StrangeSox

QUOTE (bmags @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 12:38 PM) They are actually. The American University system is the envy of the world. Our public school systems are also by and large doing pretty well in areas that aren't suffering crushing poverty. For-profit universities are hilariously awful and it's a good thing Obama shut off the federal money firehose and bankrupted a bunch of them. Too bad DeVos will reverse that.

There are places where fire protection services are opt-in (and this used to be how it was everywhere, even with competing fire companies trying to beat each other to the scene of a fire). If you're not a subscriber, they'll show up to watch your house burn down but make sure it doesn't spread.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 12:21 PM) American's should also have the right to NOT have health care. Under a true UHC system, you're free to not partake in the services funded by tax dollars. Just like you currently have the "right" to starve to death rather than take advantage of EBT. edit: any chance the health care discussion can get moved to the OBAMACARE megathread? possibly rename the thread from the years-old joke title made just to tease Y2HH a bit to a broader "healthcare" thread?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 12:00 PM) Rep. Ted Yoho believes that Rep. Nunes "works for the President," not, you know, the House or his constituents who elected him. https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/847488975375802374 Someone really needs to explain to Yoho and Nunes how that whole separate branches of government thing works, apparently. 2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports

Rep. Ted Yoho believes that Rep. Nunes "works for the President," not, you know, the House or his constituents who elected him. https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/847488975375802374 Someone really needs to explain to Yoho and Nunes how that whole separate branches of government thing works, apparently.

Watch to the end for the payoff https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/847447770063556610

How do you function as a high-level executive without ever having one-on-one meetings with a woman? I'm far from a high level executive much less a governor or Vice President of the United States, and I've had one-on-one business meetings with women that somehow did not end in adultery.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 07:56 AM) So Pence totally drunkenly cheated on his wife at some point right? I wasn't sure what this referenced at first, but apparently Pence refuses to be alone in a room with any woman who isn't his wife. Some conservatives are rushing to his defense and asking "if you're a married man, why would you be friends with a woman?"

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 11:19 AM) Our federal government is not equipped to fix anything of this structure. The more involved they have gotten, the more expensive and less productive it is. We have already seen them do this to the insurance industry. Cutting that out completely would turn out health care system into a VA style system where care suffers emmensly. For god's sake, all you have to do is look at the VA to realize that the federal government can't handle health care and insurance for a smaller subset of society in our veterans. To expect them to get better at with hundreds of millions more people to take care of? I can't think of a scarier proposition. VA is more like the NHS, though, than a single-payer (Canada, most developed countries) or a public option would be. I can also look at Medicare and see that the government can handle being the single-payer provider for tens of millions of Americans, and I can look to dozens of other countries to see better outcomes than what we have. I see no reason to flatly assume that our government is incapable of ever providing a cost effective health care solution that covers all Americans since so many other countries with much fewer resources manage to do it and do it well. If we can't ever expect the government to provide what should be would consider a basic and essential service, then we better just shut the whole thing down.

More on today's Senate hearings. "Useful idiot" has never been a more appropriate phrase.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 11:08 AM) The government subsizes both of these activities to a large degree, as do employers when it comes to health care. You flat out said that we spend more than anyone, yet the solution to solve that is? To spend even more. No, that's not what I've said or what I said the solution should be. You're getting wrapped up in your own talking points again. Other countries socialize health care a whole hell of a lot more than we do. They spend a lot less on health care for equal or better outcomes. Cutting out private health insurance as the main provider would increase government costs but lower overall healthcare spending. This isn't hypothetical. It's what we see in dozens of countries around the world.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 11:03 AM) It is amazing that the more something is subsidized by the government, the more the price goes up... Speaking of talking points and memes... But we have additional empirical evidence that, especially when it comes to healthcare, this is the exact opposite of true. Every other developed country spends far less with equal or better outcomes while covering their whole population. Some countries, like Norway, even subsidize their doctors' entire medical educations rather than loading them with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans.

https://twitter.com/Charles_Lister/status/847477859018973184

QUOTE (bmags @ Mar 27, 2017 -> 12:53 PM) Seeing on Twitter that Virginia and Kansas now look likely to take Medicaid expansion. edit: said Nebraska meant kansas. Brownback vetoed it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/hea...m=.ecd7c52ff750 There's a bit of a war going on between the increasingly more moderate Republican Congress in Kansas and Brownback since Brownback broke the entire state.

FWIW tort reform has been tried in several states, and the empirical results are that it does nothing to control costs. Extremely expensive medical school and artificial AMA restrictions on the numbers of doctors driving up salaries certainly don't help, nor do our higher-than-everywhere-else drug prices. Allowing Medicare/aid to negotiate drug prices would put a decent dent in healthcare spending in this country.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 10:21 AM) Huge difference between offering it, and making it mandatory if you are going to be alive. I will say that I'm much less comfortable with requiring people to purchase a service from a private, often for-profit company or face a tax penalty rather than having a simple single-payer system or having a public option that could be purchased. Those latter two are closer to Medicare/Medicaid, where you are paying taxes for it regardless of whether you choose to utilize those services or not. QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 10:24 AM) It certainly seems that this would be a better option in theory, but why cant anyone come up with something that can make this "hybrid" work? And it still gives the wealthy significantly better options for healthcare which is certainly a philosophical debate. The mandate exists because if you don't allow pre-existing condition exclusions, you'll have an insurance death spiral without. Healthy people are less likely to sign up and broaden the risk pool until they're sick and need health care.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 10:05 AM) Seeing as the ACA put taxes on these plans? Absolutely. What else could you blame? Seeing as how the Cadillac tax doesn't go into effect until 2020, maybe not?

Trump once again floating the idea of changing libel laws because the press is mean to him: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/...455180912181249

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 30, 2017 -> 10:06 AM) It is a loss of freedom. Period. It is just as easy for the government to socialize pretty much anything because "it is for the public good". It is an absolutely terrible reason for anything when it comes to the power of the federal government. The government already socialized healthcare for the old (Medicare) and some of the poor (Medicaid). Socialized health care, whether it's the more market-oriented model that Germany has or the single-payer system that Canada has or even the fully nationalized healthcare system that Britain has, simply functions better and at lower costs than our abomination of a system. Losing the "freedom" to die from lack of healthcare access but gaining the freedom to not die from not being able to afford health care is a fair trade off in many peoples' eyes.

A precinct-by-precinct breakdown of the 2016 election. https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creat...l-precinct-map/

I wonder what indiscriminately killing civilians will do for ISIS/Al-Qaeda/Al-Shabaab recruitment? U.S. airstrikes have killed more and more civilians in Iraq and Syria since Trump took office

Trump Said to Ease Combat Rules in Somalia Intended to Protect Civilians President Donald "Kill Their Families" "War Crimes Are Good" Trump

Another deadline approaching, this time April 28th. https://t.co/KUshYbyjpg

What do you imagine are the democratic policies Trump has been pushing, and it what ways was AHCA more in line with Democratic policy goals?

Healthcare flop Republicans mostly blame the U.S. Congress, and not President Donald Trump or party leaders, for failing to pass their party's healthcare overhaul, according to a March 25-28 Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.