The Glade 4.0

I am pretty sure that healthcare platforms have nothing to do with having enough energy to provide heating and cooling needs for the population.

We're already seeing idiots advocating against AC, even though every time there's a heat wave people - especially old people - die from it.

Another thing I'm pretty sure about is that you would never have said this in the past. If you want to have a personal epiphany, fine, but lay off the snarky bullshit. Neither side is actively trying to make things worse for people they hate, no matter how good it makes you feel about your newfound religious conversion.

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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."

Nah, just the republicans that want to deny civil rights to people, want to repeal the law that provided healthcare to a section of the populace that didn't have it, would rather spend money on wars and conflict that would be better spent at home on infrastructure...

But nothing *active*.

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Holy shitsnacks!

The Affordable Care Act drove up insurance premiums across the board, caused a marked and demonstrable decrease in offerings by the three largest healthcare providers in the country, and eliminated a competition for healthcare in a significant number of markets. It didn't help anyone, if you know the facts.

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Except all those people who can now get insurance who couldn't before.

Jill Stein also treats homeopathy as a credible alternative to modern medicine and while not a full blown anti-vaxxer she's been pretty vocal that she's "skeptical" of them as well.

You really have gone off the deep end with the leftist talking points, haven't you? Nothing like oversimplified strawman arguments to convince yourself of your newfound righteousness, amirite?

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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."

The net effect has, essentially, been to help no one. For many of these people, they're being forced to get insurance that they actually can't afford or don't really want by the tax penalty provision.

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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."

Just the truth man. Just the truth. I see with my own eyes the injustices committed by the government, and lament the hatred spewed by the right. Can you defend the denial of civil rights to a segment of the populace? Can you defend the waste of money that we have poured into the middle east for no good result? Can you deny that people that did not have insurance before now have access to it (granted, ACA isn't perfect, but its the best we got when the goddamn insurance companies got their paws all up in it. We need single payer and to take private insurance out of the equation. Healthcare should not be a commodity.)

It is what it is. I'd rather help people and make sure people aren't hungry, sick, or crippled by medical debt than spend trillions of dollars on a goddamn plane or failed wars in the middle east that we don't seem to want to prosecute to completion. Trump would rather build walls, profile muslims, and place justices that would revert 20 years of social progress. The republicans would rather waste time trying over and over and over to repeal ACA rather than come up with a better solution to implement. The republicans refused to allow a vote on a new USSC justice because they're petty **** that don't want to do their constitutional duties.

So yeah, **** those ****.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Oh, I don't know, I bet the muckety-mucks of insurance companies feel helped. They feel the <3 <$ !

And will you deny the many more that were priced out of insurance they had and now go without or with significantly worse coverage? Or the people who couldn't afford health coverage, still cannot, and now will get fined for it?

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The Dude abides.

What type of half-assed idiotic system did they implement? I've never understood obamacare.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

No, I won't deny that. Its part of the "ACA isn't great, but its what we have." But, I blame those rate increases on the insurers. They wrote the **** thing, now, they're whining that its not fair, and they can't make as much money as they thought they were going to be able to.

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Holy shitsnacks!

They basically took the worst parts of single payer, and the worst parts of the private insurance BS we had before and crammed them together. That's what happens when you let the insurance companies write the legislation.

And its *still* better than what we had.

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Holy shitsnacks!

The thing about Obamacare is it looks terrible if you are lower middle class or richer. As long as you were wealthy enough to have a job that offered a group health plan, you already had all the protections Obamacare offered to everyone. Those plans could not discriminate based on pre existing conditions and had to treat everyone equally. Obamacare offered those protections and coverage to 50 million poor people without coverage and made everyone else pay for it, of course that looks bad for everyone else.

I don't know what people were expecting from Obamacare, really. Of course it's an economic net negative, any government subsidy program is. Obamacare has definitely created a group of people who are too wealthy to qualify for subsidies but don't get insurance from work and can't afford the exchange plans. On the other hand, before Obamacare you had people who literally could not work at all because they relied on Medicaid to manage their conditions. They didn't qualify for jobs that provided insurance and couldn't work their way up because that would mean losing their Medicaid. You also had a lot of employed people with chronic conditions that were essentially serfs, they couldn't afford COBRA and due to their conditions no individual insurer would touch them. As a result they couldn't survive even a brief period of unemployment as that would mean their medication would be cut off.

I recently went through a major career change that involved 3 months of unpaid training, during which things happened, forcing me to opt into COBRA. Thankfully COBRA coverage is retroactive.

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Looking it up, it looks like the ACA is costing american taxpayers about $5000 per american citizen (whether or not they benefit from it), per year.

Ontario's universal health insurance (OHIP), which provides the same coverage for everybody (it makes no distinction based on income) costs about $2100 per citizen, per year.

Quality of service and patient care outcome in Canada and the USA are generally about the same, with Canada better in some areas and the USA better in others. In all cases, they're similar enough that the cost should be similar.

Something is wrong with the ACA.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You are talking about a law where Nancy Pelosi argued, on the floor of Congress that "we need to pass it to find out what's in it!" This law was never passed with the intent of helping anyone; it was passed with the intent of being terrible, so that the Right could advocate to get rid of it, and the Left could (at the same time) accuse them of hating poor people, while promising a solution that will really work, no really it will, if only we have more government control and more money thrown at it.

It's not like Canada or Germany where healthcare is uncontroversial because it's a service the taxpayer has already paid for and simply expects and no part of the political spectrum has an interest in upsetting that particular applecart. Here, social programs are a source of identity-based votes. Ever wonder why ALL of them are so costly and yet accomplish so little? It's because if they worked right and people were happy with them, the Left couldn't complain about not enough money being spent on them because of "hate", and the Right couldn't make arguments about "government waste" (aside from arguments to abstract principle that few people will listen to when a program materially works).

The problem we have is that the Left has no interest in fair, effective social programs that would do things like actually provide healthcare to all at a reasonable price because there would be nothing to complain about. The Right would love to be fiscally conservative, but it can't because it has been unable to figure out a way to articulate to the public that these programs are not intended to help anyone, so it therefore has no interest in getting rid of them because if you can't get what you want, you may as well milk shitlords for money with unrealistic "Tea Party" movements to enrich your incompetent consultants.

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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."

I suspect that if you review the following you'll find the vast majority of the delta:

Doctors salaries
Hospital administration costs
Drug prices

How about we add to that a population that demands drugs for everything, sees the emergency room as its general care clinic, allows an anti-vaccine movement to seriously flourish, and promotes a ridiculous health-at-any-size movement?

Maybe if we didn't have such a gigantic number of enormous fatasses that can't stop scarfing down 10 pounds of breakfast tacos every morning before ***** about how they can't get a date because of an "obsession with physical beauty" we wouldn't have demand for entirely preventable problems driving costs through the roof. Instead of whining that no one wants to see your fat *** in leggings because you're big enough for an anti-ship missile to lock on to you, do some **** situps.

Or, if we want to consider drugs, smoking, and alcohol, maybe we should stop treating these with the best of 1930s amateur psychology in 12-step-groups. More effective addiction treatment would drive down the demand for expensive lung and liver (and whatever else) treatments.

As for doctor's salaries, given what it costs to become a doctor, that's a laughable complaint. University education of any kind is ridiculously expensive these days, in a large part because of money constantly thrown at it. Constantly throwing money into the health system is just going to jack prices up there too. This isn't hard to figure out; it even happens with roads. If you build a new road to alleviate traffic - soon you've got enough traffic for both roads.

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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."

There's nothing wrong with doctor's salaries. Primary care specialties make under $200k according to every survey I've read. General surgeons make around the $230's. Sure, some salaries will go up from there the more specialized they get (derm and orthopods, particularly). But they've done 4 years undergrad, 4 years med school, 3 years residency (or 5 if a surgical specialty) where they finally start getting paid make small dollars, put in long hours, oh yeah, and have to start paying back their mortgage-sized student loans (which often have a lot of unsubsidized rates resulting in huge payment burden). Throw in a 1-2 year fellowship if you want to do some sub-specialties (like nephrology). A lot of physicians turn 30 before they see big-kid money. Not that that matters though. Their malpractice insurance can easily cost upward of $35k/year because everybody thinks doctor's salaries are too high and sue like crazy. There's also the amount of call they take, Continuing Medical Education requirements, licensing, and the loans some new docs have to take to start up their own practice. Let's also add in the personal time most spend reading to stay abreast of current clinical standards of care because if they don't, they won't get reimbursed for work they did. Now try to throw in building a non-work life with a spouse and family. The amount of deferred gratification they suffer through practically demands it. DFK sent me an article a long time ago illustrating how a UPS driver working similar overtime from the outset can make more than a physician. Doctors damn sure better get paid as well as they do.

Hospital admin costs are higher due to compliance with government regulation and gov't/insurance reimbursement policies.

Drug prices I won't necessarily put up a lot of resistance on. A good many operate at very high profit margins, which is their right, but that does raise the cost of our care.

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The Dude abides.

I suspect, based on discussions with people with healthcare administration, that you'd be wrong.

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This is also pretty far off the deep end as far as conspiracy theories go. Obamacare is not the main problem, hell Obamacare is basically what Germany uses. Obamacare might cost "$5000 per person" but the vast majority of those costs were already there before Obamacare. Before, poor people just went and got treatment and then never paid their bills. Now Obamacare is paying for all those bills, but someone was still paying them before. In the end there is very little difference between Obamacare and what Germany uses, if you're poor you get subsidized and if you want you can pay a fee/tax to opt out of the subsidized system entirely. Germany still paid half of what we do before Obamacare and that hasn't changed much with Obamacare's passage.

The issue is there's actually no one thing that causes US healthcare to be more expensive. It's a huge list of things, with each of them contributing a few percent. The biggest offender with regards to US healthcare costs is Medicare and Medicaid, their gigantic deficits, and the fact that they're politically untouchable by both the Left and Right. However, even fixing that isn't going to result in us paying anywhere close to what Europe pays. Like, here's a list of things European healthcare doesn't have to deal with:

- Europeans have better diets, exercise more, and have less obesity.
- Europeans work less hours and have less stress.
- The US still pays for the lion's share of the world's medical research costs. Our copyright laws don't apply anywhere else, so to avoid getting their **** stolen, pharma has to charge whatever they can get elsewhere and jack up the prices here to make up for it.
- Insurance company profits.
- Excess pharma company profits.
- Malpractice insurance/lawsuits.
- Fee-for-service structure heavily incentivizes fraud.
- Greater income inequality. (Really poor people are generally really sick.)
- Greater distrust of the government. We have a significant number of people that will do the opposite of any government PSA just because.
- Medical/pharmaceutical patent trolling.
- Medicare/Medicaid price-fixing rules. (You're required to charge everyone the same thing.)
- Medicare running a $600 billion deficit, paid for with borrowed money.
- Bureaucratic costs associated with insurers and doctors each having to hire people to fight over how much the doctors get paid.

There's no 5-second sound bite solution.

This is one of the biggest canards I've ever seen.

Describe to me the Constitutionally prescribed process by which the Senate must "advise and consent".

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

It is not "the truth" and you don't see any hate being spewed by the right - because the left does not get to arbitrarily decide what is and idn't hate for everyone. If you don't have the buy-in of the right on what is and isn't hate, then it isn't hate. It's just one side demonizing the other.

As for the rest of that, the Left is deeply engaged in its own attacks on civil rights - namely freedom of speech, freedom from search and seizure, the right to a trial before being deprived of property and the right to bear arms. Obama has done as much - possibly more damage in the middle east as Bush did and Clinton before him wasn't shy about getting involved in conflicts all over the place. You're not looking at the truth - you're looking at what it takes to reassure yourself about your new views.



The Senate has no Constitutional duty to vote on Supreme Court Justices in any given time frame. A new fighter is desperately needed no matter how screwed up the F-35 is - and the left bears plenty of blame for that; leftist Congressmen are as bad or worse that Republicans. Barney Frank was opposing the program while demanding the engines be built is his district.

As for the ACA, the better solution is to repeal it and not implement anything else.

We cannot have a better solution when any social program we have will be distorted by the identity politics of the left.



The double standard is always the first thing to adopt.

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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."

This is not a conspiracy theory. It's not a conspiracy; every social program we've had since the 1960s has been designed this way. They're ALL ridiculously ineffective and expensive. This was all started by a segregationst from Texas that figured out he could buy votes if he changed his tune.



Germany does not have the identity politics groups to be catered to.



Germany also has criminally high tax rates, and relies on the US to keep its defense spending to levels where it can afford to do this.



I notice the first one on this list amounted to what I said - Americans are ridiculous fatasses to an incredibly high degree. Worse, we have movements to not only justify this, but do so on identity politics basis (fat shaming, just **** lol) and then deny science in the process.



It's a good thing I didn't identify a solution and just pointed out the problem, then.

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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."