The Glade 4.0

There's this "mandatory unpaid internship" thing again. WTH?


Also, hilariously (built by a couple dudes with a budget of zero):
http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/

Basically what healthcare.gov should probably have looked like.

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

I've never encountered it, but then I didn't get a bullshit degree, either.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You also weren't 25 when you got it. You did it on your 2nd go-round. Generally, that produces better willingness to focus on academics and the discipline necessary for hard majors.

Not everyone is ready for college at 18.

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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, 1 in 3 sounds "likely" to you? Overall coverage is irrelevant because pre-ACA you can't get coverage any other way if you have a severe chronic illness.



"Refusing" to work? "Too lazy" to get a job of a decent employer? Your bias is showing. You're right, there are absolutely no other possible reasons someone with a child didn't have a job that provided insurance pre-ACA.

Also, it doesn't need to be a genetic condition, basically any chronic illness acquired before age 25 that requires treatment in order for you to be able to work results in the same problem. It's not amazingly common, but it's not rare either. There's nothing hypothetical here.



I don't really disagree with this, but the same is true of any system that doesn't just tell all the people with chronic health problems, "Pay for your treatment or die."

Demonstrably false. Here's a list of ways:

Medicare disability
Medicaid
Some methods of Individual insurance
Faith-based co-op
Employer-based coverage
Spousal employer coverage


You're just factually wrong.

This isn't to mention things (that aren't coverage, but still means to access care) like:

Free health clinics
Hospital-based NFP Charity services
Veterans Administration Care
Faith-based charitable assistance



I know I'm right, that's why you didn't bother to actually refute the point.



Actually, it is literally hypothetical, because until you present concrete examples there is no other way to describe the position you're espousing.

You're also wrong, given that I just listed a bunch of methods by which you could acquire coverage and/or care.



Glad you agree with my core point; however, I wish you and all the Democratic party buddies of yours would back the latter part up or shut the **** up about it. Seriously, I'm tired of this being the liberal standpoint.

"Waaah, conservatives and libertarians want sick people to die."

No we don't, you bunch of assholes. We want people to carry their own goddamned weight when they can, and take responsibility for their decisions.


[Multiple edits for clarity and tonal revisions]

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

To clarify, for DFK

There are university programs where one of the requirements for graduation is completion of a year internship at a local firm. Teaching springs most readily to mind. Because these internships are required for graduation, they don't pay money. After all, if you don't work the internship, you don't graduate. The schools whore out their students as slave labor. Students who, it should be pointed out, are paying a large sum of money for the privelege of working for free. It is a reprehensible practice.

Students generally don't know any better, because nearly all of us went to high school, and this is simply "how it is" for high school teachers. You work for free for a year as a requirement to graduate. This produces high school graduates who think working for free in an unpaid internship is "how it is."

I can not list specific programs, but I am aware of several in the St. Louis area that do this. Now, curiously none of the ABET accredited institutions in the area have this requirement. I am not aware of any such program in the country that requires a year internship to graduate. All of the internships in the Greater St. Louis area for engineers pay money. From anecdotal evidence (Lex, for instance) those outside the area seem to pay money as well. They don't pay a lot of money, but if a young man is willing to live in a shithole apartment and drive a beat up rustbucket, he can graduate with no student loan debts. Age is not a factor. Some of these places offer health insurance for their interns, who are working full-time.

So mandatory unpaid internships are bullshit. I'm sorry for anyone who got suckered into one, but it's your own damned fault for not telling your school and your prospective slave master to go **** themselves. You could have switched majors. You definitely should have drug your advisor out into an alley and beaten him or her with a broom handle - a type of reform that is sorely lacking in all levels of the American educational system.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

But Steve Jobs said to do what you love and the money will follow!!! You corporate schill.

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Funny. I do what I love, and I get paid for it.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Do you love finger-painting because that seems to be the most common major (or its equivalent) I've seen coming out of college.

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What is wrong with the chart above?

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hard to tell if the units on the right are supposed to be hundreds of thousands. I find it unlikely there were only 2-400 visitors who visited the website. I suspect all those value are supposed to be thousands (500,000, 400,000, 300,000, etc) Its poorly labeled, but not nearly so misleading as say, a fox news graph.

That's what you use as a measure of misrepresentation - a fox news graph?

How about "not so misleading by far as, say, the promise that folks that liked their healthcare coverage could keep it".

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In time, this too shall pass.

I fail to see how you feel the graph is a misrepresentation. I can't speak to the numbers themselves but the graph seems reasonable.

this:
http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/1 ... rts/190225

Ok. Since this whole argument was about "employer-based health coverage or Medicaid" that leaves the first two and the fifth one out. You don't get disability if you're working and that leaves you with exactly the same dilemma. I went and looked up faith-based co-ops and it sure seems to me that they also screen for pre-existing conditions, the ones I've found say they will not accept people who already have serious diseases or have obvious risk factors. (obesity, smoking, promiscuity, etc.) I guess spousal-based employer coverage does count as another option, but do you want to open the can of worms associated with suggesting that sick people marry someone for their insurance coverage? If I suggested doing that for something like citizenship you'd probably never let me hear the end of it.



I'll concede this point, you can get care if you get it from a source that's basically charity.




First, that statement doesn't imply that you want sick and poor people to die, it implies that you don't care if they do.

Second, any kind of unearned handout, whether it comes from the government or not, constitutes a incentive to both not work and/or to not increase your wages. Seriously, any philosophy more lenient than "succeed or die" means that you're OK with some amount of "disincentives," and now we're just arguing about how many and where they should come from. Thus, when you suggest something is bad policy just because it's a "disincentive to work," you are indirectly suggesting that we should adopt a "succeed or die" system.

Third, if you don't want to get labeled as an uncaring and arrogant, maybe you should try taking a position that doesn't suggest you have contempt for the vast majority of the country. You've actually gone past the already laughable position of "anyone who is unemployed for any reason is lazy" to confirming you actually believe that "anyone who is underemployed for any reason is lazy." Then there's your response to the illness situation. You see, as your own statistics have shown, having a full-time job with good health benefits at age 25 is an above-average result for college degree holders. The majority haven't achieved that. That's just amongst degree holders, so it's a significantly above average result compared to the general population. Despite this, you chose to **** on this achievement by suggesting it's easy to accomplish and that if she were a person of value, she'd have no problems accomplishing it. That doesn't say a whole lot for your opinion of the two-thirds of the country who also haven't reached that particular mark.

You know, I've always had trouble figuring out how people could really believe that anyone who is unemployed for any reason is just lazy, but you just helped me figure it out. Conservatives who spout this actually think almost everyone is lazy. Someone who "just" works a 9-to-5, 40 hour/week job is already inexcusably lazy in their eyes, so someone that's actually unemployed and makes their survival your problem is just a miserable excuse for a human being. A real American would get a second-full time job, or go to school on top of the job. These conservatives want the US to adopt the work hours of the slave laborers in China, but not only that, they think that such hours shouldn't be forced on us, but that we should choose to work that much voluntarily, and the fact that we don't just fills them with disgust. 40 hours/week is a vacation! Overtime? You think you should get paid extra to work more than forty hours? God, what kind of lazy worthless degenerates are we raising today?

I'd have a hard time labeling myself a "conservative" as you define it, that said, yes, if that someone who makes their survival my problem, and they're able-bodied enough to do some sort of work and choose not to, they are a pretty miserable excuse for a human.



There is a reason why the US was the pinnacle of a rags to riches story, rising from a colony to the world's greatest power in the space of two lifetimes. There's also a reason why the US has slid so far down that residents of other countries are almost content that they're our betters again. The work ethic you deride is the reason for the former, and the fact that you and your ilk feel comfortable deriding it is the reason for the latter.

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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

That depends. Do you mean the silly shorthand they tried to use on the Y axis, or the data represented by the chart? The former's been covered, so I'll address the latter.

This is data for only Washington, Kentucky, and Connecticut. Those states represent about 14.6 million people in the 2010 Census. Given that the same Census recorded 308.7 million and change total in the US, those states represent 1 in 21.1 US residents. So, I'll use 1:21 to extrapolate data nationally. I'm also too lazy to look up which states have their own individually administered exchanges, and simply assume that their numbers would mirror those of Healthcare.gov's.

So, this graph indicates that we can expect that we shut down our government for 3 weeks fighting over whether 23.4 million people nationwide (7.6% of our population) could look up plans on health care exchanges. We assumed they'd want to do this so they could, you know, buy the affordable health care that the Affordable Care Act was named after. So, how many people decided they needed to buy Affordable Care? Hmm. Looks like about 2.7 million people decided there was an Affordable Care plan that was right for them, and better than what they were able to get (or the nothing that their previous plans' cancellation left them with). That's .88% of the people in America.

So, of those .88% of folks in America for whom the plans offered on the exchanges are glorious saviors riding, iron-clad, upon gleaming white horses to protect them... how many people could attract said white knights' attention? Oh, about a million, nation-wide. Yeah, a third of a percent.

That's what we shut down government to fight over. Whether a third of a percent of our populace could get accepted for insurance plans that only even appear to be attractive to about one in 113 people.

Taking those numbers as accurate, at least, and representative among the states.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This argument was about whether people can get healthcare coverage, pre-ACA if they have pre-existing conditions. Period. Don't change the goalposts.



Yes, you can get it. I've had 2 employees thus far in my career with it, and I'm not that old.



Everybody screens. That doesn't mean they deny.



No, but people with disabled kids (or themselves) DO get married. All the time. So it's an option.



Your tone seems to indicate this is bad. Why?



Correct. Nobody except my family and friends cares if I die, why should I care about "random poor person X." I also don't care if rich people die.



Not at all. That you interpret it that way speaks to your mindset in a very interesting way, though.



Except I didn't say "anyone who is unemployed for any reason is lazy" nor did I say "anyone who is underemployed for any reason is lazy." Again, you have interpreted it that way, probably due to your own bias.

Now, I did say, essentially, that those able to work who do not work at a job that offers benefits (in a pre-ACA context) did so by choice. Which is to say, laziness. Post-ACA, I anticipate a lot of us to lose our benefits. Khross has stated to me that he's lost his already, as an anecdotal example.


Further, you have failed to understand the statistical results.


You need to stop bringing your baggage from your life into this. 84-86% of this country (roughly) was insured before Obamacare. Less than 5% of the population received insurance from individual plans. Estimates from professionals, not Xeq the bitter board poster, indicated that less than 5% and as few as 1% of the population were not acquiring insurance because they couldn't, with the majority of the uninsured being so by choice.

This is further confirmed by some of the low enrollment rates for Obamacare, that is: people didn't need it.



That's amazing, considering I didn't say that.



It fills me with disgust when people who "just" work 9-5, and choose not to better themselves with any education, that want to earn what I earn, yes.

People who "just" work 9-5, and choose not to better themselves with any education, yet go home and don't ***** and complain about things in life in regards to the "fairness" of pay in the world? Good for them. They've achieved the level of monetary success they wanted, it would seem.

As for those who are unemployed but want to make others pay their way? Are they unemployed by circumstances in their control, or out of their control? If they latter, **** them. Yes. If out of their control? We should assist them at a level the democratic process in each state deems appropriate.

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

Small Business owner perspective - Mine
I have 7 full time employees and 2 part time(college students under 20/hrs week)
For my full time employees I provide an insurance plan that by all standards would be a Platinum plan, low co-pays for Doctors, Hospital, and Prescriptions. also a $1500 dollar a year deductible per person, $3000 a year for family. also included in the plan is optical, dental and life(life option is also available for family members). I also provide an Hsa account that I contribute a 1 for 1 match up $3000
For next year the cost to keep the plan increased by 38.2%. of the total costs I ask that my employees contribute 40% of their share of coverage. average about $600/month.
under Obamacare they can get a platinum medical only plan for that price, but no other benefits
none of my full time employees will qualify for any subsidy, even based on family coverage.
I value my employees greatly, I Like to believe I pay them well. but I'm also here to make a profit and cover my expenses. somewhere along the line there has to be balance, With the rising costs for insurance, and complying with new and upcoming government regulations, it's getting harder and harder.
So if my costs to stay in business continue to rise, what are my options, trim costs, reduce overhead, reduce benefits, sell the business(I've had very attractive offers),
But I've spent the last 20 years building this up.
My personal income forecast for this year is only 20% higher than my highest paid employee.
depending on what happens with insurance over the next year will effect me greatly, do I drop coverage and give them all raises to help them pay for their own coverage with less overall benefits. do I raise my rates and risk losing clients.
There is nothing good coming down the pipe because of the healthcare law. it is going to hurt a lot of people and businesses.

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History of the Condom
In 1272, the Muslim Arabs invented the condom, using a goat's lower intestine.
In 1873, the British somewhat refined the idea, by taking the intestine out of the goat first.

The original post that you responded to was me saying that Obamacare is preventing someone I know from needing employer coverage by age 25 in order to avoid having to sit on Medicaid for a lifetime, and thus not work. I didn't change anything.



You probably know more about this than me due to your job, but I checked into this and from what I can find, you get Medicare coverage if you have been receiving disability payments from Social Security for 24 months or more, but if you have "substantial" (>$1,070 annually) earnings, you can no longer collect SS disability benefits after nine months. So I don't see how someone can get Medicare insurance and still be working.




What would be the point of screening, then?



You're telling me that Obamacare, by itself, changed the dynamic so that now, for the first time in US history, it's possible for a "non-lazy" person to exist who cannot provide himself with health benefits despite wanting to? This is a pretty big stretch.



I never said it was a common occurrence. I already admitted that it was uncommon, in fact.

You see, the thing is, liberals want to make sure they cover everyone. A few percent of the population needing care and unable to get it is still millions of people. The charity thing also falls under this. I don't think it's bad that charity exists, I just think it's not going to reliably catch everything. By the same token, I am well aware that the majority of people on welfare are either lazy or abusing the system, but lacking a crystal ball that magically determines who is and who isn't, I'd rather we pay the abusers than strip the assistance from those who really need it.

I would also respect someone who thinks that welfare on a whole is not worth it, that the costs outweigh the benefits because you're wasting a lot of money on a lot of lazy people. I would also respect someone who doesn't like welfare because it's basically taking money from people who earned it and giving it to people that didn't. What bothers me is when someone declares that fully one hundred percent of all welfare recipients are lazy wastes of oxygen that are fully responsible for their own situation and deserve no help because of this.



I don't know what you earn. I wasn't attributing that last paragraph to you specifically, but you went on a rant on what "liberals" do so I felt like I could do the same. And yes, I know conservatives who believe that hourly employment is "not a real job" because overtime acts as a disincentive for your employer to give you more than 40 hours. "Real Americans" have salaried jobs and do as much work as is necessary. They believe that working your *** off is a moral imperative and anyone that does not do so, regardless of how much they actually make per hour or how much they spend, is beneath contempt. If you're not putting in at least sixty hours a week, you're contributing to the downfall of this country, even if you're getting paid $500/hour.

I definitely agree with the in/out of your control part, but remember that what does and does not count as "out of your control" is VERY subjective and you can stretch that pretty far in either direction depending on how liberal or conservative you are.

Yay! I have health insurance now so let's engage in risky behaviors because that'll totally drive insurance costs DOWN!

http://news.yahoo.com/new-pro-obamacare ... 27303.html

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College age to mid twenties kids seem to be the targets of these ads (the healthy kids who will pay and pay and not use insurance). But these are now convered under their parent's plans till 26 so why would they pay more when they can put the costs on their parents?

It's like the government doesn't even understand econom....oh yeah.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Wait...

That's an actual ad for ObamaCare? Are you serious?

I thought it was some kind of Onion parody....

holy...

Its a Colorado thing. Not affiliated with the feds, but trying to get twentysomethings to join the marketplace. Because if they don't, then the whole thing falls apart.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Of course not, but he said "when the process started". I'm just pointing out that his 88% was waaay off. People wanted reform.

Nonsense.

[quote]Reform for a broken system, because other people are suffering its impacts, is not the same as reform for me.

yes, i misunderstood what you were trying to say here. this is true. people wanted the system reformed, but generally wanted to be left alone about it, in terms of care and available coverage.