dear gwb

[Alexvrb]

I think Supergrom was just ruling out the entire shebang ending up in the govt's hands. That doesn't mean he doesn't think things need to be improved one way or another.

Maybe you should write some of your representatives/senators in your state. I'm glad you're thinking about it, and surely you see my original point.

 

[ExCyber]

Ah, well, I apologize for kinda biting your head off. Maybe we can argue Emacs vs. vi vs. Wordpad sometime.

 

[dibz]

vi!

 

[it290]

Agreed.

 

[Xavier]

Something needs to be done about the health care system in America today .

I shattered my wrists about the time I became a member of this board skating. I ran up at least 20,000 in medical bills. I was in between insurance companies so none of this was covered. My parents work in the medical field in fact my dad works for one of the major hmo's and negotiates finall billing and he says that the typical bill is marked up well over 60% with still a healthy profit in it. If you want proof of this take your pet to the vet and youll find that typical procedures will cost a couple hundered dollars versus several tens of thousands on human beings. So I called the billing departments at the hospitols and for the major bills offered three payments of $2,000 a month for to three months lets say. They told me that that while the total amount amount I was offering to pay was acceptable my terms werent. I could either pay the amount in one lump sum or pay $100 a month for the rest of my life. Neither was acceptable to me so I just filed bankruptcy instead keeping the money. By this point the whole thing had ruined my credit and I would have had to file bankruptcy afterwards and been totally broke.

Most major cities have government subsidized hospitals for people without insurance where anyone one can go to for anything. There are slightley subpar and waiting times can take forever but hey what do you expect? If you want the bill to be paid for by the government though there tons of tape you have to go through like giving all youre personal and financial information applying and doing whatever follow up is needed. The process could easily eat up months of your time. But they will see you after you get through the line and give you whatever care is needed. These hospitols are good again for people without insurance like illegal citizens people below the poverty line and cases where medical bills have risen to high to were insurance providers will no longer pay for anymore bills. Which brings me two my next point .

Insurance is a scam. Insurance companies only want to cover people who dont need it. For healthy people who come into an emrgency once care exceeds a certain amount the health care policy is null and void leaving the consumer to pay the rest out of pocket. Those that are allready sick or injured are deamed uninsurable or policy rates are as high as just getting the medical treatment in the first place.

Personal health insurance can cost upwards of $250 a month thats what it cost me 6 six years ago when I was self employed. Since then costs have risen 16-33% per year. Most Americans arnt aware or care about this because thier employers pay most if not all of the cost. If you have a large family say a spouse and 4 childeren premuims of over $1,500 a month are not unheard of.

To generalise :

Theres hmo's usually with them you have a main doctor and he tells you whats wrong with you and what other spelized doctor you need to see. Benefits of this healthplan is that you only need to pay your monthly premuim + a small copay per incident. Drawbacks you have one doctor you cant go see your buddy you grew up with or someone else youve grown to know and trust.

Theres ppo's , you can see any doctor on a huge list which includes most all qualified people in your area. How this works is you are enrolled and clinics subscribe to this list and when treatment is given a reasonable price like 70% off is allready negotaited threw contracts. Drawbacks copays are huge and in most cases if you wanted to take the time yourself and didnt have insurance you could get the exact same deal.

Theres also hybrid insurance policies and one like aflac that pay you a flat rate of $500 say if your pinky got cut off.

As for medicine :

This is the best that I understand it.

Countries like Canada buy medicine anually or quaterley all in one fell swoop for the entire country at one time. Anybody who knows coporate buying knows the more of somthig you buy at once the cheaper it is. This is true across the board but can been seen at a bigger extentant for name brand drugs. Reasons for lower cost no-low marketing and packing shipping and handling. Drug companies typically lose money on third world countries if they even give any support at all make small profit margins on countries with socialized medicine and make a large bulk of thier gross profits in the US. Drug lobbyists would be very unhappy if Us Healthcare was reformed. I feel its very sad that theres talk of taxing Canadas system instead of making our own. Btw some US government orginsations allready use this formula for decades and it works for example I got a giant bottle a prevacid from the VA for free, retail cost at the time were almost $7 a pill putting the cost of this bottle at nearly $2000 governmant actuall cost probabley under a couple hundered.

So my main question is how does the average American who makes less than $40,000 a year afford health, dental, optical, home/renter, life, automotive and castrophe insurance? Let alone those who just make minuim wage ? :huh

 

[SamIAm]

I can't help but take this opportunity to add my own little pharmaceutical horror story, although it doesn't involve me personally. I live in Missoula, Montana, and one day in my high school chemistry class, we were visited by a guest lecturer from Butte, a nearby city. This speaker was an organic chemist by the name of Andrea Stierles, and in addition to teaching, she has dedicated her life to finding new kinds of medicine.

Have you ever heard of a drug called Taxol? It's a powerful cancer fighting agent, and it happens to be possibly the most effective treatment of breast and cervical cancer we have. However, the price tag is rather intimidating; full treatments can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000 last I heard, depending on how much is needed. This is because the drug has to be extracted from the bark of a yew tree, which is an almost extinct species found in the northwest US and Canada. Drug companies have special greenhouses for harvesting Taxol from these trees, but it simply takes too long, and there's not enough for everybody. With the drug being such a premium, they can charge whatever they want for it.

Here's where it gets interesting. Andrea hunted around the northwest taking samples from yew trees, and in Glacier park she found something. In a bark sample the size of a thimble was a special fungus, and it turned out that it could produce the exact same chemicals by itself. Before long she isolated it, and it's even named after her. She told our class, face to face, that with this fungus and a simple fermentation process, Taxol would be as easy and as cheap to manufacture as vitamin C.

She took this fungus and showed it to Bristol-Myers Squibb, a leading pharmaceutical company. Eventually they wound up with the commercial rights to the fungus and the process. So why don't we have dirt cheap Taxol? Because they buried the whole thing. They don't want to make it the new way. After all, who would want to stop selling doses at 20 grand a pop?

 

[~SuperSonic~]

I think countries should try their best to provide state run health care, I count myself lucky I don't live in the USA, because I'm in and out of hospital with broken bones and stuff.

I thought a country as big and as wealthy as America would of had goverment owned health care. Quite shocking really that only a few countrys offer state owned healthcare.

 

[it290]

I'm all in favor of a state-run healthcare system. I think the overall cost would be much lower. It all boils down to three things, IMHO:

1. Obviously, insurance companies and the health care industry are extremely powerful lobbies.

2. Americans are extremely proud of their supposed 'individualism' and are resistant to change.

3. The American government is _big_ and _slow_, which makes a lot of people very worried about the prospect.

 

[M3d10n]

In our country life is considered a right, so every citizen is automatically registered into the state-managed health care. If you walk into a public hospital you'll get whatever treatment you need (within the hospital's capabilities). You can take your doctor's prescription to public pharmacies and get most medicines for free (they even offer AIDS medicines - and condoms - for free).

But since this is a 3rd world country, it does have it flaws, of course.

At least in my city, emergency treatment goes on acceptable levels. It's long term and complex treatments that can get problematic, and you need lots of determination to go through all the quirks and get yourself fixed up. Small clinics are really full of problems (personal and drugs shortages are common), so large amounts of people head to the big hospitals in big cities, overloading them. In many hospitals waiting times are *really* long. One of this state's biggest hospitals is two blocks away from here, and it's common to see people getting and forming lines while it's still dark.

I simply don't know what would be of many people here if everyone had to deal with the evil private health care.

Oh, and from Xavier's story, it becomes obvious to me that medical treatment is a tad overpriced over there in US.

A friend of mine suffered a car accident, and got her hip bone cracked (but not completly broken). Since it was the other driver's fault, his insurance covered all expenses. My friend was lucky, since she had to say in the hospital for a few days, and that ran in BR$ 8,000.00. That's rougly 2,700 USD. While that's a hefty amount of money for our standards, it's a mere fraction of what someone would pay in the US.

 

[IceDigger]

ARE YOU A Liberal?

Virtually anyone can be a Liberal. Just simply quit thinking and vote that way. But if you want to be a GOOD Liberal (which, by definition, is an oxymoron), there are some prerequisites you must have first. Compare the reasons below and see how you rate.

1. You have to believe the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.
   
2. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.
   
3. You have to believe that guns, in the hands of law-abiding Americans, are more of a threat than US nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese communists.
   
4. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding.
   
5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate, and more affected by yuppies driving SUVs.
   
6. You have to believe that gender roles are artificial, but being homosexual is natural.
   
7. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand.
   
8. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity.
   
9. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but loony activists from Seattle do.
   
10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.
    
11. You have to believe the military, not corrupt politicians start wars.
    
12. You have to believe the NRA is bad, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
    
13. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.
    
14. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, General Robert E. Lee or Thomas Edison.
    
15. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides aren't.
    
16. You have to believe Hillary Clinton is really a lady.
    
17. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried, is because Democrats haven't been in charge.
    
18. You have to believe conservatives telling the truth belong in jail, but a liar and sex offender belongs in the White House (from '93 through 2000)!
    
19. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag, transvestites and bestiality should be constitutionally protected, and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal.
    
20. You have to believe that illegal Democratic Party funding by the Chinese is somehow in the best interest of the United States.
    
21. You have to believe that Saddam Hussein did not know any terrorists.
    
22. You have to believe that every American should have free health care.
    
23. You have to believe that reciting the pledge of allegiance is an establishment of religion.
    
24. You have to believe that there are "millions of starving children" in the United States.
    
25. You have to believe that everyone who doesn't/can't/won't work should be paid. Vote Democratic ... It's easier than getting a job.
    

 

[Zero 9]

That's possibly the dumbest thing I've ever read.

 

[ExCyber]

That's rather mild as anti-liberal smear rhetoric goes; it gets far worse. Ann Coulter's work, for instance, is frequently so flagrant that many people think she's just trolling. And she's a bestselling author.

 

[Alexvrb]

Well don't attack her if you lick Moore's feet. I'm not saying you do, Ex. I know that is far from the truth. Just that it swings both ways.

 

[ExCyber]

I haven't looked that hard, but the closest thing I've seen to her on the left is probably James Carville (who I like occasionally, but he often gets out of hand). Moore is playing a rather different game.

 

[it290]

ARE YOU A Republican?

Virtually anyone can be a Republican. Just simply quit thinking and vote that way. But if you want to be a GOOD Republican (which, by definition, is an oxymoron), there is a prerequisite you must meet first. Compare the reason below and see how you rate.

1. You have to be a fucking idiot.

... wow, that was concise.

note: not necessarily an expression of personal opinion - I'm just sick and tired of this bullshit rhetoric. Iceman, if you look at a few of the items on your 'humorous' list, you'll realize that the gaps in logic become apparent within a few seconds. Take #5 for example - do 'cyclical documented changes' mean we should ignore what scientists and economists are telling us, and happily consume more and more fuel each year?

edit - oh yeah, and comparing Michael Moore to Ann Coulter is like comparing George Carlin to Bozo the Clown.

 

[Cloud121]

Originally posted by it290@Sat, 2004-11-06 @ 09:47 PM

ARE YOU A Republican?

1. You have to be a fucking idiot.

... wow, that was concise.

[post=123018]Quoted post[/post]​

Yes it was!

:thumbs-up:

 

[SkankinMonkey]

Ann Coulter is a whack job.

So is Michael Moore.

 

[Quadriflax]

At least Michael Moore admits he's pushing an agenda. Anyone else that says they aren't is full of shiat.

 

[SkankinMonkey]

I agree. Ann Coulter is the devil.

 

[ExCyber]

I just read something written by David Rees (of My New Fighting/Filing Technique is Unstoppable and Get Your War On fame) that says a lot to me about politics in this country, although it was not written on the subject of politics:

Originally posted by David Rees

Years of skulking at the edge of the World Of Ideas have taught me it's usually easier to appreciate praise than praise's object--and more enjoyable to catch a cheap buzz from vicarious adulation than to invest in a sober understanding of what's actually being adulated.