US Govt shutdown
 

More Obamacare related = OUCH!

Its childish, but there was this much backlash and more over the initial implementation of Social Security too.. They made FDR out to be a bigger socialist than any in Europe, and fought hard for several years in the legislature. 70 years later its the hallmark staple of American life, and nobody from any political ideology opposes it outright. We had an even worse tiff before between the political parties, over a little thing called slavery. The assholes lost then too, and then lost again when they tried to revive it in the Civil Rights era. And for all the war crimes and lies of this and every presidency, Affordable Care Act will not be eliminated, it will go on as planned, and hopefully will be readjusted and improved rather than repealed.. The GOP increasingly look alienated from the majority of Americans. Its not that the Democrats are necessarily less tone-deaf, its just they appear that way. If the government is really "shut-down" then how come there are still military operations going on? Ain't got time to pay government workers or keep public services running for ordinary Americans but heaven forbid we stop the war machine for even a day ;)

kiss - war machine http://youtu.be/RYN5ezObW6I

social security: i'd rather not have 15% of my paycheck taken by a government that promises to pay me with junk bonds sold to china and then threatens to default on its bills every 3 months.

There is some fear the Fed Govt might take private 401K type plans like in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Ireland, France, Portugal, Bolivia & Argentina - they'll issue some kind of certificate that will be meaningless if they say so.

i was starting to reply to you, but then i realized i didn't know what you were actually saying.

who takes what from whom like where?

in other words-- what are you saying happened in hungary/poland/bulgaria/ireland/france/portugal/bolivia/argentina?

in other words-- what's the premise, so we can follow your conclusion?

oh shit, i've been googling the names (while i wait for your reply)

looks like in the past decade these countries have been seizing private pension funds (YIKES!) and moving them into state funds.

but seems like these were pension funds not individual investments/ accounts. trying to figure out what's what.

ps- okay, here a good point to start reading

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Th...ivate-pensions

the fuckers!!!

When discussing important political issues its important to set emotions to one side
So let me just say that the sub human right wing pieces of fucking shit that want poor people to pay 3000 instead of 700 for health care because socialism are the most despicable fucking cockroach sociopath bastard pieces of fucking excrement to crawl out of the sewers. The fucking scum cunt bastard pieces of fucking shit who are shutting down a government for the profits of the corporate greed whores who fund them are directly responsible for the murder of innocent people who have died and suffered immensely by being denied their basic right as a human being to medical treatment. These pieces of shit are no better than terrorists and should be spat on shamed and smacked in the fucking face the economically illiterate pieces of fucking garbage may they burn in fucking hell the cunt bastard scum

funny thing, what they're saying-- it's not even "socialism". it's a mandate that everyone purchases PRIVATE insurance so that people do not resort to the emergency room at the last minute and so that hospitals do not get stuck with an unpaid tab at the end (because per that commie ronald reagan's law emergency rooms must provide care to whoever requests it regardless of their ability to pay).

the ACA is not a socialist plan, it's basically a mandate for personal responsibility within a private market, i.e., a "conservative" thing, and as such it was proposed by nixon and implemented by romney, but now that a black kenyan muslim signed it it's somehow highly unacceptable and a scandal. pure bullshit politicking and manipulation.

anyway, yeah.

The "socialist" aspect which the "Republicans" are fighting mad about are the subsidies and medicare expansions that are a part of the Affordable Care Act, not just the mandate itself. Fighting against the mandate makes them sound like some kind of libertarian jihadists, a superhero for the tea party folks, but the reality is their ideological beef lies more so with the subsidies (which they only seem to believe should benefit military contractors, major banks, and expansive multi-national corporations) and medicare (which they think is some kind of hand out, those mercurially cruel bastards!)...

Its simple math. Everyone in the pool or the rates go up for everybody who is already in, and since everybody can't afford to get into the pool, Uncle Sam has to do the right thing and subsidize the price. The scandal is that if it were outright socialized medicine it just might be both (a) fairer and (b) cheaper.

I have socialized health care and the only criticisms of it are the fact that sometimes bad doctors can be difficult to get rid of. Also because the doc doesnt have to sell you anything they can sometimes be less interested in pursuing eveey option when it comes to non life threatening ailments. That's about it. It works well and no one has to go 60k into debt. Symbol and suchfriends make very good points. Obamacare isnt even enough but its at least a start and is very necessary.

It is crucially necessary. In all the "middle-class" debates about the mandate, what has been lost is the substantive benefits to poorer people, and the long term big arc benefits to society as a whole. When "poor" people visit ERs, public hospitals, and subsidized neighborhood clinics for healthcare, who pays for this? Magic? Smoke and mirrors? NO. The taxpayers pay this, and they pay an exaggerated rate because of all the gimmicks in place to appease the conservatives ideologues who don't want to admit that by and large, we already have socialized medicine, why not go all in then?

So it would be actually cheaper for ALL taxpayers to expand medicare and increase subsidies for health-care for the poor and working poor people. In California we have Medicaid, but you have to have children to be enrolled. Medicaid, while expensive, has actually saved probably TWICE what it costs by allowing preventative care for families, and by subsidizing their doctor visits to replace the ER. Medicaid works, and it can work better. What California is doing for the ACA is they are expanding Medicaid to included people without children, through the government subsidies. People can either use the subsidies in California to buy a private plan through "the exchange" or can apply for Medicaid or actually some weird combination of both.

I'm just wondering how will the terrorists determine if they are being watched or not? It is just not fair.

And if a terrorist wants to know if he's on a list, the TSA has approved a convenient, $100 service that allows him to figure it out: the Clear program, which issues IDs to "trusted travelers" to speed them through security lines. Just apply for a Clear card; if you get one, you're not on the list.

i'm actually for free market solutions but an insurance cartel is not free market-- therefore i'd rather have a regulated cartel than an unregulated one. in other words the ACA is better than the shit we had before.

i pay for my dental care out of pocket and it's better than going with some insurance racket. i also have catastrophic health insurance which means i'm only covered for major shit and i pay for my own small things, consultations, etc-- it's not that much really. i see it as car isurance-- i don't need them to pay for my new tires, oil changes, etc-- i only need them to pay for major surgeries etc.

anyway--

anything from 25,000 to 45,000 have been dying every year for lack of health insurance-- that's way more than bin laden killed, and yet i'm not hearing anyone say we should nuke and invade some cuntry for it.

problem with subsidies is that they might perversely incentivize poverty, but i think there's enough of a tier that people can go up the ladder easily-- right now you have to be either dirt poor to middle class. not a good thing. especially with "preexisting shits". i saw the story of this family that had to keep their income below a certain limit so they could get coverage for their autistic kid-- that will now end.

of course costs will spread through the system so that means an increase for some people. that's the point of insurance though-- to spread risk. if everyone knew what their risk was you'd need no insurance.

another advantage is the ability to purchase your own plan frees people from being slaves to a certain job. i hope that an entrepreneurial renaissance will be a side effect of this. freedom, fuckers!

btw, i've been trying to shop for new insurance but the exchanges are overloaded. which is a good thing ha ha ha.

If they're on the No Fly List as legitimate terrorists, then they obviously wouldn't be able to get cleared. What the "clear card" can do is allow for people who have wrongfully been placed on the list to get off, and that is a good thing, Uncle Same throws around the label of "terrorist" a bit to freely, there are perfectly ordinary and legitimate people wrongfully placed on these lists, sometimes out of guilt by association, sometimes out of a misunderstanding, sometimes some kind corrupt game.

Look what's turned: 100

I fucking love free health care

Nothing is free, ever, someone always pays for things and the costs are just hidden where you can't see them.

Of course, but in principle, if everybody is in, the gross costs will also go down. Further, since Americans aren't entirely heartless, no body is proposing repealing the laws implemented in the Reagan era requiring public funding of some ERs and neighborhood clinics, but this actually turns out to cost tax payers MORE out of the pocket than if low-income folks were given subsidized or even free healthcare. Further, when the hospitals and insurance companies have to pay for the care of uninsured, it raises the over all cost for all their policy holders. I've heard many people complaining that their insurance rates are going up, this is true in the short term and over the past several years, but those costs will never go down until more of the uninsured are covered. Basically, as you said, nothing is free, the question is how can we lower the costs for everybody and the answer is bringing everybody into the insurance system, whether through legal mandates, subsidies, or medicare expansion. The combination of the three should over the next few years bring down healthcare costs, and even if it doesn't (such as has been the experience in Massachusetts), at the least everybody's rates won't be climbing as precipitously.

If you ask me the flaw is not i the insurance companies systems but with our current educational system. In Germany doctors make around $90,000 a year, which is absurdly low by American standards, but then again, in Germany ALL public education is free, from kindergarten through medical school, so graduating physicians are shackled with the burden of $250,000 or more in debt like American medical students. Here at UCLA, a PUBLIC school, they charge an added premium of $20,000 a year to their medical school ON TOP of their regular graduate studies tuition. What the fuck is that shit? AT A PUBLIC SCHOOL??? Bullshit. Doctors have no choice but to charge exorbitant rates and fees for their services, because they themselves were gouged mercilessly to get their education. Doctors in Germany are more or less content with their much lower salaries because they don't have nearly the staggering amount of debt to repay. It takes American doctors almost 15 years on average to pay of their student debt. That is embarrassing. We spend over 20% of our GDP on healthcare in this country, conservatives tout that as an accomplishment, the rest of us see it as utter, greedy, almost mercurial waste. Going to the doctor is expensive because becoming a doctor is so expensive. Its a counter-intuitive system we have here, and in part, why in actuality the ACA will never truly work, so long as secondary education costs continue to sky-rocket exponentially. Doctors will get priced out of the system by their debt loads :(

I think that'd be an ideal situation overall. The routine stuff is covered out of pocket or with individual health insurance purchased. Catastrophe covered more universally. I would have less issue paying taxes towards ACA stuff if it was just for catastrophe instead of for everything.

But its the "everyday" stuff that actually costs the system more? Too many people without insurance visit ERs at public hospitals for routine kinds of medical care because they don't have a primary care physician, they don't have their "routine stuff" covered at all by anyone. So who ends up covering the tab? Right. The tax payers as a whole. Do taxpayers honestly want to turn away uninsured, low-income people from hospitals? No. In fact, it hasn't even remotely been suggested, many of the Republican arguments against "Obamacare" is that current laws already more or less provide public healthcare. Of course the reality is that the ass-backwards approach of the current laws and funding make is WAY more expensive than it has to be. If the people who have to visit ERs and public hospitals for "routine stuff" had preventative care and access to primary physicians, those costs would actually go DOWN. Further, hospitals, doctors, and insurance rates would also as a whole drop in costs as expenditures decline.

If the ACA DOESN'T fund "routine care" and just wastes moneys on "catastrophic" care which happens rarely, the government would quite literally be throwing BILLIONS of dollars towards healthcare that the majority of recipients would never even have opportunities to use in the first place. They'd STILL be having to go to ERs for "routine" care, and they still would be costing the system and the taxpayers that subsidize it MORE money than if they just gave out public insurance.

See, in America we suffer from an interesting, self-defeating mentality behind our systems and structures. We believe in the myth of meritocracy, so we don't agree with paying for things like "welfare" or public health, and yet conversely we are not a bunch of heartless scumbags, by and large the majority of Americans totally support funding for the public need, they just don't ever really like to pay for it. We like to have our cake, but not pay for it after eating. Its why we have so much "national debt" because NONE of us are willing to contribute taxes to even cover our day-to-day expenses which is why our country has ran up annual budget deficits more years in the past 50 than it has had surpluses or even just pushed. No, we like programs like public education, military spending, and prisons, but we rarely are interested in putting our money where our mouth is. These are supposedly deeply ingrained "American values" and yet nobody tends to actually value or prioritize them.

So if Americans want to continue to have to pay higher rates by covering our public health issues with an expensive public-hospital-ER bandaid without actually just providing subsidized health coverage for those who can't afford it, then Americans will continue to have to pay MORE out the ass when such people get sicker than they otherwise could have been with access to preventative treatment and medicine. What leads to something catastrophic like a heart attack, a stroke, or cancer in middle-aged Americans? By and large not having access to or simply neglecting preventative treatment which could have helped prevent something routine from devolving into something catastrophic or directly life-threatening.

Its amazing to me how you can have a country with sane informed people like the ones in this thread (except the conspiratards) and also have the tea party who are fucking nutbags with an agenda that is an incoherent joke compared to any other first world conservative party.

despite having worked in the US healthcare system for 15 years, I'd never go see the doctor, because I simply couldn't justify the costs.

now, in Australia, I've had occasion to use Medicare several times, most recently, with a steroid injection into my foot (plantar fasciitis) that would have cost me over $500 in the US (to meet deductible). here, after pharmacy copay, I was out $5.

insanity.

the US medical system is not about treating people's health problems, it's about putting money into the pockets of insurance mega-conglomerates.

also also:

tax file number: took 5 minutes to apply for and arrived 2 weeks early.
drivers license: showed them my texas license and received my VicRoads in 1 week.
Medicare: the nice lady at the Medicare office actually apologized because the wait to apply was 20 minutes long. I laughed. we waited an hour and half for my wife's social security number in the US, in an office full of dropkicks, and waited 6 for the card to arrive.

the US government is full of do-nothings. good riddance.

^^^ pretty much this.

US Medicare, in it's current form, does not pay for any diagnostic testing. I could wax ad nauseum over the cost-per-benefit of pro-active, covered health maintenance, and the consequential savings to tax payers, over that of only covering catastrophic costs (which tend to error toward exponentially rising prices), but I'm more interested in watching your shithouse go down in the flames, while simply stifling a soft chuckle.

also also:

has anyone heard if the En Ese are still able to keep Etch-a-lawn mainframes spinning while the National Weather Service guys have to pray they'll be getting backpay to cover the cost of McDonalds for the family???

That is the is essentially the Rastafari perspective.

found this morning

-------

GOP: "Can I burn your house down?"

Dems: "No"

GOP: "How about just the second floor?"

Dems: "No."

GOP: "Just your garage?"

Dems: "No."

GOP: "Let's discuss how much of the house we can burn down?"

Dems: "No."

GOP: "I can't believe you won't negotiate with me!'

Nice move to pay off the federal workers "retroactive pay" - they won't be marching in the streets now.

I have a good friend who is an air traffic controller. He's been forced to work (without pay) for weeks now.

air traffic controllers cannot go on strike. Ronnie Reagan saw to that bullshit

No question he deserves his retroactive pay.

But I'm not so sure about the other people who have been sitting at home or out doing volunteer stuff or other things you do when you're forced not to work but have a job. It is kind of cold on my part, of course, to even consider it, but I do have ask why would the republicans so gallantly announce they are going to get paid for not working? I have to keep reminding myself, we livein Bizarro world.

do we really need to spend money on this
Toward Narrative Disruptors and Inductors: Mapping the Narrative Comprehension Network and its Persuasive Effects, DARPA - 2012
In 2012 the CSC was awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) a $6.1 million dollar research grant to study the neurobiology of narrative comprehension, validate narrative theories and explore the connection between narrative and persuasion. This groundbreaking research study will employ multi-modal neuroimaging, combining the temporal resolution of EEG with the spatial resolution of fMRI. The project seeks to validate narrative theories that that to date have rested on interpretive approaches, rather than empirical, neurophysiological study. In so doing, the project aims to discover the neural network(s) involved in narrative comprehension and persuasion, and to come to a further understanding of how elements of existing narrative theories can induce or disrupt narrative understanding by the presence or absence of those structural components of narrative. Principal Investigator is Dr. Steve Corman,

The fact that you would even consider that we shouldn't is unfathomably depressing.

hell yes.

bring the troops home & triple the money.

The obama funded darpa neuro research that is starting now is legitimately new, experimental work in the most important frontier of our lives. Its an example of humanity at its best. Its exploring weird new terrains and it will have massive consequences. Far more exciting than space travel ever was.

so they are essentially studying how best to frame stories so that brainwashing is optimized, huh?

As much as they are also freeing the mind from its inherent brainwashing.