Something I`m not seeing either side address is the supply/demand aspect of this.
Great, so everyone has medical insurance and gets to go see the doctor for a scraped knee (Huge Mother Fracking increase in demand). And yet we still have the same number of doctors and hospitals (Supply stays the same).
The health care bill does nothing to address the supply of medical treatment. It`s not like there`s doctors sitting on their hands waiting for patients currently. I don`t see anything good from this on the horizon.
I don't like lots about the bill, but this is a dumb one: supply and demand takes care of itself. We'll just steal more doctors from Canada. Posted: March 24th, 2010 @ 8:56AM
The problem with Forsaken's little pro-gov't bit is that he highlights things that lend themselves to centralization. Power, roads, food regulation, water distribution, a postal system, etc. Or he highlights one-off innovations like the Internet (which didn't really take off until you had private interests get more control/content on it).
The problem with Deuce's post is that he tries to refute Forsaken on a point by point basis no matter how far that makes him stretch. Stamps get more expensive? Oh shit, someone sound the drums of revolution.
The problem with everyone else (aside from bivrip I guess) is that they totally missed the point of what Forsaken was saying: for certain services centralized government is exactly what you want. Dismissing something outright because of government involvement is as closed-minded as dismissing something outright because it makes a business some money.
I thought Forsaken was being heavy handed, but obviously his post was a bit too deep for the rest of you.
By the way, Deuce: I'm a foreigner and I've never met a canadian who hated his country as much as you do. You live in a nice enough place, a country much more socially safe than the US but much more personally free than the western nations of the EU... lighten up, I guess. Posted: December 21st, 2009 @ 12:49AM
Corporate taxes and personal taxes are not the same thing.
Like, if you're a kajillionaire business owner as opposed to a break-even business owner, the amount of money you pay out for your business to have health insurance will be the same. Your personal insurance premium obviously would be higher, given the wording of the bill which seeks to charge you more. Posted: November 9th, 2009 @ 1:29PM
I've been all over the world, and I think we're a bit ignorant about just how good universal health care is or how much we could use reform in America.
But Obama's speech seemed to make it clear that a public option won't actually be an option for someone who gets health care from their employer, which brings the viability of the idea into question altogether. We don't need another unsustainable government system. The public option has to be able to compete with the private options to force those prices down, and they way he's talking it won't be able to.
I'm a fiscal conservative but I'm sold on the benefits of UHC. We wouldn't want our water being managed by private companies (look how badly KBR handles water purification) and health care is no different as far as I'm concerned.
But, again, that's not what we're getting anymore, so now I regret to say I'm opposed to the reform. It really needs to be reworked. Posted: September 14th, 2009 @ 9:42AM
Nalcolm, Nebu`s actions were a lot closer to assault than your simple exercise of free speech.
Besides, are you from California? This is a conflict zone. People shoot guns. People deal drugs. Maybe not where [Nebu] lives, but everywhere else...
Are you that dumb? You think that California being a place with that sort of crime makes it more likely to get charged with assault for yelling at a shitty neighbor and flipping the bird? Something tells me the courts have other things to deal with.
Nebu yelled at a guy who walked into his garage without permission, then gave him a couple middle fingers. You're nitpicking about the difference between walking up to something and knocking on a door or walking INTO a garage where personal items are stored, and it pisses me off because you know it but are being thick headed on purpose so you don't have to admit that someone going into a part of your place is a big enough violation that you deserve to get yelled at.
Lot closer to assault? Stop being a nitwit. Posted: September 12th, 2009 @ 11:17AM
Granted, you`re right- without bodily contact or clear and indisputable verbal threats of such, it would be a more difficult case.
More difficult? More like impossibly difficult, what lawyer would take a case based on some white guy yelling at some other white guy? Racism is looked on a lot differently in America than telling people to fuck off for entering your garage uninvited.
For example: Fuck off Zelph01, you're a stupid twat. Stop clogging up my series of tubes with your thick skull.
Lawyer up and come and get me for assault, if you think it's so easy. Posted: September 11th, 2009 @ 6:27PM
he got heat from all over for his attempt at indoctrinating the kids so he backed off. but this sets the stage for him to do it again and through that people will let their guard down and the next time it will be the hardcore stuff.
I find it hard to believe that a president who didn't want to be overly partisan and said he was going to address the children of the nation about the importance of staying in school would write something non-partisan and just tell children about the importance of being in school. Obviously the speech must have been some Orwellian political indoctrination and we were only saved by half the people in the country freaking out about it beforehand because SOCIALISM. Posted: September 7th, 2009 @ 9:40PM
You`re close - it`s an AV-8 Harrier. Or so it looks in the blurry freeze frames.
Hehe, I don't feel very close but at least they're both attack aircraft and look a little similar. I know which one I'd rather turn in 10 million pepsi points to get, though...
And being the Av-8`s where first released in the Marine Corp it looks like it wasn`t someone in the AF to tell you that.
Good point, I didn't mean to lump the branches together like that or imply the AF is in charge of all the stuff in the air ;). Posted: September 6th, 2009 @ 5:50PM
I thought they'd already changed the speech so Obama asks what kids can do to help their country, not to help the president.
I don't have a problem with a president addressing students directly to tell them that education is important and that they should stick with it. If that's the message, I hope all presidents, republican democrat or hahaha other, start doing this. For kids to hear directly from each of their presidents in a non-partisan way would be really good for the country in general. Let's get kids thinking early that it's important for them to say what they think and believe to the politicians that represent them.
As long as it's non-partisan. And a stay in school and stay safe message is pretty non-partisan, as long as, again, the president doesn't ask kids to help him directly. Posted: September 5th, 2009 @ 11:37AM
I'm proud to have gone to a Catholic school that thought educating children was important enough to make sure that children knew about the theory of evolution.
If you don't think an omnipotent and omniscient god is clever enough to make a universe in which evolution works and the end result is humans, then you're the one lacking faith, not me.
Science is about teaching what we've learned through the scientific method. It's already been said and I'll say it again, religion doesn't deserve to be taught in a class that's based on the scientific method. Faith is a belief that's intrinsic, it's so valuable because it exists without evidence. If God just showed and said 'believe in me, jackasses, or I'll vaporize you,' believing in God wouldn't mean a lot, would it? It would just be one more fact that everyone observes. Faith is given it's meaning by the way that it exists in a way intrinsic to all of us that stands apart from everything else. That's why it's so special.
I had a religion class every day to learn about faith. I understand you don't get a religion class like that if your kids are in a public school. But if your kids are in public schools, why don't you spend 30 to 60 minutes of your time every day being a proper parent and educating them about religion?
And open your mind a bit, because your kid is going to be operating under a severe handicap for the rest of his life if he thinks that Earth is about 6000 years old. I've loved ya (in the non gay way) for being so honest about what you think since the war2kali days Neb, but Genesis is total nonsense as a literal reading. It makes a LOT of sense as a metaphor, so why not look at it that way? God is smart enough to make sure that faith fits in just fine with science. Thinking that dinosaurs were around 65m years ago instead of 6000 doesn't mean you're going to hell.
I want to edit this to say that I think everyone's responses here have by and large been really mature. That people can have a discussion like this without it degenerating to the usual internet shit is a sign of the quality of people this site attracts, which itself is a sign of how good EN is.
And I think religion should be taught in all public schools as a class, where people learn about all religions. We'd all get along a lot better, were that the case.
haha and I'll edit again to say I agree with Apricoth (that's like three times now) that kindergarten is too early for that type of shit. Let's wait till kids are hitting or about to hit maturity before bringing that stuff on, and leave it to the parents first and schools second.
EDITED: 2009-09-05 11:47:36 Posted: September 5th, 2009 @ 11:20AM
That's not an F-18, not that it detracts from the coolness of it. I think it's an A-4 but someone in the AF will undoubtedly correct me if I'm wrong. Posted: September 5th, 2009 @ 11:12AM
Correlation != causation. While I agree that plenty of drugs are bad, plenty of drugs aren't. It would be nice if we decided which those were based on some scientific criteria. Then educated people about such things. Which would be great, as people are suffering from a severe lack of education on the issue, and that puts people at risk.
From the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice:
"With regard to the associations between early frequent marijuana use and later violence, our conclusions are similar to those of White et al. (1999), in that what we are seeing is a selection effect."
ibid.
"Because the proportion of violent individuals who used marijuana frequently was larger than the proportion of frequent marijuana users engaging in violence, and because the prediction of violence from earlier frequent marijuana use was mediated by common risk factors, our results do not indicate that early frequent marijuana use causes later violence. Rather, we conclude that frequent marijuana use and violence co-occur because they share common risk factors (e.g., race/ethnicity, hard drug use). It is important to keep in mind that marijuana has been used for centuries and is the most widely used illicit drug today and that the majority of marijuana users do not engage in violence (Boles & Miotto, 2003). Our findings indicate that intervention with young violent offenders to prevent or treat substance use problems may be more practical than targeting marijuana users for violence prevention."
And it doesn't help when you get a group of people lumping drugs into categories of 'good' or 'bad' depending on legality and using unbelievably huge generalizations. IE:
"The resulting number is greater for the group of people who use drugs than for the group of people who don`t. That`s called correlation." Posted: August 5th, 2009 @ 1:36AM
Your anecdotal experience isn't worth a whole lot more than anyone else's anecdotal experience, Charkoth. I daresay some other guy on the internet has grown up watching people experiment with drugs and not turn into a pack of failures.
Sorry you had a shitty childhood. But an objective look at the goals of the 'war on drugs', along with the results of the current execution, should let a smart person like you figure out whether or not it's a good thing.
Hint: the war on drugs didn't stop your brothers from getting ahold of and fucking their lives up with a bunch of them. And a legal drug still did a number on your father. Posted: August 4th, 2009 @ 10:37PM
I'm anti-war on drugs because the war on drugs, like prohibition, serves only to further a problem rather than fix it. I don't think anyone taking a sensible look at the issue could feel otherwise.
When I read something like:
If you take every alcoholic in America and turn them instead into an abuser of psychoactive drugs, you'd have a hell of a lot more deaths than 17,000 in a year.
My suspicions about sensibility appear to be confirmed. That said, Charkoth certainly has a better excuse than most people do for irrationality. I wonder if a specific example comes to mind for him, and if that specific example would be dead were that specific example abusing alcohol instead of something else. Posted: August 3rd, 2009 @ 1:08PM
I realized the detractors from the system were probably cherry picked, but then again you think that with such long wait times people are taken care of that need to be taken care of?
That's just flawed thinking. Why do you think he had to wait? Think about exactly what we watched happen in this video. To start with, a guy goes to a clinic on a day it's closed. Well, ok. And clinics in our country never close, right?
So then he goes to the ER. It's packed. The ER being packed is implied to reflect poorly on canadian health care, as if our ERs are not the same. He has the symptoms of a broken wrist.
ER. Packed. Symptoms of a broken wrist.
Why do you think he had to wait? The answer is pretty obvious when you think about it: a broken wrist isn't going to kill you, and waiting six or eight hours to get it looked at might be inconvenient but it means people with bigger problems are getting help first.
And that's exactly how every American ER I've been in looked at things too. It's an Emergency Room, it's not a family doctor.
Then we see a guy go to a a clinic and ask for a blood test. This is an elective request. Elective requests take the longest in the Canadian system. A young fit male asking for a cholesterol count is certainly an elective request. With a doctor that wants a blood test for you, you can get a blood test in Canada on that same day and have the results in one to two weeks, from personal experience.
I spend more of my time in Canada than any of the other nations I regularly travel to (I even have a house here.) I've gone with friends to the ER. Once was a guy with a broken leg, once was a guy who slipped on ice and fell hard on his spine.
The guy with a broken leg took about 9 hours from us going in the door to leaving. That's a long wait!
The guy who slipped on the ice got air lifted to a bigger hospital to go in a MRI machine, was in the machine that night and again a week or two later, then immediately in surgery after the second MRI to drain abscesses that had formed alongside his spine. He had no wait, he was in the ER then under the care of a doctor, he was put in the MRI machine as soon as he arrived, he was in surgery as soon as they realized he needed it.
People who might have broken wrists wait for people who might actually be in danger of dying. It's that way in our ERs, too.
About wait times: It's really not as clear cut as people or studies like to make out. When you look at wait time from the point of talking with a doctor to the point of getting treatment, Canadians wait longer. When you measure the point of seeking treatment to the point of receiving treatment, you realize that Canadian wait times are basically the same as ours, because we wait a lot longer on average to see a doctor (thank the approval process of health insurance.)
Cancer treatment in Canada is often cited as something that specifically takes too long, especially compared to us. But taking into account the time one waits to see a doctor and then cancer specialist, you find out that Canadians are actually treated faster (and with better results due to the speed of treatment) for cancers than Americans are.
For the record I oppose the UHC system Obama is trying to implement. I don't think it'll do anyone much good, and I think it'll cost us a lot of money just to end up as one more unsustainable social service. But as someone who spends a lot of time in Canada and talks to Canadians who see our debate on health care and the way the Canadian system is often represented to us, I have to say we're not getting the full story.
EDITED: 2009-07-30 21:28:19 Posted: July 30th, 2009 @ 9:26PM
I have an interesting story about a health care experience in Canada, though I'll need to get permission from a client to post it, first.
The 'report' was set up to show the results it did from the start. They picked Quebec, and they used English males. They pointed out that government employees in Canada will tell you of all available options if you don't want to wait, which is exactly what public servants should do when you ask them questions. Then they cherry picked some bad treatment results with the story of the amputee lady and the story of the man who couldn't get a tetanus shot at one hospital.
If an entire nation has one health care provider, you're going to be able to find some tragic examples of accidents and malpractice and incompetence that you can attribute to the system. That's a statistical certainty.
It's surprising to see people who've denounced the sensationalist methods of Michael Moore's 'documentaries' eat up something that's done in exactly the same way, just from the opposite end of the political aisle...
Great 'report', though. It's certainly right up there with 'documentaries' like Sicko. Posted: July 30th, 2009 @ 12:45PM
