LOL

I'm amused watching Republicans try and distance themselves from Trump like rats on a sinking ship.

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I am more amused by DC politics in general. This is another example. Trump had the best answer for him during his first interview where he said let the Dems wear this. He thought do not do anything and in his opinion as Obamacare was failing and about to crumble the Dems would own it and all the blame. Now between him and the legislators here he sits in a mess.

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Elections have consequences.

It just goes to show that Republicans do not really stand for free markets and limited government. They don't have the stones to pull back on an ever expanding entitlement state. Medicaid is an absolutely horrible and costly system, and the day of reckoning will be more difficult as time passes.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Just gotta wait a few more months for the FBI to finish framing Trump and then we get Pencecare, which will be an improvement over Trumpcare and Obamacare.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Pray for good health! The cost is only spiritual.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

What is your solution or what system is best in your opinion?

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libtard's personfied:

It's worked for me the past 10 years

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

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A Future To Believe In

I've described it in detail over the years on here. The biggest reason that costs are out of control is that people are largely insulated from the costs of the actual care. By that I mean, a large portion of the population is in Medicare or Medicaid, and those programs pay at a fixed rate to providers with little or no additional cost to the patient. Even worse, most employer provided plans have very large premiums with insufficient co-pays or deductibles to discourage overuse and/or change unhealthy behaviors. As such, it is like a health care buffet where people pay a large upfront fee to then consume limitless amounts of healthcare and drink so much damn soda that they have diabetes before their 40th birthday.

For the majority of the population, low premium, high deductible plans are the way to go over the current dollar trading schemes that are in place. Therefore, risky behavior is discouraged because people have to spend their own dollars on the first several thousand of medical costs, which are offset by much lower upfront premiums. However, there is a stop loss in place for expensive situations. These consumer driven plans are common now and matched up with HSA's. Ours was one of the first, and the transformation in the cost curve and behavior is dramatic. We have people in our office who were overweight for their entire lives that are now thin as can be. The entire culture has changed at a 5,000 person company.

We still need some sort of solution for the poor and elderly. I haven't thought much about how to make Medicare more cost effective. I would replace Medicaid with private plans funded by the government based on the consumer driven model and then fund an HSA like in fill account based on need.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Dennis you make good point but people do not want to do what is necessary to achieve that. Either some will not want to be responsible or will not want to manage the HSA/deductable/copays. People love the buffet.

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Elections have consequences.

Yeah, no shit, no one wants to deal with managing their "health savings accounts" on top of everything else they have to do. It's the same problem with Obamacare: nobody wants to deal with marketplaces and means testing and all that. People just want to be able to go to the doctor when they're sick, pay a reasonable amount for it, and not have to think a great deal about it. Everything doesn't have to be so byzantine.


"Limitless amounts of healthcare"? Again, there's no recreational heart surgery. I haven't seen a physician in years. I guess I've been fortunate that my ailments have only been mental in nature and that my lingering knee pain of the last 13 years has never gotten so bad that I've needed to do something about it, but I don't like thinking about the astronomical medical bills I'd face if I got hit by a car or shredded my knee or whatever.

As for condemning people for drinking soda, this has always seemed like a big blind spot of libertarianism for me. American overconsumption of soda is a function of what else but a free market, one where an unhealthy product is sold at competitive prices and marketed, marketed, marketed to the point where Coca-Cola has an unassailable position as part of American culture. And not just soda but alcohol and cigarettes and junk food and boner pills and motorcycles or things on electronic screens that are far more alluring than getting off your ass and going outside. The market encourages us to make impulsive reptile-brain self-destructive decisions at every turn because otherwise the whole enterprise falls apart (and also because for many Americans life is a fucking joyless slow-motion deathmarch where the only respites come in sugary/fatty/alcoholic form, or worse). Just take sports: make Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch's gargantuan ad buys disappear overnight and then try to run a baseball league. But I know you're not suggesting we just disappear Coca-Cola's outsize marketing presence -- rather, let them keep relentlessly selling it while expecting everyone to know better than to buy it. That'll last.

So what it comes down to is this idea that one is somehow "beating the game" by knowing better than to make the "unhealthy decisions" that the benighted masses can't help but make: you want a system that makes other people lose so you can win. You can say you want everyone to know better like you do, and that's admirable, more people should know better, but that can only reasonably come in the form of some dastardly central planning whether it's exorbitant sin taxes (which just punish consumers over producers) or onerous regulations on advertising like those placed on tobacco, which would seem unlikely given the unofficial agreement not to advertise anything harder than beer or wine on TV/radio has been soaked in Tito's Handmade Vodka and set on fire. This Mr. Burns health plan of making all the good workers do Iroquois twists every morning so they're healthy enough to pay their medical bills won't work in the grand scheme of things. Most people will just go bankrupt or get sick and die. You simply can't reconcile the ad-blitzing nature of the American free market with the belief that everyone should be strong enough not to fall victim to it -- something's gotta give even if you personally have an edge. Or you can accept that good health in the macro is a necessary casualty of capitalism and take care of the sickness our lifestyle incurs lest our whole society go down for the count into death and despair.

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I'm listening

that made my day.

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Ба́бушка гада́ла, да на́двое сказа́ла—то ли до́ждик, то ли снег, то ли бу́дет, то ли нет.

it has a MUCH better return rate than our defense budget...

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the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

Reading this post had me closer to relapsing than the unopened baggies/folds of fun I ran across at the bottom of my junk-drawer the other night.

Given the decline in watching advertising supported broadcast TV among the internet savvy set above 30 and in general below 30, the penetration of soda advertising has to have peaked and now be in full-on retreat. But I haven't seen any numbers on that. Tho I suppose duopoly shelf-space down at the local grocery and Pepsi/Coke machines in schools/workplaces maintains some level of unnecessarily/artificially high consumption.
I do recall the doctors in Super-Size Me advising dude in that film that if he simply dropped the full-sugar soda drinks from his order, the meals at MCD's weren't all that bad. Hey, hey, ho, ho--Big Soda has got to go.

Aside from Pulte Homes defense, this is why you have become a must read poster for me

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

This is extremely disturbing--this Capito Caller Bob in particular. The entire citizenry of West Virginia specifically and purposely voted to repeal their own health care. Who does she think she is saving them from themselves? Fuck her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/us/p ... ctionfront

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Soccer 1,2,3
Spanish Honor Society 1,2,3,4
Forensics 1,2,3,4

"Smiles with Nostrils"

"...no Hmong, go find some blacks"

Comrade Hair

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I'm sorry, I couldn't sleep last night. That was sinicalyptical. But Obamacare sucks and is going to fail and so will any "market-based" healthcare.

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It doesn't make you wrong. Just honest in my book

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

While I do not disagree with you, malpractice insurance and tort reform or missing from your statement. this is a huge factor in the ridiculous costs for all medical procedures.

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This is oft-repeated insurance co. lobbyist-driven fake news. First, tort "reform" is a state issue and medical malpractice cases are extremely difficult to prove up, even in the most liberal jurisdictions. Which is unfortunate given the sheer amount of malpractice that is committed by shitty, incompetent doctors. Medical providers are incentivized to perform procedures because they make nothing by doing nothing. Second, medical malpractice rates are not high and have virtually no effect on the cost of health care. Next time you see a doc, ask them what they pay.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/boo ... 62467.html

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Soccer 1,2,3
Spanish Honor Society 1,2,3,4
Forensics 1,2,3,4

"Smiles with Nostrils"

"...no Hmong, go find some blacks"

Voting because of anger and identity and a wish to return to the past--or, on the other hand, out of guilt--does not always work out for people.

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Market based health care has worked for decades. It's not perfect but no health care is.

As I've said many times, one of the biggest problems we have today with healthcare is the government and how bad they're at 2/3 of it with the other niche market they cover being average at best.

We have a single payer education system. Where does it rank? How much cheaper is it?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: when I made my name on forum.watmm.com it was as "sinicalyptical Caller Bob"

I used to say "sinicalypticality happens" tho, so I guess I shouldn't be as weirded out by someone else using my name as.... An adverb? Is thst right? I mean it's not a full-on noun, it's definitely not an adjective, and it's not quite a verb.... So adverb?

[Goes off on a 19 paragraph "sinicalyptical" kick about how this reminds him of a time some allegorical deity approached him on the L]

But hey you know what? Say what you want about me, but I swear to god it's like a bad dream in inception when you're riding the L and the person in the seat in front of you turns around to reveal he's wearing ~10 bracelets like you are on his right arm (I only had 1, he had like ~10/+) and then you notice he has your # scribbled all up and down that arm (meant to look like tattoos... But they couldn't be, right?) and he implores you to go to w certain dive bar in oak park...

...which you do, but nothing of consequence happens outside of a guy there happening to be named Timothy Dalton (he furnished ID to prove this) which is also the name of your favorite song of thst summer -- what an odd co-eenky-dink, no?

...and then when you leave you're sick of being goaded into situations (at least you figure you filled your quota for thst night) so you walk past the cabbie sitting in his cab right next to the bar you were at and go up to Madison & Harlem to call up a cab to take you home.... However 303/flash taxi claims that Madison & Harlem in oak park doesn't exist. You seriously go "huh? Wtf?" And try to make this obvious to them (get off 290 at Harlem, go north, you'll see me at the Wendy's a few lights up) but no go...

...so you call American taxi and they too claim that Madison and Harlem in oak park doesn't exist. When you try to make it even easier like "ok meet me at the gas station right there on the north side of Harlem right off of 290 they tell you to sober up and call them back for a ride when you have a real intersection, so you just kinda hang up like "wtf" and proceed to walk back to the cabbie reading a book in his cab right in front of the bar you were at and hey whaddya know even w/o the fire hire sign lit up he's for hire and willing to take me home...

...and of course when you unwittingly drop your copy of the Illuminatus! Trilogy on the floor of his cab (not even noticing you did so) the next time you're In oak park a few weeks later OF COURSE out of nowhere you hear HONK HONK and the cabbie pulls up like "hey you forgot this in my car" hands you your [in/conveniently bible-sized] book and shoots you a world class shit eating grin as he promptly drives off, never to be seen again.

As always, I'd like to thank the law of fives for making [all] this impossible!

>sinicalypticality happens

P.S. I figured out later on thst Harlem & Madison is technically in FOREST Park not Oak Park, but still I was making it flagrantly obvious that I was at a major intersection roughly 6 blocks from the CTA Green Line station in one direction and interstate 290 in the other direction (and I would have walked to either one of those), you know, major arterial streets. Both cab companies claimed that the intersection didn't exist.... What a co-eenky-dink, no?

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Also, I'd like to add that it has to be at least "fairly ironic" that there's such a thing as "trumpcare" when it's been proven time snd time again that #DRUMPF doesn't care about ANYONE other than himself... =P

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Whatever. He cares about his hot daughter very much.

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the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

From an article in the Trib today about a shooting victim:



Does $1125/hr seem reasonable for emergency care?

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