that there should be 100% tax rates on East Indians within Kenya.

I know what his father meant, though. He meant genocide.

 

[La Sagna]

We have had universal health care in Canada for almost 50 years (1966), oh no, I guess I have to start arming myself so that I can protect my family from the coming genocide! Or better yet, maybe I'll retain my sanity.

Here's some information for you about the Canadian health care system

"Health care in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded health care system, which is mostly free at the point of use and has most services provided by private entities. It is guided by the provisions of the Canada Health Act of 1984. The government assures the quality of care through federal standards. The government does not participate in day-to-day care or collect any information about an individual's health, which remains confidential between a person and his or her physician. Canada's provincially based Medicare systems are cost-effective partly because of their administrative simplicity. In each province each doctor handles the insurance claim against the provincial insurer. There is no need for the person who accesses health care to be involved in billing and reclaim. Private health expenditure accounts for 30% of health care financing.

Competitive practices such as advertising are kept to a minimum, thus maximizing the percentage of revenues that go directly towards care. In general, costs are paid through funding from income taxes.

According to Lightman, “In-kind delivery in Canada is superior to the American market approach in its efficiency of delivery.” In the USA, 13.6 per cent of GNP is used on medical care. By contrast, in Canada, only 9.5 per cent of GNP is used on the medicare system, “in part because there is no profit incentive for private insurers.” Lightman also notes that the in-kind delivery system eliminates much of the advertising that is prominent in the USA, and the low overall administrative costs in the in-kind delivery system. Since there are no means tests and no bad-debt problems for doctors under the Canadian in-kind system, doctors billing and collection costs are reduced to almost zero."

There are definitely some problems with our system but compared to the US our life expectancy is higher, our infant mortality rate is lower and our cost per capita for healthcare is much lower so I'll take our system over yours anytime...even with the risk of genocide...

 

[Skarekrow]

Estimates on the causation of skyrocketing costs vary. The fear of malpractice causes many doctors to order extensive tests, often very expensive, to cover themselves in case of a lawsuit. Wall Street Journal has a piece here on this:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125193312967181349

Yes, they do order expensive tests...even when they are unnecessary. Because the market is unregulated and the public has dictated that that is what they do...hopefully that will improve with some much needed regulation...but lawsuits and the fear of being sued is not the driving force behind the cost of healthcare in the US.
1 - the cost of the uninsured is paid for by the insured...the idea behind the ACA is that with the individual mandate the cost will be distributed amongst more people and thus the cost will go down.
2 - we have unregulated PRIVATE insurance companies and hospitals who are beholden to shareholders...it’s all about the profit, it has nothing to do helping people.
3 - Most Physicians in this country are way overpaid...you do the math.

One of my most important objections to the centralization of medical insurance in a single-payer system is that it concentrates too much power in one location. This has been known to cause genocides. Friedrich Hayek argues in his book The Road to Serfdom that it was Bismarck's caving into socialists and allowing for a state-sponsored medical program that led to the death camps. He argued that once a massive dragnet of information is housed in one place that holds the medical records of everyone, that same information can be used to create death camps, overseen by the very doctors that were supposed to provide longevity to the population. So, you got Mengele and others out of the same pool of people that were supposed to keep people alive.

This may not happen immediately. There was a half a century or more between Bismarck's reforms and Hitler's death camps. It's just that if you put all the information in one place, and then start to put power and money there, too, the result is generally speaking a genocide. It will almost invariably occur. Rudolf Rummel at the University of Hawaii is a specialist in Marxist and socialist genocides and he claims that you can't have a socialist society without also having a genocide. Once you adopt a socialist system, all those who threaten it have to be killed. It has happened every time. Although I do have short range problems with Obamacare, I also have longterm concerns. Not so much with Obama himself, or his idiot father from whom he claims to have gotten his ideas, but with far squirrelier people who may yet arise in the future of our country and who will use the controls he's put in place in order to create a genocide.

The very same massive network that can supposedly keep people alive longer can also be used to terminate whole populations. Genocides generally begin from within a state-controlled apparatus. The idea should always be to keep governments as small as possible, because once there are not checks against their power, someone almost invariably arises to use the power to destroy their enemies. Democrats don't seem to sense this. It isn't clear to me why that is so. They are so busy projecting their own evil on to Republicans that for whatever reason they don't see their own hideous aggression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_genocide

There are eight stages of genocide. The first consists of marking off the good and the bad. That has already happened to a degree with the "rich" being designated as vermin. Stage five is still cultural. Once the pot is boiling, though, the last stage is remarkably quick and irreversible, and is always denied. It could be the holocaust with its deniers, or it could be the Turks with millions of dead Armenians at their feet, or it could be China with its eighty million dead in the Cultural Revolution, or it could be Vietnam after we left and the millions of dead Christians that they buried as payment for supporting the South Vietnamese government and the American Army.

So I have both small issues, and larger ones.

Holocausts and genocides take generations to foment. Obama would not by himself be able to cause one here. He has not stopped them elsewhere. He's a happy go lucky guy who hasn't got much of an idea of who he is, what he's doing, or even what his father meant when he said that there should be 100% tax rates on East Indians within Kenya.

I know what his father meant, though. He meant genocide.

So now all of the sudden we are a Socialist country?
LOLOLOLOLOLOL!
You’re fucking paranoid man....
The ACA is not a government takeover of your healthcare...it is now being REGULATED but the government because people can either NOT AFFORD healthcare or if they do have insurance it A) is junk insurance that won’t pay for shit...or....B) they are being priced out of it because the insurance companies keep jacking up the premiums.
They needed to be regulated...and even though I disagree with a lot of how the ACA is being run....the bottom line is they are still being implemented by the insurance companies NOT the government.
Seriously [MENTION=4235]problemz[/MENTION], I want to know your plan to fix our healthcare woes...
Do we need to pray more? Because since according to you, God is an American...why is he giving cancer to children in the US?
And seriously...enough with the Obama crazy bullshit...one man does NOTHING by himself in the country....
If you want to talk about ONE man creating havoc for the US have you so quickly forgotten all the shit BUSH and his administration has done to this nation?
We are really really lucky that he didn’t privatize Social Security before the Wall Street collapse or we would have seen more than the 99%ers protesting.
What about the TWO wars he landed us in? How much do those cost us...per year....per month....per day....per hour...per minute?
Every hour, taxpayers in the United States are paying
$11.26 million for Total Cost of Wars Since 2001.
http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/

Don’t give me any more nonsensical crazy bullshit...if we wanted to fund healthcare in this country we easily could...but the priorities of those in Washington are not the same as the priorities of the people.
The rest of your rambling is just hyperbole.

 

[Stu]

Rudolf Rummel at the University of Hawaii is a specialist in Marxist and socialist genocides and he claims that you can't have a socialist society without also having a genocide.

where does he say that?

and exactly how many people have died as a result of the west attempting to maintain control over the undeveloped parts of the world just beginning with the end of ww2?

As usual, the conservative argument against proving access to health care for millions of poor americans is the threat of world government domination.

The problem with your point of view is that it is completely elitist.

 

[problemz]

Skarecrow, this isn't an accurate picture that you gave - although it's a wonderful illustration of an illusion that capital concentrates too much power in one place. It in fact decentralizes power and creates all kinds of pockets of power. There is in this country Hollywood, Wall St., 50 state capitals, law, professional sports, modeling, still 35% of the world's goods are made here in incredibly diverse factories, and so on.

But in a socialist system the centralized planning office determines everything.

Check out Kim Jong On.

He can have his uncle killed by dogs with the snap of a finger.

Maybe that is too catty. Perhaps he only shot him with anti-aircraft guns and then fed him to the fish.

The fact is there is no checks and balances in a socialist system. It spreads everything but power, and power turns out to be everything.

As for the Rummel - this is his motif - that centralized power creates genocides and famines, and that it always will. His wiki page is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.J._Rummel#cite_note-21

I found the illustration illuminating of a certain paranoia about capitalism that is ill-deserved. I'm not saying that capitalism is perfect. It's just better than anything else, especially better than socialism.

 

[Lerxst]

Why isn't anyone here arguing about the overly inflated military budget?

View attachment 19333

What do those countries on the lower ed or off the list offer? Heathcare, education, labor unions. What do we offer with our huge military expense? The opportunity to recruit our "next generations" to blow up non-white people. What do we create? An entire "lost generation" that's convinced a huge military is the ONLY military and criticizes other countries that decided to spend that money on public policies. Even Eisenhower warned about the dangers of a prolonged, established, industrial military complex. A lot of people even have shown some valid evidence the JFK was assassinated, in part, due to his stance against the military.

As long as we have this bloated, life-sucking, money-pit of a military existing, any talk of any productive programs outside of that scope are moot; the money isn't and will never be there. Get rid of the military and the first thing we're going to need is a boost to the public education system to re-educate all the brain-dead, trigger happy zombies we created to fire a weapon right out of high school. Let the next generation reap the benefits of their newly acquired education to start studying needed fields that fill the voids we've created. Then, implement the Universal Healthcare system with the educational foundation firmly in place to support it.

If we tried this in our current state, all Hell would break loose. Millions would be unemployed with no opportunity to get a decent education in place of their military training.

People who live off of fast food because no policies or budgets are in place to keep those corporations in check or enforce any FDA/USDA regulations, would flood the "Free Healthcare" system. One of the few things America ranks high in is heart disease and poor health. We've spent almost no money in preventing poor health and educating people, so any healthcare system we create at the moment, will surely be inundated with the ignorant victims that are wandering out there.

We can't just start a healthcare system of any kind without first, fixing the other problems that we have created over the past 60 years.

 

[problemz]

It sounds as if we should invade Canada and let them take over our healthcare system, plus we could visit Quebec and try out our French from time to time. We might as well invade Greenland simultaneously. With global warming, it shall soon turn into prime real estate once more. Also, Mexico. Since they have already invaded us, we might as well return the fay-vor...

After that, we could let go of our military, I guess.

I have to go to bed, as I am exhausted. Sweet dreams, everybody.