The Glade 4.0

This is why no one takes you seriously. You're like a **** cartoon.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

How in the **** is tellign them they can't have Viagra on the public dime asking them to sacrifice "everything"?



We could save a lot of that money by not stimulating and not bailing out idiots, and in any case, teachers with erectile disworking dicks function are really worth a lot less than low tax rates.



Yes, this pretty much demonstrates how bad they are.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So let me get this straight...a male's ability to "get it up" should somehow be paid for with my tax dollars so he doesn't feel physiologically or psychologically impaired...yet if I wish to have a fatty lump removed from my eyelid or have some wrinkles removed or a boob job to ease my mental state and appreciation of self I have to pay for it myself???

Oh, Monte...and here I thought you were all for protecting the women of the world from male dominance! Obviously you're not when it comes to your own masculinity!!

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Wouldn't actually save us money in the long term. It would cost us. Without the bailouts, stimulus, etc, we would have doubled our job losses and fell into a true Depression. That means less revenue. Those measures saved our **** bacon.



Yes, yes. Unions are evil. They work for the benefit of their members. Look how evil they are, with their evil 40 hour work weeks, their evil health care benefits, and the way they eeeeevily protect their members. Evil I say! Like, long mustache evil.

Question, DE - were you ever part of a police officer's union?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Stop talking about things you clearly don't understand. One poorly taught intro to econ class and a dismal background in math does not an economist make... or do I have the professional authority to critique classical swordsmanship because I just finished reading about Rand Al' Thor's heron marked blade?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Unions aren't evil but they have served their purpose. They screw up things nowadays. All they do now is make sure the dems have a voting block that can be bought and paid for.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

No we wouldn't, and no they didn't. The entire idea is absurd. You've been pwned repeatedly on this and I'm not rehashing everyone else's arguments. They're far more convincing than you.



No. Nor was I in a union at the prison I worked at.

That said, I have no problem with fire, police, and prison unions (although I don't like them; I think they are a necessary evil to protect workers from citizens, the press, and superiors attempting to trump up complaints; I'd really rather they were replaced by non-union advocacy groups like OPBA that didn't do collective bargaining) because those unions cannot strike.

Teachers unions would be acceptable (although not good) if they were forbidden to go on strike. They do serve a function in protecting teachers who are nutcases, or taking blame for administrative failures, but teacher strikes are a tremendous social evil. They hold children's education hostage to squeeze people for money, and teachers are generally overpaid as it is.

They also **** substitute teachers right in the ***. When there's budget cuts, substitutes who are paid a pittance by comparison, take the cuts. You have to "pay your dues" as a sub, and if you aren't suitably obsequios when you are one, you'll never get hired there as a regular teacher. There are no raises as a sub as a general rule. My wife has been a substitute since I met her 8 years ago. In 2002 she made $100 a day for a job that requires a college degree. Now she makes $90. That's due to teacher's unions making a school district budget 80% inflexible and demanding a raise every year so they can buy their boats and new cars.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh, Damn. There goes the white knight projection that's been so painstakingly propagated. How dare you use someone's own words to lay bare their hypocrisy and destroy a life's work of internet gallantry? You sharp-tongued she-evil!

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Racist.

Purely as devil's advocate here, but what about the studies that suggest that men who have regular orgasms have a 3-4x lower rate of prostate cancer? Insurance companies pay for preventative medicine (or with cash back incentives) and wellness programs, including weight loss regimens, gym memberships, etc.

One of the problems I have with these types of studies, is the lack of behavioral reference.

Sure, men who have sex X amount of time fewer may have a higher peredeliction towards Y, but what are they doing that leads them to have sex fewer times? Small study groups can't encompass prior lifetime behaviors. Is in not plausable, if not probable, that it is those other things that led to them not having sex which caused the cancer?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

no but they should pay taxes

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Ron Paul 2012

Remove your personal situation from the equation for a minute and think about the actual facts. We get it, you don't want to have pay for it yourself anymore, and are looking forward to being able to use your fiancee's education system health plan to cover the treatment. But it is really worth the jobs of so many other teachers, or the education of children, so you can get your sword out of the sheath?

Yes and yes!

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm signing up for Medicaid ASAP. I don't think I'd like the quality of treatment provided by my HMO.

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Hooker Management Organization?

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Holy shitsnacks!

Erectile dysfunction, while a problem, is not a dangerous health issue. It is not like surgery or medicine for physical sickness. It doesn't affect an employee's work function in the least.

I also view the school's $30 million debt as irrelevant to the issue, especially from lack of information. We don't know why they are in so much debt. Perhaps they built a really fancy indoor pool.

The union here is trying to squander as much as they can. It's the nature of unions, and of most entities, I guess. If they win, it's simply by technicality of contractual terms. By most ethical standards the teachers union is being greedy.

While the union's actions in this case (assuming there isn't more to the story) are over the top, I don't think the underlying idea that ED treatment should be covered by insurance is ridiculous. After all, we're talking about restoring normal function when a body part/system stops working due to illness or injury, not a purely elective enhancement like a boob job or a face lift. That said, many standard insurance plans limit even vision/dental coverage to acute problems (e.g. accidental injury, infection or other disease, etc.) and don't cover basic corrective treatments like glasses, fillings, root canals, etc. It's pretty hard to argue that the ability to have sex is as fundamentally necessary to a person's well-being as the ability to see clearly or, you know, have teeth.

So, long story short, I don't have a problem with insurance plans choosing not to cover ED treatment for cost reasons, but I think it's a mistake to view such treatment as purely elective or to consider arguments in favor of covering it as obviously silly or lacking in perspective.

[Emphasis mine]

Did you read the thread up to this point? Serious question.



Why? Again, evidence discussed so far in the thread indicates it is elective.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I think you have a good point about ED being serious enough for insurance. ED is indeed a bodily function and it should be remedied. Note however that dental insurance is often separate from normal healthcare. I am not sure if ED should be covered under a standard health plan.

edit: poor reading comprehension on my part

Sorry for the delayed response. Not really much to add, but didn't want you to think I was dodging the question. Honestly, I didn't read the whole thread. I skimmed the first page and the last page, which left me with the impression that the thread was mostly jokes, commentary on the union aspect, and shots back and forth with Monte, so I didn't bother reading the second page. As a result, I missed the bulk of the discussion about depression and body image rationales for covering ED and plastic surgery.

Having read through it now, though, my opinion hasn't really changed, as it wasn't based on preventing the psychological harm some people experience as a result of ED. Rather, I just think there's a pretty clear difference between restoring normal function to a body part that isn't working the way it's supposed to and enhancing something that is already in the "normal" range. The latter is much more properly referred to as "elective". And for the sake of clarity, I'll note that my reference to cosmetic surgery was in regard to the classic "she just wants bigger boobs" kind of thing, not skin grafts for burn victims or even boob jobs for breast cancer survivors.

Now, whether or not cosmetic surgery is purely elective for someone with a mental illness like body dismorphia is an interesting question in its own right, but doesn't seem exactly on point w/ respect to a condition like ED where the body part in question actually is malfunctioning/abnormal.

Again though RD... what causes ED?

If it were truly a physical condition, which would require muscular problems, nervous system problems or circulatory problems, you would have a point that treatment should be covered to correct that issue.

However, causes because of choices of the individual (diet) or psychosomatic?

Are anti-depressants covered under the plan? Is therapy?

It may or may not make sense, but insurance plans generally distinguish between direct treatment of mental illness (e.g. anti-depressants and therapy) and treating the physical symptoms associated with it (e.g. hypertension or digestive disorders related to chronic anxiety/stress). I'm not sure I see why psychologically-induced/aggravated ED should be any different. As for diet, again, insurance generally covers lots of physical conditions that are caused or aggravated by poor lifestyle choices (e.g. heart disease, diabetes, etc.), so why not ED?

Also, I'm a little unclear on whether you're saying that drugs like Viagra are effective for treatment of ED caused by physical conditions, or only for treatment of ED caused by psychological conditions. Can you clarify?

Lack of sex doesn't cause cancer, being a nerd causes cancer!