World Politics

[Anonymous]

I think it depends whether you take into account all the lower rulings and all the cases which were dismissed at an early state (granted most of them were initiated by absolute numbnuts which had no idea about how the legal system works).

Anyway, I agree with the rest of your sentiments. In the end it's about the bottom line. Of course, it's not like premiums aren't increasing under the current system. It'll be hard to argue what precisely is the cause of future increases.

The one thing I'm still surprised is that you defend 30 something males for not paying into any healthcare system. Even though they might not go to the doctor at all for quite some time, they're still depending on the present infrastructure eventually. May it be later when they're in their forties or fifties, may it be when their wives or girlfriends get pregnant, may it be if they have an emergency, a traffic accident or who knows what. These guys are freeloaders as far as I see it.

I don't disagree with this, except how does it make sense to force a 30year old to buy private health insurance?

I understand the reasons why they should. I have paid health premiums since I was out on my own. I think Vinson made a comparison... something to the effect of the State deciding it would be in the public interest to end homlessness so therefore everyone will be mandated to buy a house.

The difference of couse is the homeless live on the streets whereas the 30 year old uninsured gets medical care.

 

[Anonymous]

How many times have you said this? And yet you keep having to repeat it.

Why?

Because trolls see what kind of line annoys someone and then proceed to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.

Notice how he has never responded to you making this point. Hell just let it go then repeat it at a later date for maximum effect. In life they call it bullying. Small people who need to feel big kind of thing. On the internet its called trolling.

The best response is always the "dont feed the troll" method. You can put him on ignore like i have done. Then in your case you can go on having debates with your more sensible and cultured ideological opponents like cobblestones or TFF without getting into spats with someone whose only purpose is to derail things.

You are right but I get a kick out of Red. I'm the conservative but depend on him to let me know what's going on over at Fox and Rush Limbaugh.

 

[Anonymous]

Ok, I'll bite.

Do you see a constitutional issue with the mandated purchase of health insurance?

If this was about the poor would not coverage be extended to everyone?

I would argue providing an opportunity for the poor to not be poor anymore is far more compassionate than giving them enough to barely eek out an existance.

I guess we will disagree though.

Coverage will be extended to everyone by 2014, for those that cannot afford, there will coverage available.

What offer do the majority of poor have for not being poor? The fact is that in a capitalist system, the poor are a necessity. To believe that those at the top of the food chain do not disproportionately receive greater access and influence to the mechanisms of government is simply not realistic. To then suggest the greater proportion of policy does not benefit those with greater access and money is also not realistic.

We have gone round and round this ride before, and we sort of see each others point, but cannot quite agree.

Have a drink on me, and have a good evening.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Coverage will be extended to everyone by 2014, for those that cannot afford, there will coverage available.

What offer do the majority of poor have for not being poor? The fact is that in a capitalist system, the poor are a necessity. To believe that those at the top of the food chain do not disproportionately receive greater access and influence to the mechanisms of government is simply not realistic. To then suggest the greater proportion of policy does not benefit those with greater access and money is also not realistic.

We have gone round and round this ride before, and we sort of see each others point, but cannot quite agree.

Have a drink on me, and have a good evening.

I agree there has to be some type of health care available for folks who are the working poor. It is a shame we have to debate that but like anything else the poor are the one’s still not represented by either the conservatives or the democrats. A health care plan is a step in the right direction. Some changes need to be made with the current plan but I am confident it will work.

Does anyone else find it crazy that the judges recent ruling on the health care bill caused the Left side to say that it was an abuse of judicial power? That is the same argument the Right uses when they get put down on a judges ruling. It is always the same for the two sides, unable to find a common good cause and agree.

 

[Cobblestones]

I don't disagree with this, except how does it make sense to force a 30year old to buy private health insurance?

Well then make it a government run system and call it a tax. We both know that this would be entirely constitutional.

You agree they're freeloaders. So let's find a way how to make them pay. The mandate seemed like a compromise, because it keeps the private insurance system in place and was a republican idea to begin with (before it turned into the tea-party). If you don't like it, there's plenty of other ways to make them pay.

Glenn, about the judges. The hypocrisy of the right by calling every unwelcome judge under the sun an 'activist' is just coming home to roost. Societal change sometimes comes about through legislation, sometimes through the juridicial process. Everyone should just get used to it and shut up about the stupid 'activist' label. Civil rights, reproductive rights, gay rights. Look at the history. Change sometimes comes one way, sometimes the other. But it's also quite a bit of fun to make people on the right eat their own words.

 

[redtreviso]

Republicans are not opposing the health care reform bill because of any details, or to fix any flaws, They are opposed to the whole idea.. Anything that could be called "public".. like Public Health Care has been branded Socialist Health Care..Socialist...commie..

What strikes me most is commercials on tv with young couples talking about their dream to own a home..How they saved and saved for a down payment etc.. Working people doing all the right things to have a mortgage of 800 or 900 dollars a month..We should have commercials of people dreaming of owning a health insurance policy.. In most cases insurance costs more than a home.
Most people are going to put roof over their head and just pray they stay healthy.

 

[redtreviso]

Making little republicans.. Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLeQkuTGSOs

 

[Anonymous]

Coverage will be extended to everyone by 2014, for those that cannot afford, there will coverage available.

What offer do the majority of poor have for not being poor? The fact is that in a capitalist system, the poor are a necessity. To believe that those at the top of the food chain do not disproportionately receive greater access and influence to the mechanisms of government is simply not realistic. To then suggest the greater proportion of policy does not benefit those with greater access and money is also not realistic.

We have gone round and round this ride before, and we sort of see each others point, but cannot quite agree.

Have a drink on me, and have a good evening.

This depends on how "poor" is defined. Poor as in having many modern convieniences including a cell phone plan and cable television? Or poor like living on the streets eating out of a trash can. So, I don't accept your premise and that's likely the crux of our disagreements.

BTW, thanks for the beer. Firestone/Walker Union Jack. It went down very well.

 

[redtreviso]

This depends on how "poor" is defined. Poor as in having many modern convieniences including a cell phone plan and cable television? Or poor like living on the streets eating out of a trash can.

uhhhhh.. the big screen tv....Like cars, cell phones and cable tv might be the only things some can have that makes them think they have a toe hold on a pretend good life. Odds are you don't see someone from your neighborhood in a Lexus with a cell stuck to their head as someone spending their entire net worth to have those things..but on the other hand--well you know....You can tell "those people" that buy a 20 dollar a month cell phone plan when they should be getting a 1500 dollar a month health insurance policy with a 5000 deductible instead..Those poor looking people.....

 

[Anonymous]

Well then make it a government run system and call it a tax. We both know that this would be entirely constitutional.

You agree they're freeloaders. So let's find a way how to make them pay. The mandate seemed like a compromise, because it keeps the private insurance system in place and was a republican idea to begin with (before it turned into the tea-party). If you don't like it, there's plenty of other ways to make them pay.

Glenn, about the judges. The hypocrisy of the right by calling every unwelcome judge under the sun an 'activist' is just coming home to roost. Societal change sometimes comes about through legislation, sometimes through the juridicial process. Everyone should just get used to it and shut up about the stupid 'activist' label. Civil rights, reproductive rights, gay rights. Look at the history. Change sometimes comes one way, sometimes the other. But it's also quite a bit of fun to make people on the right eat their own words.

I wonder why the Obama admin didn't just go for broke with a full-on govt single payor system? Take out private insurance altogether.

 

[Anonymous]

uhhhhh.. the big screen tv....Like cars, cell phones and cable tv might be the only things some can have that makes them think they have a toe hold on a pretend good life. Odds are you don't see someone from your neighborhood in a Lexus with a cell stuck to their head as someone spending their entire net worth to have those things..but on the other hand--well you know....You can tell "those people" that buy a 20 dollar a month cell phone plan when they should be getting a 1500 dollar a month health insurance policy with a 5000 deductible instead..Those poor looking people.....

You are right. Everyone does the right things and no one games the system.

How silly of me.

 

[Hugh Januss]

I wonder why the Obama admin didn't just go for broke with a full-on govt single payor system? Take out private insurance altogether.

I'm gonna guess Insurance Company lobbyists with pockets full of Insurance Company's, I mean our, cash.

 

[redtreviso]

You are right. Everyone does the right things and no one games the system.

How silly of me.

Bottom line is you deserve and those you see so easily as undeserving do not.
Those who take the only 800 dollars they ever had and get a big screen tv are different than the fulllllllllly insured and benefited Lockheed worker whose employer never have problems that cost overrun appropriations from congress won't fix.

 

[Anonymous]

Bottom line is you deserve and those you see so easily as undeserving do not.
Those who take the only 800 dollars they ever had and get a big screen tv are different than the fulllllllllly insured and benefited Lockheed worker whose employer never have problems that cost overrun appropriations from congress won't fix.

I don't deserve many things. I actually pay for my health insurance and guess what? I don't have a big screen TV. Imagine that.

 

[Cobblestones]

I'm gonna guess Insurance Company lobbyists with pockets full of Insurance Company's, I mean our, cash.

Also known as the 'bipartisan compromise'.

 

[Anonymous]

I'm gonna guess Insurance Company lobbyists with pockets full of Insurance Company's, I mean our, cash.

If the lobbyists were that strong they would have never allowed the steps that were taken to be taken.

So, when I had my appendectomy was that your money that paid for it? I guess I should say "thanks."

 

[redtreviso]

I don't deserve many things. I actually pay for my health insurance and guess what? I don't have a big screen TV. Imagine that.

So what would it take to price you out? Insurance companies would rather have 1 of you at 1000 a month than 2 at 500..or 4 at 250..If they had their way those other 3 would be SOL no matter how responsible they are. If they thought they could only cover those that could afford 5000 a month they would do that too leaving the majority to dream of the luxury of going to the doctor..You could be proud of yourself that you can afford the 5000 and even more so that it is something others will have to do without.

Do you need to go laugh at homeless people for your steak to taste good?

 

[Hugh Januss]

If the lobbyists were that strong they would have never allowed the steps that were taken to be taken.

So, when I had my appendectomy was that your money that paid for it? I guess I should say "thanks."

Probably, I've been paying in between 3 and 4 hundred a month for at least the past 6 or 7 years and haven't been to the doctor in that time, you're welcome.

 

[rhubroma]

I wonder why the Obama admin didn't just go for broke with a full-on govt single payor system? Take out private insurance altogether.

Now you are talking sense, Scott SoCal.

The PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES ARE EVIL.

 

[rhubroma]

I don't deserve many things. I actually pay for my health insurance and guess what? I don't have a big screen TV. Imagine that.

In a civilized society, everybody deserves to be treated if they have a malady as an unalienable right, like due process, from the time they are born to the time they die. This belongs to the public domain and is the public's responsibility in any enlightened society.

Not everybody has the right, however, to own a car or a TV set. In democracy (as opposed to under say regime dictatorship), we would hope that more people have more access to the material comforts that make their existence more enjoyable, lessens the gap between the haves and the have nots, though this is a private affair, based on each citizens economic possibilities.

Removing healthcare from the public domain and placing it within the private sector is firstly uncivil, secondly unethical and thirdly demonstrates to what fanatical degree American society is predicated upon upholding so called individual freedom (I will not besmirch the word "right" by implicating it in this case) over the common well-being.

The rich in any society are a privileged class. After the French Revolution of 89, I see no reason why they shouldn't also be expected to pay for the health care of the destitute of society who would have no means otherwise to obtain treatment. Even after their taxes are spent they are still comfortably rich. Thus it is the very least they should be made to publicly give back for the privileged, no matter how hard they "worked for it", lives they live. Plus it reminds them that not everyone can "make it on their own", also because nobody really does or, as John Adams put it, for one American to be rich 500 people around the world need to be poor. What this means is, of course, the wealthy are only rich in relationship to how great the monetary/economic distance is between themselves and the masses. And privatized medical care caters to their economic means and interests, allows for the well-off to be legally to be free of any social responsibility toward the collectivity, and, worse, to the further detriment and exclusion of the poor and less economically capable. Such barbarity is simply indecorous in light of the class struggle and social advances of the modern democratic states, and yet it prevails to the great benefits of the private insurance industry.

If you feel that this is not the case, then I can only beg to differ with such a shallow and ultimately self-serving and egotistical world view. Because this is the prevailing view in my native land, it doesn't make me at all wonder,despite being the richest society on planet earth, why the US has such grave social welfare problems (for example it being the murder and crime capital of the First World community) that are not found to such a degree across the Atlantic, with the exception to a lesser degree of Britain (but only because of the Anglo-Saxon disease).

Not even the conservatives of of the Continent would argue that privatized health care is more righteous than socialized medicine, which only reinforces what a bunch of greedy, mendacious and self-centred folks the American conservative class is.

The Teaparty movement is only further confirmation of this.

PS: The argument about the poor "playing the system" is utterly pathetic, as if what are they supposed to do with the little cash they earn compared to the gargantuan sums enjoyed by the rich. Live responsibly? Not try to take as much out of the system as possible? I can only applaud them for doing so, considering the lopsided world we live in.

And, hey, guess what, socializing medicine means one less thing (if it makes you happy) the poor can buck the system on. Whereas privatized health care only gives them another reason to do it, terrible as this seems to you Scott SoCal. By contrast to me the way the Cheney's of the American society have accrued their personal wealth through lies, treachery, murder, guile, greed, BUCKING THE POLITICAL AND LEGAL SYSTEM in their favour (something which the poor could never get away with), controlling congress, the US secret service, Wall Street, the military, foreign puppet regimes and dictators, etc., etc., is far more problematical and the consequences far more considerable Scott SoCal.

The poor bucking the system, please.

 

[rhubroma]

That is a sick way to look at this.

Sick, but true.

Can one really be so naive, I ask myself. The Middle East has the worst types of governments that have always found the necessary pressure to bear in repressing society for as long as they have, mostly through US support. Bad, undemocratic governments in the region had for most of the past decades been good business for the US, upon which their survival also has largely depended. I have no doubt that, for example, if faced with the threat of political extinction the Saudi Royal family would take recourse to all means necessary to snuff the threat.

And if this were still good business (the easier option than facing a Saudi society actually empowered with self-determination and the threat of a Islamic fundamentalist take-over) for the powers behind the scenes in the US restricted elite at Wall Street and the oil block, a few hundred American citizens blown to smithereens on the NY subway system would be nothing to them to keep the Saudi Royalty in their position of power.

The cover up, in addition, would be child's play. Now that's cynicism for ya, not me stating it baldly.

Perhaps it is merely terrible coincidence that all of the 9-11 terrorists were Saudis, but not one came from Iraq and yet who did we invade? While even this war was based on the most fallacious propaganda drawn up by the neocon buddies of the oil industry, which provides adequate proof of the pure cynicism and manipulative ideological underpinnings that have already been employed to safeguard the nation's interests, especially those of an elite few who stand to profit enormously from the lies.

 

[Anonymous]

So what would it take to price you out? Insurance companies would rather have 1 of you at 1000 a month than 2 at 500..or 4 at 250..If they had their way those other 3 would be SOL no matter how responsible they are. If they thought they could only cover those that could afford 5000 a month they would do that too leaving the majority to dream of the luxury of going to the doctor..You could be proud of yourself that you can afford the 5000 and even more so that it is something others will have to do without.

Do you need to go laugh at homeless people for your steak to taste good?

You know, I've tried to have a dialogue with you. I guess Hitch is right.

 

[Anonymous]

Now you are talking sense, Scott SoCal.

The PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES ARE EVIL.

Of course. It must be this way otherwise the world makes no sense to you.

But why stop at insurance companies? C'mon, aren't all private for-profit companies evil?

 

[fatandfast]

Of course. It must be this way otherwise the world makes no sense to you.

But why stop at insurance companies? C'mon, aren't all private for-profit companies evil?

friend in his early 40's has a Lens Crafters franchise. If you see the amount of work/money that he goes through to collect from both government/private insurance companies, it's amazing that even a pair of glasses for a child don't cost 700 dollars. Over beer he constantly cries about selling his bike shop in S.Cal and moving east to be closer to family

 

[redtreviso]

Of course. It must be this way otherwise the world makes no sense to you.

But why stop at insurance companies? C'mon, aren't all private for-profit companies evil?

They can be..certainly more than all unions can be evil..I'm sure exxon sees the money people spend on tv's and phones (or clothes) could be going to them. Find people with disposable income and make them dispose of it to them. Our system cannot survive with every good or service commanding the ultimate price. Remember when ENRON's next idea was to buy up municipal water services? I'm sure the boardrooms of electric utilities talk about how great it would be if they could just double everyone's electric bill.. So there are some that could take all that in stride..The Ayn Rand world from a deeper H*ll..Maybe you see yourself as one of the winners here scott..or admire those that could or would gladly absorb $2000 a month electric bills and 600 dollar water bills 10 dollar a gallon gas. 1000 dollar to show up plumber etc.. knowing that it is just killing others forever. Not different than taking a cruise downtown to laugh at the homeless before grilling that steak. "ummmm that's good I'm so deserving" "I love me sooooo much"