patrick.net

From where I'm sitting, it just appears that CIC is responding with incredulity at the mismatch between Sander's pie-in-the-sky campaign promises and the general population's aversion to tax levels that approach a total confiscation of income.

It could be worse. President Hillary. OMG!!!!!!!

turtledove says

From where I'm sitting, it just appears that CIC is responding with incredulity at the mismatch between Sander's pie-in-the-sky campaign promises and the general population's aversion to tax levels that approach a total confiscation of income.

Americans can choose to focus on extra taxes, or they can choose to focus on how you are being ripped off on healthcare and education.

It's not extra costs, it's a different channel to pay for the same.

turtledove says

From where I'm sitting, it just appears that CIC is responding

CIC doesn't do math. He attacks any policy, regardless of merit or evidence, that does not fit his twisted ideology. Remember, CIC says climate change is a hoax.

CiC is going off the rails. He spends like 15 hours a day spewing nonsense on here. What a fucking loser

No one gainfully employed could spew off that many propaganda threads. Nor could anyone with a life.

He hasn't been able to find a job since he was 50. I image he's some bitter 65-year-old longing for the days when "blacks new their place" and hookers were fifty cents or even less if they had no teeth.

How pathetic would it be to plot his posts over time here the past three years on patnet

He posts all day every day. And its all pathetic crap

Heraclitusstudent says

or they can choose to focus on how you are being ripped off on healthcare and education

Interesting... prices have gone stratospheric AND they are both government subsidized. When exactly did prices start rising at a rate greater than inflation?

Heraclitusstudent says

or they can choose to focus on how you are being ripped off on healthcare and education.

i don't get ripped on either of those. fuck bernie. as stated earlier in the thread - total confiscation of one's income.

JMHO, but if you are going to lodge a verbal assault against CIC, you should remove him from ignore so that he has the opportunity to respond. In the spirit of fair play.... and I'm kind of bored and could use the entertainment. Cheers!

turtledove says

JMHO, but if you are going to lodge a verbal assault against CIC, you should remove him from ignore so that he has the opportunity to respond. In the spirit of fair play

True, if I wanted to be fair to a weasel, but I don't. CIC honors no rules of discussion, so there is no reason to be concerned about treating him fairly.

In any case, I put him back on ignore because I wanted to open another thread on politics that I didn't want him to immediately pollute.

landtof says

i don't get ripped on either of those. fuck bernie. as stated earlier in the thread - total confiscation of one's income.

Corporations, i.e. the executives and owners of corporations, confiscate far more of a person's income than government does. A typical employee pays 50% to 80% of his wealth production as a tax to his employer before government even takes a penny in taxes. I'm not saying that corporations shouldn't tax their employees anything. That would be impossible, but 50 to 80% is a bit much. If government taxed you that much, you'd be in armed revolt.

Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to do the arithmetic to calculate how much wealth they produce and how much their employer siphons. Capitalism does not reward wealth production. Capitalism rewards one and only one thing, bargaining power. And capitalism is designed to keep as much bargaining power in the hands of owners and the least in the hands of wealth producers (workers) as possible.

So don't bitch about Bernie raising taxes on the top 1%. Bitch about the 70% taxes on your income that go to your boss. Your income would be over twice it is if your employer paid you a mere 80% of your wealth production and kept the other 20% for itself.

turtledove says

Interesting... prices have gone stratospheric AND they are both government subsidized. When exactly did prices start rising at a rate greater than inflation?

This shows gov+corporations = extortion. This is not what Bernie is proposing.

In every country that has gov healthcare, the cost of these cares per capita is much lower than in the US.

Besides republicans are all against any action that could make the government less corrupted (for example controlling money in politics). Their only solution to corruption is to get rid of the government altogether. Which basically means extortion without control.

Heraclitusstudent says

In every country...the cost of [medical care] per capita is much lower than in the US.

There, fixed that for you. Literally every country on earth has lower costs than we do, no matter what payment mechanism they use.

Our system is designed to maximize power, specifically in the form of revenue to the patronage networks that wrote it, and which everyone else calls spending. Any effect on health is incidental, and often adverse. Our system operates as designed. If Bernie can turn our ship of state around 180 degrees, I wish him success, but meanwhile in our country increasing government subsidies has tended to increase costs rather than reduce them.

Dan8267 says

No one gainfully employed could spew off that many propaganda threads. Nor could anyone with a life.

You know this applies to you too.

Bernie sounds like a real schlep! I had no idea he was such a bum until he stumbled into a government job.

BERNIE SANDERS, THE BUM WHO WANTS YOUR MONEY
"It wasn’t as bad as he says. His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.

“I never had any money my entire life,” Sanders told Vermont public TV in 1985, after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington.

Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.

He finally wormed his way into the Senate in 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress. Save for a municipal pension, Sanders lists no assets in his name. All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife’s. He does, however, have as much as $65,000 in credit-card debt."
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/bernie-sanders-the-bum-who-wants-your-money/

zzyzzx says

Dan8267 says

No one gainfully employed could spew off that many propaganda threads. Nor could anyone with a life.

You know this applies to you too.

No, it doesn't. Propaganda, by definition, is deceitful. Persuasion without deception is not propaganda.

I never use deceit to get a person to accept a position because doing so is fundamentally antithetical to my belief that the reason for a decision is far more important than the decision itself. It's not good enough to be right, you must be right for the right reason and explicitly understand why a position is right. Understanding is the only valid form of persuasion.

This is why you cannot back up your assertion with a single example.

socal2 says

Bernie sounds like a real schlep

When you cannot attack a person's policies, make character attacks in order to persuade fools for you will not be able to persuade the intelligent.

Ironically, socal2 is confirming the original post.

You know a candidate is good when the nutjob right wing starts getting scared of him or her.

Dan8267 says

When you cannot attack a person's policies, make character attacks in order to persuade fools for you will not be able to persuade the intelligent.

I'm attacking Sander's entire work resume. He is a parody of a know-nothing Socialist who couldn't make a living without a government job.

I particularly loved this part. Reminds me of a some of my old college room-mates.

"Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”"

He was so poor, even the unshaven hippie chicks wouldn't have anything to do with him until he at least hustled some spare change or stash.

If you rave non stop in Times Square in an empty potato sack demanding someone else's money, you have a good chance of becoming a liberal idol.

Dan8267 says

I never use deceit to get a person to accept a position

No, you just post a bunch of really gay stuff instead.

zzyzzx says

Dan8267 says

I never use deceit to get a person to accept a position

No, you just post a bunch of really gay stuff instead.

True, and that is not using deceit to get a person to accept a position. It is a public acknowledgement that no one can be as homophobic as CIC without being a repressed homosexual. This is a lesson history has taught us time and time again.

The real Bernie Sanders.

www.hDRxbQlpqmo

You'll notice that no conservative has attacked his actual platform. Baseless assertions are indication of a weak position, and this thread proves the conservative opposition to Sanders is weak indeed.

Heraclitusstudent says

In every country that has gov healthcare, the cost of these cares per capita is much lower than in the US.

My experiences living in Ireland for several years where all residents get a free "medical card:"

1) After all the withholding was taken out of the paycheck, we were left with about 40% to live off of (housing, food, and gas made CA look cheap -- don't forget VAT on everything, so Ireland isn't exactly an inexpensive place to live).

2) Well care is paid for out of pocket. So, anytime you need to go to the doctor, that was not covered by your medical card. So, if you want it for free, you go to the emergency room.

3) People with money pay for a supplementary private insurance (eg., VHI), which allows you to upgrade various hospital services. The cost of this was $600/month for a family of four. It allows card holders to go to private hospitals or stay in the better sections of public hospitals in private or semi-private rooms. It also gains a card holder access to care clinics for non-urgent matters (I think it was five visits a year). This is a textbook example of a two-tiered system. You are delusional if you think that you will ever get away from that.

4) Shortly after moving to Ireland, my husband had a very serious attack of diverticulitis. He was admitted to St. Vincent's (Dublin). Because we had a private, supplemental policy, we were eligible to be in a private room. However, there was no room, so we got the opportunity to see how the rank and file medical card holders lived. There were 8-10 beds in a large room. The hallways smelled of urine. There were ants everywhere (in all fairness, they moved him to another room when I showed them my gingerale can covered in ants). On my husband's second night there, the Guarda showed up with a patient in shackles. The patient was placed in a bed across from my husband and handcuffed to the bed. The two police officers parked themselves in a couple of chairs. When we came to visit my husband the next day, I and the children were not allowed to go to the room. My husband had to be wheeled out to us. By the third day, my husband was no longer acute. However, he needed daily IV antibiotics. Here in the states, a person would likely be told to just come back each day to get the IV. However, they kept my husband in residence for the entire week just so he could get a daily IV which took about an hour to administer. The condition of this hospital is something most US residents would find below standard. It had the appearance of a prison... or some sad, forgotten, low-budget government building. Picture the cinder block walls... painted in a eye-ease green/yellow color.... The best thing I have to say about the experience is that my husband lived to talk about it. So, they must have something going for them.

5) The Health Services Executive (HSE) is the largest employer in Ireland. They have been accused of many abuses over the years. Examples include, duplicate departments and job titles, employees with no job descriptions, absurdly high salaries and pensions for the higher-ups... the kind of stuff that's common when you have extremely large government run organizations that become so bloated that no one is accountable for anything. They were so big and so confused, that enormous things got missed. For example, the HSE was found to be years behind on radiology readings. People actually died before the films were ever read. It was a big scandal (2009 - 2011). Again, such a big organization that no one seems to know who is responsible for what.

Four and a half million people live in the Republic of Ireland. Imagine the kind of problems they would have had if the HSE were responsible for a couple of hundred million? Look at state Medicaid programs... How ripe for abuse are they? I can only imagine, the abuse, waste, and low-quality that would result from a mega healthcare organization responsible for the care of hundreds of millions of people.... Though the prospective government healthcare contractors (eg, big hospitals) no doubt would still make out like bandits no matter how the debate ultimately ends up.

Here's an article that talks about the radiology scandal I eluded to in my prior post:

http://www.radiologybusiness.com/topics/care-delivery/radiologist-errors-ireland-lead-review-thousands-x-rays

turtledove says

Here's an article that talks about the radiology scandal I eluded to in my prior post:

http://www.radiologybusiness.com/topics/care-delivery/radiologist-errors-ireland-lead-review-thousands-x-rays

Why do you hate the glories of centralized planning for the people and by the people?

turtledove says

There were 8-10 beds in a large room. The hallways smelled of urine. There were ants everywhere ... When we came to visit my husband the next day, I and the children were not allowed to go to the room. My husband had to be wheeled out to us. By the third day, my husband was no longer acute. However, he needed daily IV antibiotics. Here in the states, a person would likely be told to just come back each day to get the IV. However, they kept my husband in residence for the entire week just so he could get a daily IV which took about an hour to administer. The condition of this hospital is something most US residents would find below standard. It had the appearance of a prison... or some sad, forgotten, low-budget government building. Picture the cinder block walls... painted in a eye-ease green/yellow color....

Wow, this is so like what they used to have in USSR it's not even funny. Down to the "keep you hospitalized for days for simple antibiotics" and color of the hallways. So much for "socialized medical care in the West will be different from socialized medical care in socialist countries" bullshit.

Thank you for writing your impressions of Ireland. I lived in France for a long time. I experienced healthcare there first hand.
Yeah doctors are not always very friendly. Yeah buildings often look like they could use a refresh.
But hey... they get the job done for a fraction of the costs here. I think that's what most people want.
And yes this is paid through taxes. Big F deal.

turtledove says

employees with no job descriptions, absurdly high salaries and pensions for the higher-ups...

jeez I want to compare these "absurdly high salaries" with what doctors are getting in the US.

You can turn this anyway you want, and nothing is perfect. But private healthcare in the US is just not working for most of the population.

Healthcare is a simple business (or should be). The question is how do you keep costs in check.
In a capitalist system there is only one thing that does that: competition.
But as far as healthcare is concerned there are good reasons why competition won't work:
- because no one shops around different hospital to see what cares cost.
- because insurances have little incentives to question the cares provided, rather than just passing it on to you.
- because when you choose an insurance, you're best bet is always to pick an expensive good coverage. The last thing you want is to have to sell the house to save your life.

So how do you keep costs down?

As far as socialism is concerned: it's good to remember an insurance is always a socialist construct where the healthy pay for the unhealthy. This is the only way it works.

And the rich pay for the poor too: It was always the case, even in the US before Obama care.

Heraclitusstudent says

As far as socialism is concerned: it's good to remember an insurance is always a socialist construct where the healthy pay for the unhealthy. This is the only way it works.

Or another general way to put it--the young pay for the old.

Heraclitusstudent says

jeez I want to compare these "absurdly high salaries" with what doctors are getting in the US.

My husband made 300,000 euro/year as an employed physician in Ireland. At the time, the exchange rate was between $1.35 and $1.60 per euro. Employed physicians don't make that here in the US.

turtledove says

My husband made 300,000 euro/year as an employed physician in Ireland.

They don't make that in most countries. An Irish idiosyncrasy.

Heraclitusstudent says

They don't make that in most countries. An Irish idiosyncrasy.

In 2012, the offer from Montreal was for $600,000 (Canadian). I remember being very surprised that a single payer system had that kind of money for a reproductive endocrinologist. You see, Quebec decided that they need to increase their population. So, they passed something that made IVF and all it's related technologies covered by the state-run plan. Bet you'd love to know that your tax money was going to something like that. We ended up not taking the job due to licensing encumbrances, a required French test, and no desire to uproot the kids, again.

Yet, these kinds of things rarely get mentioned in salary tables. They take GPs and a few specialties and list out a median. What you aren't seeing is that in the US, the median includes salaried physicians along with practice owners. Generalists in this country are lucky to make $175k. Employed specialists are lucky to make $250k. Mingling employed physicians with a practice owner of a huge practice with it's own lab and surgery center is going to play tricks on the numbers. I've been in the business for almost 20 years. I know exactly what we made in residency... what we made during fellowship... what we made at our first job... what we made at subsequent jobs. And I have lots of doctor friends. I know what they made, too. So, you can tell me that doctors here make all the money in the world, but I assure you that most do not.

There is no reason even under capitalist theory for allowing private health insurance companies to make profit. Capitalist theory says that profits should be proportional to risk. After a critical size long since met, there is no risk in health insurance due to the law of averages of large numbers. Therefore, even capitalist theory says there should be no profits in health insurance.

The fact that there are profits, and at the expense of everyone, indicates that capitalism has completely failed in its goals and predictions. It was suppose to make an efficient market over time, and efficient markets by definition generate no economic profits. Clearly capitalism does not necessarily, or in fact often, produce efficient markets.

In the very least, health insurance should be nationalized. It has worked in every developed nation. Our current system is an abject failure.

jazz music says

How does that make sense? What are you trying to say? What does it mean to be a real schlep?

Socal2, like all brainless conservatives, is incapable of making an actual argument against a policy. So the only thing he does is make baseless character attacks and hopes his audience is stupid enough to fool for his transparent and childish tricks.

jazz music says

How does that make sense? What are you trying to say? What does it mean to be a real schlep?

Stupid or clumsy person.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/schlep

Bernie apparently couldn't hold down a job, couldn't hammer a nail and was described by his friends as a slob - as he ran his yap about socialism and the rich holding him down......in between writing his rape fantasy stories.

Dan8267 says

There is no reason even under capitalist theory for allowing private health insurance companies to make profit.

Private health insurance companies are a big part of the evil in all of this. I would have rather seen single payer than a mandate that forces more people to participate in this broken system. Insurance is like money that is specially printed for the purposes of healthcare. So before insurance came about, medical pricing was based on what? It was based on what individuals could spend. But now that a person has no lifetime maximum on dollars spent due to insurance, not surprisingly, pricing is based on what an insurance company can spend. The result is now we have to keep them around. No one could afford to go uninsured. The insurance companies don't really care about the pricing... They can just raise premiums. It's $700 for a Tylenol in a hospital for goodness sake!

I will never understand why that shit wasn't the primary focus of the effort to make healthcare affordable. Instead of focusing on the pricing issues, we focused on making sure that each person had the ability to OVER pay for their health care through insurance. If you can, take a close look at a hospital bill. You will see tons of charges that have nothing to do with the doctors who provided the care. Remember, the doctors are mostly independent contractors who bill separately. So when you get your million dollar hospital bill, that doesn't even include the doctors services.

Here's an example from a couple of weeks ago to illustrate what I'm talking about. A woman had to have surgery. It was a laparoscopic/hysteroscopic removal of a permanent contraceptive device. The surgery is made up of four parts: 1) salpingectomy (removal of fallopian tubes); 2) cornual resection (freeing the devices embedded at the junction of where the fallopian tube connects to the uterus -- very vascular); 3) removal of foreign object; 4) diagnostic hysteroscopy (provides the inside view of the uterus to ensure that the entire coil is removed). The surgery took about an hour and a half. The only unusual thing with her surgery was that she had to have intraoperative fluoroscopy to look for some metal fragments because the device had broken, which we knew going in. Other than that, it was pretty garden variety. The surgery was a success and she's a happy camper. She was treated at Saddleback Hospital in Laguna. She was admitted on a 23-hour stay. The adjusted hospital bill was $55,000. Our adjusted bill for the surgery was $2,000. Anesthesia's adjusted bill was $800. You might want to believe that the doctors are the problem here... But there is nothing that this woman received at the hospital to justify a $55,000 bill. They do it because they can get away with it.

We are the ones who take a ton of risk and our reimbursements are extremely small by comparison to the hospital. I'm not arguing that we should get more. However, if we are concerned about costs, hospitals should be looked at much more closely than they are. Had her surgery gone wrong, the doctor could have been on the hook for a million dollars. Yet, the reimbursement for this one surgery doesn't even cover one month of malpractice insurance. There's something wrong with that when you consider the risk that a doctor takes the minute he/she puts someone under.

There is simply no excuse for a hospital to charge what it does. And there is no excuse for insurance companies to pay it. Doctors don't get treated as well. We are told that the "usual and customary" pricing for our services is X and we must live with it or go off network. The hospitals, on the other hand, have the power to negotiate some pretty sweet deals with the insurance companies. I guess they need the money to pay those million dollar salaries to their administrators.

The doctors are the easy fall guys for the crimes of the hospitals, the insurance companies and the government.

The doctors interface directly face to face with the patients. The hospital administrators and insurance sharks never see the patients, and aren't even identified as being involved with the system even if they do, so they know that the patients will lash out at the first thing in their line of sight, the providers. The admins and insurance companies work hard to keep it that way by trying to keep all the patients blaming the providers for everything while the admins and bureaucrats get away with murder.

Blame shifting, cost shifting, creating bureaucratic nightmares and always being a changing, moving target are the insurance companies' lingua franca.

Pharmaceutical companies, as well. They've done pretty well fleecing the insurance system.

turtledove says

I will never understand why that shit wasn't the primary focus of the effort to make healthcare affordable.

Well, they don't want to cut prices to what it's really worth: revenues in the healthcare sector would be cut in half and a lot jobs would be destroyed.
Armies of lobbyists fighting it out.
First step: stop its progress.